Report: Recycling center where Maine shooting suspect’s body found had been searched before
Maine police had twice searched and cleared a recycling center before they found the body of the 40year-old gunman who killed 18 people and triggered an intensive police manhunt that forced thousands of people to shelter in place.
The body was discovered only after the center’s owner called local police to say that Army reservist Robert Card was familiar with the property, urging investigators to check the trailers in an overflow parking lot across the street from the main facility. Just before 8 p.m. Friday, a state police tactical team discovered the body near the sliding door of an unlocked trailer full of scrap plastic and metal. Card had died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Law enforcement separately found a letter addressed to a loved one with the passcode to Card’s phone and bank account numbers. Maine Department of Public Safety Commissioner Mike Sauschuck said the note’s “tone and tenor is that the individual is not going to be around,” but it wasn’t an “explicit suicide note.”
The shooter also left behind a legally purchased long gun in a vehicle abandoned near a boat ramp near the Androscoggin River. Police said the ramp is connected to a walking trail along the waterway that leads to the parking lot where Card’s body was found along with two other firearms, also legally obtained. The commissioner rebuffed a question about whether the police should have searched that area sooner, saying they did not know it was connected to the recycling center.
The Maine Recycling Corporation told the Bangor Daily News in a statement that Card had worked as a commercial driver for the company but left the job voluntarily last spring.
Authorities said that
Card had had mental health problems and paranoia, and that they had not yet found evidence of a specific motive. They had found no records of Card having been forcibly committed for mental health treatment and were seeking to confirm whether he received any voluntary treatment.
“When you talk about, is there a motive here? I think clearly there’s a mental health component to this,” Sauschuck said during a news conference Saturday morning.
“There’s paranoia, there’s some conspiracy theorist piece,” Sauschuck said. “The individual felt like people were talking about him. It may even appear that there were some voices in play here.”
The Washington Post reported earlier that over the summer, Card’s military reserve commanders became so concerned by statements he made targeting his own unit that he was sent to a hospital. Card received about two weeks of inpatient psychiatric treatment, according to a person familiar with the investigation. It is not clear whether any other consequences followed.
Investigators continued to look into hundreds of leads and serve at least a dozen warrants to piece together the days and hours before Card opened fire on bowling alley and bar patrons, Sauschuck said. The commissioner emphasized that the gunman’s family had been very cooperative. He also said that although there was a strong mental health “nexus” to the shootings, “The vast, vast, vast majority of people with a mental health diagnosis will never hurt anybody.”
With the manhunt over, the Lewiston community and surrounding towns are emerging from the terror of a mass killing, reaching for something like normal as a sign that it is once again safe to live their lives. On community Facebook groups, neighbors are trying to figure out what businesses are reopening and when, whether Halloween events will go forward, and when pharmacies will reopen.
On the road to the Schemengees bar and grill, which remained blocked by police, stood a poster of the four deaf victims surrounded by five pots of chrysanthemums and bouquets of flowers.
“The time to heal begins now,” Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline said in a social media post.
State and city officials have opened a family assistance center at the Lewiston armory for people who were present at either of the two shooting scenes – the bar and Just-in-Time Recreation bowling alley – to obtain help from various agencies. Mental health services will be provided to the wider public at a local hotel.
“The entire city is a scene, people that are traumatized,” Sauschuck said. “Now this will slowly evolve over to a wellness and a resilience conversation for the community.”
In Kennedy Park in downtown Lewiston, Wilder Barreto was among those enjoying the freedom to leave their houses again, gathering multicolored fall leaves in his arms and posing for his camera mounted on a tripod as he shot content to post on Instagram.
Barreto, 31, had been “very nervous” living in downtown Lewiston since the shooting and said he stayed home Thursday and Friday. “No one knew what could happen,” he said.
Then relief came on Saturday.
“This morning we saw the news,” Barreto told The Washington Post in Spanish. “We said, ‘Wow.’”
Lewiston is home to fewer than 40,000 people; the population of the entire state of Maine is just 1.3 million. It has not been uncommon for people to realize they had connections to more than one of the victims.
The 18 who were killed included a 14-year-old boy and his father out for a night of bowling; four people from the area’s deaf community who had gathered at the bar to play cornhole; a married couple in their 70s; and two men who witnesses said confronted the shooter at the start of the rampage. Of the 13 people injured, three remain in critical condition at the hospital, police said.
When Alicia Phelps and her husband got the emergency alert on Friday night announcing Card’s death, they turned on the news and went outside “to breathe a sigh of relief and know that we’re safe in our neighborhood.”
“It’s feeling really surreal,” the 30-year-old mother said as she pushed her son on a park swing. “It’s a beautiful day, but there’s this emotional weight of ‘18 people are dead.’”
She and her family live in neighboring Auburn, where they stayed home with the doors locked. The couple had intended to stay in the community until their son finished elementary school, but they now wonder whether they will stick to that plan.
“This has definitely brought up a conversation in our house of if we feel this is a safe community to stay in and to raise our kids in,” Phelps said. “And that really extends beyond the shooter; it’s what is the response from our political representatives when it comes to gun control.”
Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) has opposed aggressive gun-control measures despite members of her party pushing for tougher rules in a state with relatively loose gun laws such as permitless carry. The state does not have a red-flag law, which would allow family members or friends to ask a court to take firearms away from a person thought to be at risk of self-harm or to pose a danger to others. Such laws would also require law enforcement to seek a mental health evaluation for an individual before getting a court order to seize firearms.
The governor’s spokesman has since signaled Mills’s willingness to reopen the conversation about gun restrictions.