‘We Will Heal Together’: Maine Residents Relieved As Shooter Found Dead
The body of suspected shooter Robert Card, 40, was found on Friday evening near a recycling area 10 miles from Lewiston, with what the authorities confirmed on Saturday was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Announcing late on Friday that the massive local, county, state and federal hunt for Card was over, Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, said she was “breathing a sigh of relief tonight knowing Card is no longer a threat to anyone”.
“Tonight the people of Lewiston and the state of Maine begin to move forward on what will be a long and difficult road to healing. But we will heal together,” Mills said.
The commissioner of Maine’s department of public safety, Michael Sauschuck, said the suspect’s body was discovered on Friday evening near the Androscoggin River in Lisbon Falls, just a few miles from Lewiston, where 18 people were fatally gunned down at a bowling alley and restaurant and 13 others wounded in the worst such massacre the state has ever witnessed.
In Lewiston, there was an almost immediate sense of the community being able to exhale after a tense and terrifying three days with the gunman on the loose. Stores have been closed, with few people on the streets while hundreds of police searched rivers, woods and homes for Card. Officials announced that the Maine hunting season for the public would open on Saturday as scheduled.
Attention will now turn to comforting and assisting the families of those killed in the attack on Just-in-Time Recreation bowling alley and Schemengees Bar & Grille, supporting those injured, of whom seven were still in the hospital on Saturday morning, and laying to rest the dead.
Those killed ranged in age from 14 to 76 and included staff at the establishments, parents, children, members of the local deaf community out for a games night, and several heroes who called for help and tried to stop the gunman.
At a press conference on Saturday, the commissioner of Maine’s department of public safety, Michael Sauschuck, said Card’s body had been found in the back of a trailer full of metal at an area recycling business.
Sauschuck said the center had been searched twice previously, by the local Lisbon police and by a tactical team. It was only after the manager of the business asked if trailers on an unmarked overflow site adjacent to the main property had been searched that the suspect was then found by state police.
Card was in an unlocked, previously unsearched trailer among as many as 60 trailers on that site full of metal and plastic for recycling.
It has not yet been established at what point following the shootings on Wednesday that Card took his own life.
Sauschuck said on Saturday that a note left by Card at a family home was not explicitly a suicide note, though Card had written the unlock code to his phone and bank account numbers.
He noted that though “there is clearly a mental health component to this”, Card had not been “forcibly committed” to mental health treatment and had not triggered any firearm restrictions.
“Just because there appears to be a mental health nexus to this, the vast majority of people with a diagnosis will never hurt anybody, themselves or the community,” he added.
Card had been taken by police for an evaluation after military officials became concerned that he was acting erratically in mid-July, a US official told the Associated Press.
Sauschuck thanked the shooter’s family for its assistance to investigators. “This family has been incredibly cooperative with us. Unfortunately, the family has taken a great deal of grief over this, threats and people hanging out at their houses.”
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