The gunman who shot down 18 people and wounded 13 others in Lewiston, Maine, last month, was likely alive for most of the two days police spent desperately searching for him.
Robert Card, 40, was found dead on October 27 in a trailer at a recycling plant where he had previously worked, two days after the deadly shooting shut down Lewiston and surrounding areas as residents stayed behind locked doors while authorities searched, as CrimeOnline reported.
Just a few hours after the shootings at Just in Time Recreation and Schemengees Bar & Grill, police found his abandoned vehicle at a boat ramp in Lisbon, about eight miles from Lewiston. Card’s body was eventually found a mile along the Androscoggin River from the boat ramp in a parking area used by Maine Recycling to park the trailers.
Although police had searched the area twice before, they did not look at the lot with the trailers until a supervisor at the recycling company suggested they do so, The New York Times reported.
And now, the state medical examiner’s office said Friday that Card shot himself just eight to 12 hours before his body was found — meaning he was alive for at least 36 hours of the search for him.
It’s not known when Card went into the trailer where he was found, however, but the medical examiner’s report brings more scrutiny to the entire investigation.
Questions have already been raised about whether law enforcement and Card’s Army Reserve unit took seriously enough reports of his deteriorating mental condition. Card’s ex-wife and teenage son first reported in May that he had begun hearing voices and gotten paranoid. He was taken to an Army mental hospital for a two week evalucation when he began behaving erratically during a training exercise in New York in July. And in September, his Reserve unit contacted the sheriff’s office in Sagadahoc County, where he lived, about his behavior. The sheriff’s office was unable to locate him and sent out a statewide alert, which was canceled a week before the shooting after Card’s family said they were able to keep him away from weapons.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills said this week that she would work with the state attorney general to set up an independent condition to look at the investigation of the shooting as well as the information that was made available prior to it.
“The gravity of this attack on our people — an attack that strikes at the core of who we are and the values we hold dear — demands a higher level of scrutiny,” Mills said in a statement.
Mills said the commission would include legal and mental health experts and would determine “the facts and circumstances” around the entire situation, from the warning sides to the shootings and into the investigation.
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[Featured image: Photographs of the Lewiston shooting victims rest under a sign at a memorial outside Schemengees Bar & Grille on November 3, 2023,in Lewiston, Maine. (AP Photo/Matt York)]
