Sheriff had reason to take Maine gunman into custody before shooting

A commission investigating the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, concluded Friday that local law enforcement should have taken the gunman, Robert R. Card II, into custody and seized his weapons before he killed 18 people on Oct. 25 .

The decision to instead make Mr. Card’s family responsible for removing his guns was “an abdication of law enforcement responsibility,” the commission wrote in its 30-page interim report, intended to to provide early findings to lawmakers who are weighing various proposals for changes. the state’s gun laws, spurred by the events.

The local sheriff’s department had “sufficient probable cause” to take Mr. Card into custody and remove his weapons due to a “likelihood of serious harm,” the commission said. his report.

The seven-member committee has held seven public meetings since November last year, which will gather testimony from Mr. Card’s Army Reserve supervisors, local and national police officers, as well as survivors and relatives of the victims. The panel asked witnesses to provide details about their actions in the months leading up to the shooting, when the gunman displayed increasingly erratic and paranoid behavior, convinced that people he did not know were calling him a pedophile.

Concerned Army Reserve colleagues and supervisors intervened the summer before the shooting, sending Mr. Card for a mental health evaluation at a New York hospital. But subsequent efforts to check his mental health and take away his weapons were unsuccessful, raising questions about the adequacy of law enforcement communications and follow-up, and about the state’s “yellow flag” law , which allows for the removal of weapons. weapons from people who are considered a risk.

“Robert Card Jr. is solely responsible for his own conduct, and he could have committed a mass shooting even if the guns he owned in September 2023 had been removed from his home,” the report said. “Nevertheless, there were several opportunities that, if taken, could have changed the course of events.”

The commission stopped short of recommending specific changes to the “yellow flag” law, noting that the process it set up can be “cumbersome,” but also that the law has been successfully applied in other cases it reviewed.

“An officer must have knowledge of the process, use all resources available to the officer to gather necessary information, and have the dedication and perseverance to continue the investigation and process,” committee members wrote.

The committee plans to hold additional hearings before issuing its final report. No testimony has yet been heard of trauma to Mr. Card’s brain, as documented by scientists in a recent autopsy report, similar to what has been observed in the brains of veterans exposed to repeated gun explosions. The evidence of brain damage has raised questions about whether Mr Card’s experience as a grenade instructor affected his mental health.

Mr Card, who had been a grenade instructor in the Army Reserve and was exposed for years to thousands of skull-shaking blasts on the training ground, showed signs of “moderately severe” damage to the white matter that makes up the wiring deep in the air. brain, according to the report from Boston University’s CTE Center, a laboratory that has documented chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in athletes.