Did exposure to military explosions play a role in Maine Gunman’s disaster?

After a 40-year-old Army reservist, Robert Card, committed a shooting in Lewiston, Maine, in October, his community grasped for answers.

Eighteen people were killed. Neighborhoods were locked down for days as police hunted for Mr. Card. When he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, his family and fellow soldiers revealed that he had become delusional, paranoid, and possibly violent, and that police had not acted on their warnings about him for months.

Why he unraveled remains a mystery. But authorities have begun investigating one possible answer: that Mr. Card’s brain may have been damaged by his time in the military.

In recent weeks, the state medical examiner sent part of Mr. Card’s brain to a laboratory that analyzes the brain for diseases caused by repeated blows to the head, including chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE And Army investigators have asked members of Mr. Card’s battalion if his work in the Army could have affected his mental state, two soldiers who served with him said.

Publicly, the Army has said almost nothing about Mr. Card’s time in uniform — only that he was trained as an oil supply specialist and never deployed in combat. But soldiers who spoke to The New York Times said that description left out something crucial: Mr. Card worked every summer for years as an instructor at an Army hand grenade training range, where he was rocked by thousands of brain-shattering explosions.

For generations, the military has assumed that the shock waves troops experienced when firing weapons or throwing grenades during training did not pose a danger to them. Only in the last few years has mounting evidence of damage from repeated exposure, along with mandates from Congress, prompted the Department of Defense to attempt to track, study and understand the impact of blast exposure.

An investigation by The Times this fall found that many artillerymen who fired thousands of 155-millimeter howitzers developed brain injuries and suffered from panic attacks, depression and, in some cases, hallucinations.

Mr. Card was a sergeant first class assigned to the Army Reserve’s 3rd Battalion, 304th Regiment, a training unit based in Maine that provides a two-week summer course to cadets from the United States Military Academy at West Point, teaching them how to use rifles, machine guns, anti-tank weapons and grenades. Mr. Card joined the unit in 2014, the Army said.

A senior platoon member who worked with Mr. Card for years and asked not to be named because the Army had instructed soldiers not to talk about him to the media, said Mr. Card worked as an instructor with grenade launchers, AT4. anti-tank weapons and machine guns, but spent the vast majority of his time on the hand grenade range.

Every summer, all 1,200 West Point cadets are required to throw at least one M67 grenade. Most throw two. Mr. Card was almost always one of the instructors with the cadets in the shell pits. The soldiers in his unit said he could easily have been exposed to a total of more than 10,000 blasts.

The Army did not respond to repeated requests for details about Mr. Card’s work in uniform.

“The concussion from the grenade is brutal, brutal – it will shake your heart,” the senior platoon member said. ‘We have a berm on the ridge that protects against shrapnel, but not against the blast. Some guys got a lot. Probably too much.”

At age 39, Mr. Card wore hearing aids.

The senior soldier said he too had hearing problems, along with headaches and dizziness, and had not slept well in years – all conditions often associated with blast injuries. He added that another veteran soldier from the unit had to be taken off the grenade training range in 2022 due to mental health concerns. That soldier is currently in a psychiatric hospital, a member of his family said.

“Is it related? I don’t know,” the senior soldier said. “But I know he was there with Card in the shell pits.”

Researchers have found one unique damage pattern in the brains of some deceased veterans exposed to blasts, but there is no way to detect that damage in living troops. And even if the damage could be detected, there is no way to predict when the damage might cause a psychiatric disorder, or who might be susceptible to violence.

While so much remains unknown, members of Mr. Card’s platoon said they were concerned that simple steps were not being taken to protect soldiers from explosions.

Blast injuries can cause behavioral changes including insomnia, anxiety, mood swings and substance abuse. Some studies suggest that traumatic brain injury increases the risk of psychosis, but the evidence is limited.

The military tests all troops deployed to war zones — even those who have desk jobs — for signs of brain injury upon return. But it doesn’t test instructors working in training areas, even though they may be exposed to far more blasts than troops in war zones.

Mr. Card was never deployed and therefore never tested, the senior platoon member said.

The Maine medical examiner sent Mr. Card’s brain tissue to Boston University, where the nation’s largest brain bank focuses on CTE

“An event like this leaves people with more questions than answers,” said a spokeswoman for the Maine Office of Chief Medical Examiner, Lindsey Chasteen. “It is our belief that if we can conduct tests that can shed light on some of those answers, then we have a responsibility to do so.”

Detecting CTE would not eliminate questions about what motivated Mr. Card. Experts say people who commit mass violence usually do so for complex reasons that rarely depend on a single factor.

A spokeswoman for Boston University declined to comment, saying the university could not discuss specific cases without written permission from the family. Mr. Card’s family did not respond to requests for comment.

Years before Mr. Card became delusional, the Army had evidence that grenade trajectories were taking their toll among soldiers. In 2015, an Army research team went to the grenade range at Fort Jackson, S.C., after instructors there complained of headaches, fatigue, memory problems and confusion. In 2017, the Army investigated again after receiving more complaints from instructors at Fort Moore, Georgia.

“They had instructors who left the lot, had to stop their car on the side of the road and threw up,” said Gary Kamimori, a retired Army researcher involved in both investigations. “They had all the symptoms of a concussion.”

The research team placed sensors in the wells to measure explosions. They found that the concussion force of each grenade explosion had largely dissipated by the time it reached the pits, but not the sound wave generated when the explosion created a sonic boom. The soldiers in the pits were hit by sound waves of up to 160 decibels – several times more intense than the sound energy of a jet engine.

“Above 140 decibels, sound can cause bones to vibrate. You feel your body shaking,” Mr Kamimori said. “The skull is made of bone. You vibrate the brain, the nerves, the connections. If one of those connections breaks, you will have problems.’

After Mr. Kamimori shared his findings, some shooting ranges changed their schedules to limit individuals’ exposure to blasts, but the military did not take any violent action. She also did not continue the investigation. During the studies, the team collected blood samples from instructors to check for chemical evidence of brain injury, but without further funding the samples were never tested. Mr Kamimori said they were still in an army freezer.

Early this year, just before Mr. Card turned 40, he began complaining that voices accused him of being a pedophile, his relatives and fellow soldiers told police. Periods of paranoia and delusions in the following months led to him being hospitalized by the military for two weeks in July.

According to Dr. Stephen The condition occurs most often when people are young adults.

“For someone to have their first psychotic break at age 40 is very unusual,” he said. “If he’s my patient, I ask what else could be going on that could be causing this.”

For generations, military psychologists have noted that a surprising number of high-performing soldiers tended to become erratic and self-destructive, plagued by anxiety, insomnia and difficulty concentrating as they neared retirement in their 40s. It was so common that doctors even had a label for it: Old Soldier Syndrome.

In a 1965 article in the journal Military Medicinean army psychologist suggested that the symptoms were caused by fear of retirement. Later generations of military psychologists were more likely to attribute them to combating exposure and latent post-traumatic stress disorders.

Only recently has a group of psychologists suggested that years of exposure to weapons explosions could be the cause.

a 2021 paper documented Operator Syndrome – a widespread pattern of behavioral and physical problems among career Navy SEALs and other special operations troops – and argued that brain injuries, both from enemy blasts and from the operators’ own weapons, were at the root of most issues.

“It wasn’t PTSD, it wasn’t based on a fear response — it was something else,” said Chris Frueh, professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii and lead author of the paper. “I have no doubt that explosions play a major role in this.”