Severe damage has been found in the Maine gunman’s brain, possibly from blasts

A specialized laboratory that examined the brain of the gunman who committed Maine’s deadliest mass shooting found profound brain damage of the kind seen in veterans exposed to repeated gun blasts.

The lab’s findings were included in an autopsy report prepared by the Maine Chief Medical Examiner’s office and released by the gunman’s family.

The shooter, Robert Card, was a grenade instructor in the Army Reserve. In 2023, after eight years of being exposed to thousands of skull-shaking blasts at the training track, he began hearing voices and was haunted by paranoid delusions, his family said. He became increasingly erratic and violent in the months before the Lewiston disaster in October, killing 18 people and then himself.

His brain was sent to a Veterans Affairs laboratory in Boston known for its groundbreaking work documenting chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in athletes.

According to the laboratory’s report, prepared on February 26 and updated on Wednesday, the white matter that makes up the wiring deep in the brain had “moderately severe” damage and was completely missing in some areas. The delicate sheaths of tissue that insulate each biological circuit lay in “disorganized clumps,” and scarring and inflammation indicative of repeated trauma were evident throughout Mr. Card’s brain.

This was not CTE, the report said. It was a characteristic damage pattern previously found in military veterans who were repeatedly exposed to weapon explosions during their service.

“Although it is unclear whether these pathological findings are responsible for Mr. Card’s behavioral changes in the last ten months of his life, based on our previous investigations it is likely that brain injury played a role in his symptoms,” the report concluded.

The findings have serious implications for the military because Mr. Card has never seen combat and was never exposed to explosions from enemy fire or roadside bombs. The only blasts that hit his brain came from training that the military said was safe.

“We know very little about the risks of exposure to explosions,” says Dr. Ann McKee, who heads the laboratory and signed the report. “I think these results should be a warning. We need to do more research.”

Congress has pressed the military in recent years to study whether blasts from repeated firings of heavy weapons cause brain damage, but the military has moved at a slow pace that has produced little change on the issue.

Soldiers like Mr. Card are still exposed to large numbers of blasts from grenades, mortars, cannons and rocket launchers every day during their training. And current Pentagon guidelines say that absorbing thousands of grenade blasts, as Mr. Card did during his career, poses no risk to troops’ brains.

In a statement Wednesday, the military said it had made recommendations in recent months to reduce exposure to explosions in combat units. “The Army is committed to understanding, mitigating, accurately diagnosing and promptly treating hypertensive stress and its effects in any form,” the statement said. “While prolonged exposure to explosions can be potentially dangerous, even if they occur on the training ground and not on the battlefield, there is still much to learn.”

For much of his life, Robert Card was a quiet, kind, reliable man with no history of trouble, his family said. He grew up on his family’s dairy farm in Bowdoin, Maine, and drove a van to work. He enjoyed fishing with his son in the local ponds and often took his nieces and nephews along.

“He was always there to do chores on the farm, for the kids and for Sunday dinner,” his sister Nicole Herling said in an interview.

Mr. Card joined the Army Reserve in 2002 and was a petroleum supply specialist for his first twelve years in service. In 2014, he was transferred to the 3rd Battalion, 304th Regiment, a training unit based in Saco, Maine.

Every summer, his 3rd Battalion platoon conducted a two-week field course for cadets from the United States Military Academy West Point, teaching them to use rifles, machine guns and shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons. Soldiers said Mr. Card spent most of his time on the grenade range during the course. Each of the 1,200 cadets had to throw at least one grenade; most threw two. Soldiers said Mr. Card could easily have been exposed to more than 10,000 blasts over the years.

The Ministry of Defense has done that a list of 14 weapons which, when used normally, unleashes an explosion powerful enough to be potentially dangerous to the troops using them. Grenades are not on the list. Soldiers in Mr. Card’s platoon said they had received no instruction about the dangers of repeated exposure.

In 2022, Mr. Card began to lose his hearing. His family noticed that he became gloomy and short-tempered. In the spring of 2023, he began to believe that people at a local market and the bar where he liked to play cornhole were talking about him behind his back and calling him a pedophile. He also started losing weight quickly.

His brothers and sister tried to intervene several times and encouraged him to see a doctor. At one point, his sister called a veterans crisis line. But Mr. Card pushed his relatives away, they said, accusing them of conspiring against him.

In July, the Army placed Mr. Card in a psychiatric hospital for two weeks after he complained of hearing voices and made threats against fellow soldiers. Doctors at the hospital prescribed him lithium, his sister said, but he was not evaluated for a traumatic brain injury. When he left the hospital, he stopped taking the drug.

Mr. Card had a number of other angry and violent interactions in the following months. One day his mother came home to find him crying on the porch because of his delusions that people were talking about him.

He lost his job driving a recycling truck. Police came to his parents’ home in September and warned that he was making threats against soldiers in his army unit. Mr. Card’s brother and father both tried to take his guns, but he got angry and told them to get off his property.

A few weeks later, when the local news reported that a man had opened fire at a bar and bowling alley in Lewiston, Mr. Card’s siblings saw the video footage and recognized their brother. .

While the state of Maine brooded over the loss of life and argued over missed warning signs, Mr. Card’s brain was shipped to Boston, where researchers examined thin cross-sections of tissue.

“The damage was enormous,” said Dr. Lee Goldstein, a professor of neurology at Boston University, who analyzed Mr. Card’s brain tissue with an electron microscope.

The long, slender, cable-like cells called axons that transmit messages deep in the brain were in tatters, Dr. said. Goldstein in an interview. “I see cables that have lost their protective wrapping, cables that are just missing, cables that are inflamed and diseased, cables that are actually filled with mobile garbage bags,” he said. “These cables determine how one part of the brain communicates with the other part. If they are damaged, you cannot function properly.”

The findings are not the first indications that the military has become aware of the potential risk of repeated explosions on grenade instructors.

In 2015 and 2017, Army research teams examined reports from instructors in Georgia and South Carolina who complained of headaches, fatigue, memory problems and confusion. The military collected measurements of grenade blasts but took no broad action to limit blast exposure.

Similar concerns were raised at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri in 2020. A small study funded by the military examined the brains of new grenade and explosives instructors using PET scans. Researchers found that before working with explosions, the instructor’s brain looked healthy. But in follow-up scans five months later, their brains were full of an abnormal protein called beta-amyloid, which is associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

“You shouldn’t see amyloid in a young brain. No. Zero,” said Dr. Carlos Leiva-Salinas, the University of Missouri neuroradiologist who led the study. “We were surprised, very surprised.”

Mr. Card’s sister said the analysis of his brain, which the family learned about on Friday, changed the way the family saw the shooting and their brother.

“It allowed me to forgive him,” she said. “I know a lot of people are in a lot of pain,” she added. “Maybe we can use what happened to help other people.”

In a statement on Wednesday, the family wrote: “We want to start by saying how deeply saddened and heartbroken we are for all the victims, survivors and their loved ones, and for everyone in Maine and beyond who has been affected and traumatized by this tragedy. .”

“While we cannot go back,” the statement continued, “we are making the findings of Robert’s brain research public with the goal of supporting ongoing efforts to learn from this tragedy and ensure it never happens again.”