The Army Reserve and local police had multiple opportunities to intervene in the Lewiston shooter’s psychiatric crisis and confiscate weapons from him but failed to do so, according to a comprehensive report released Tuesday by a special commission tasked with investigating Maine’s deadliest mass shooting.
The report was published nearly ten months after reservist Robert Card, 40, killed 18 people and wounded 13 others at a bowling alley and a bar-and-grill restaurant in Lewiston, Maine. Card’s mental health quickly deteriorated before he carried out the mass shooting on October 25, 2023, and committed suicide two days later as the police searched for him.
The Independent Commission to Investigate the Facts of the Tragedy in Lewiston, established by Democratic governor Janet Mills, concluded that the local sheriff’s office could have enforced Maine’s “yellow flag” law by seizing Card’s weapons and taking him into protective custody one month before the attack. The Army Reserve is also responsible because leadership failed to follow up on Card’s mental-health treatment.
“Card is solely responsible for his own conduct. He caused the deaths and injuries inflicted that night,” the 215-page report states. “Although he might still have committed a mass shooting even if someone had managed to remove Card’s firearms before October 25, 2023, there were several opportunities that, if taken, might have changed the course of events.”
One such opportunity presented itself when a fellow reservist texted commanding officers in September 2023, warning about Card’s mental health and possession of guns. “I believe he is going to snap and do a mass shooting,” the text reads. Card reportedly experienced auditory hallucinations and displayed aggressive behavior.
Alarmed, the commanding officers asked Lewiston police to “conduct a well-being check on Card . . . to gauge his mental health and determine if he was a threat to himself or others,” the report says. Moreover, one of the commanding officers believed the sheriff’s office had sufficient probable cause to secure a yellow-flag order in order to obtain a court order for removing Card’s weapons. But the process didn’t get far enough to prevent the shooting.
No yellow-flag petitions had been filed by the local sheriff’s office prior to October 25, a footnote in the report notes. It has since filed 14 out of the state’s total 290 petitions.
The commission’s final report corroborates its previous finding in March about steps that law enforcement could have taken to prevent the tragedy, while affirming an Army investigation last month that found what Lieutenant General Jody Daniels, former chief of the Army Reserves, called “a series of failures by unit leadership.”
The shortcomings primarily involved communications failures within the chain of command and between a military and civilian psychiatric hospital responsible for treating Card. The investigation resulted in disciplinary action of three Army Reserve leaders for dereliction of duty.
The independent commission announced the report’s conclusions at Lewiston City Hall, located about three miles from where the shooting took place last October.
“None of us can begin to imagine the pain you people have experienced on that terrible day,” said Daniel Wathen, chair of the commission and former chief justice of the Maine supreme judicial court, in acknowledgement of the victims.
Earlier this month, Maine adopted a new law requiring gun retailers to institute a 72-hour waiting period before customers can bring their purchased guns back home. The law is one of many gun-related bills that took effect this year following the shooting, though the bill about the 72-hour waiting period was not signed into law by Mills.
Taking arguments on both sides of the gun issue into consideration, the governor said she felt “deeply conflicted” after thinking “long and hard about the potential impacts of this bill.”
However, Mills did sign a slate of gun-control policies that strengthened the state’s “yellow flag” law allowing weapons to be confiscated from gun owners suffering from mental illness, criminalized the transfer of guns to prohibited buyers, expanded mental-health crisis care, and required background checks for people who advertise a gun for sale on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, or elsewhere.
Mills signed these measures into law after telling lawmakers during her State of the State address in January that doing nothing about gun violence and mental health was not an option.