Police had already searched dozens of trailers in the crowded recycling center parking lot when they rolled up one final door and saw the bloody combat boots that would mark the end of Maine's two-day nightmare.
The shooter, who had killed 18 people and wounded 13 more in Lewiston, was dead.
On the night of Wednesday, Oct. 25, a man had walked into two family businesses in the central Maine city of 38,000 people and started firing. The bullets from his AR-10 rifle hit bowlers and diners and cornhole players, some of whom he’d known for years. The attack shattered a feeling of safety that many Mainers had long taken for granted in a state with an unusual mix of high gun ownership and low violent crime rates.
First responders did not hesitate to throw themselves into danger. Within minutes of the shootings, they raced to Just-in-Time Recreation and then 4 miles away to Schemengees Bar & Grille hoping to stop the violence. But the gunman had already disappeared into the darkness.
"We don't know his location,” Maine Department of Public Safety Commissioner Michael Sauschuck said at a news conference the morning after the shooting. “I'll leave it at that."
A trove of first-person police narratives released by Maine State Police last month point to inefficiencies, frustrations and miscommunications between agencies during the manhunt that followed, especially during the key first hours after the shooting.
For 48 hours, Mainers sat paralyzed, torn between their shock at the massacre and fear of what might come next.
Schools were closed. Entire towns went under lockdown. As the search for the killer stretched into Friday evening, residents were forced to confront the possibility that he would never be found — that he’d slip unseen into the endless woods of northern Maine.
For 48 hours, a swarm of police unlike any the state had ever seen — an estimated 750 officers from some 50 agencies — raced from scene to scene to respond to hundreds of tips. Each call to investigate a sinister shadow in a garage or an unexplained bump in a barn could have put them face to face with the suspect: Robert Card, a 40-year-old Bowdoin resident who had been trained to use high-powered weapons during his 20 years in the Army Reserve.
But for 48 hours, they failed to thoroughly search Maine Recycling Corp., where the gunman had worked until just months earlier, where he took his own life and where police discovered his body on Friday evening.
Police knew early on that the shooter was a disgruntled former employee, and they had identified the business as a site of interest within a few hours of the massacre.
The lot was directly accessible from a footpath that led to the gunman’s abandoned car a mile away. And his brother and his closest friend repeatedly told investigators that was where he would be.
State police leaders have said it was only obvious in hindsight that he was at the recycling center, and no one was injured because of the delay in finding his body.
“There’s just as many people saying he’s in the river or he’s in this wooded area. Twelve people called in and said he’s in Massachusetts,” Col. William Ross said in May. “Every call is a Robert Card call. A broken-down vehicle is a Robert Card call.”
Police have largely stood by the mission as a success — one they say may have stopped the shooter from striking again.
Most public scrutiny of the case has focused on the lack of action in the months before the shooting, when officials failed to confiscate the gunman's weapons despite receiving multiple warnings that his mental health was declining.
But the thousands of pages of newly released police documents highlight the confusion and chaos of the two-day manhunt.
The Press Herald’s close examination of the response raises questions about whether Maine police were adequately prepared for what happened — and whether they’d be prepared today if a mass shooter ever took aim at Maine again.
Experts who reviewed the Lewiston shooting at the request of the newspaper said that police did several things right — they responded quickly to the first 911 calls, set up a central command post and initially established a perimeter around the suspect’s last known location in an effort to prevent his escape.
But they pointed out other problems that they said indicated a lack of training: police were too slow to set up a unified command, which left some officers waiting hours for orders while others self-dispatched to areas they shouldn’t have been; they failed to smoothly shift from active shooter tactics to effective manhunt strategies; they waited far too long to begin a grid search of the shooter’s last known location and did not maintain a tight perimeter until that search was completed.
“Overall, it appears they were pretty unorganized,” said J.J. Klaver, a retired FBI agent who now runs a Philadelphia security consulting business. “You can’t just be sending people out to search. You have to do it in a methodical way.”
It’s not clear what would have happened if police had opened the fateful trailer door on Thursday morning. Experts say it’s impossible to know with any certainty whether the gunman was still alive at that point, and police have said we will likely never know when he first took cover in the shelter.
Maine State Police leaders spent hours this spring discussing the manhunt at public hearings held by the state commission investigating the shooting. But the department declined several interview requests, saying they would not speak while the commission continues its work.
Lisbon Police Chief Ryan McGee, who was involved in the initial response, praised law enforcement’s work during the long, tense hours when the gunman was at large.
“We do not know during that time where the suspect was,” McGee wrote in an email to the Press Herald. “What we do know is that all of the police officers, state and federal agents that responded and were there throughout the incident shut down that area and the suspect was not able to escape that area.”
Initial police response
As mass shootings have become an indelible fact of American life in the wake of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, law enforcement has refined and adopted active shooter protocols endorsed by the FBI.
They say first responders should not wait for armored tactical units to confront a shooter. Instead, police are expected to step into the line of fire and do whatever it takes to stop the killing as quickly as possible. When officers hesitate, as happened at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, police leaders risk more loss of life, their jobs and even criminal prosecution.
“If you’re hearing gunshots, you’re going toward the gunshots,” Klaver said. “That’s the training.”
There was no such hesitation in Lewiston.
It took less than two minutes for officers to arrive at Just-In-Time Recreation after the first 911 calls about a shooter at the bowling alley’s youth night.
When they learned the suspect had already left the bowling alley and that another shooting had been reported at a pool hall and cornhole bar across town, police jumped back in their cruisers and got there in five minutes.
“As we approach the parking lot we have no idea if the shooter is still there and if he’s waiting for us to arrive,” Lewiston patrol officer Keith Caouette wrote in his report. “There are people in the parking lot screaming for help. Some people are yelling he is still in the building and others are yelling he already left.”
“Once we go in it needs to be quick and methodical but it’s pure chaos,” Caouette wrote.
As news of the shootings reached the public, a flood of tips and speculation began to pour into dispatch centers.
Local police received reports of suspicious people all over town as residents tried to help them catch the killer, who would soon be identified by friends and family. But responding officers said they mostly just ran into other cops.
A third shooting was reported at a Walmart Distribution Center shortly after 8 p.m. At least 75 officers charged ahead, breached the door and cleared the building — only to realize the shooter had never actually been there. Another false report of a shooting drew police to DaVinci’s Eatery in downtown Lewiston.
There is no requirement that Maine police officers train with the active shooter curriculum that the FBI endorsed a decade ago.
The trainings, intended to equip all officers with a common set of strategies and vocabularies in chaotic scenarios, are a vital part of how departments should be preparing for the worst, especially in relatively low-crime regions where police don’t get much experience dealing with violence, said Brian Higgins, a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former New Jersey police chief.
He said the lack of training requirements in Maine was concerning.
“Cops aren’t going to be sure exactly what to do based on experience — only on training,” he said. “It’s very difficult to do, coordinating multiple agencies. The first time you have an incident like this should not be the first time that all these agencies get together and work this out.”
Maine state police leaders told the commission this spring that they recognize the need to do more training with other departments, including tabletop exercises that help officers run through multiple emergency scenarios.
Though a lack of standardized training did not prevent a quick, initial response in Lewiston, things became more complicated as the evening wore on and what had been an active shooter situation turned into a manhunt — an entirely different scenario that requires a distinct set of tactics, Higgins said.
In rare instances where mass shooters stop firing and flee before they are killed or captured, he said, law enforcement should slow down and begin a two-pronged approach, with some officers standing by, ready to spring into an action, and others engaged in a methodical search.
But in Lisbon, where the suspect’s car had just been discovered, police appeared to be caught between the two strategies.
Finding the suspect's car
Just before 10 p.m., three hours after the gunman was seen leaving the bar, two officers came upon a white Subaru Outback with a distinctive black bumper tucked in a dark, quiet corner of a boat launch in Lisbon, about 8 miles southeast of the second shooting site.
“A glimpse of something was observed in the parking area of the boat launch. The object was at the back of the lot, where there is no lighting,” Lisbon Sgt. Nathan Morse wrote in his report. “Spot lights were activated and a white Subaru wagon with a black front bumper and roof rack was observed.”
They parked their cruiser in one of the lot’s two entryways, got out and took cover. McGee, the Lisbon chief, arrived and confirmed the license plate number — it belonged to the gunman.
Within minutes, dozens of officers from different agencies crowded the street surrounding the parking lot. Some used rifle scopes to try to look into the vehicle’s dark interior — it appeared, according to police reports, that the car was empty.
They had no idea where the shooter had gone.
State police thought he could be anywhere. In one report, Lt. Aaron Turcotte offered several theories: he could have gone “into the river and shot himself; he had transportation at the river when he arrived; he was picked up by a third party; had a vehicle waiting for him to leave in; or left on foot.”
Around the same time, police were getting other leads from those who had identified the gunman — his family.
Nicole Herling was one of several family members who has said she had tried for months to get help for her increasingly paranoid brother.
In an emotional appearance before the commission investigating the shooting this spring, Herling wept often as she and her husband talked about her brother.
Once known for his loyalty and his quiet demeanor, Robert Card began visibly unraveling early in 2023. Sometime that winter, he became obsessed with the idea that people were calling him a pedophile behind his back everywhere he went — an idea that may have been rooted in a confrontation he had with coworkers at Maine Recycling, who found a different man with the same name on the state’s sex offender registry.
A postmortem study of his brain by researchers at Boston University found that Card likely had a traumatic brain injury. The report cited his history of conducting thousands of hand grenade training exercises at West Point in New York as a member of the Army Reserve, but Army leaders have recently minimized his exposure to blasts and suggested his brain injury could have been linked to a fall from a ladder in 2008.
He started wearing hearing aids in early 2023, which seemed to exacerbate his paranoia. He became more frustrated and aggressive as the year wore on, leading to a stint in a New York psychiatric hospital in July after he tried to fight another reservist.
Doctors asked his commanders in the Army Reserve to find ways to take away his guns then, but that never happened. After the shooting, the commanders said they had no authority over Card when he wasn’t at weekend drills or the unit’s annual training.
Then in September, he threatened to attack his Army Reserve unit’s base in Saco. That prompted local police to attempt to conduct welfare checks twice at his Bowdoin home, but they could never get Card to answer the door.
Police said they couldn’t have confiscated his many weapons under the state’s “yellow flag ” law because without assessing him face to face they couldn’t take him into custody. Maine’s yellow flag law, the only one of its kind, requires police to take someone into protective custody before they can be evaluated by a mental health professional to confirm if they pose a threat to themselves or others. Then a judge decides whether to temporarily take away their firearms.
At the prompting of police, the family tried to step in to remove the weapons. Robert Card’s father went to his house and locked them in a gun safe, but he forgot to collect the key that overrode the safe’s code.
All attempts to intervene only drove Card further away.
By the night of the shooting, when Herling called police and identified her brother from the grainy image of the gunman that police shared with the public, she hadn’t seen him in months.
“It's about the shooting in Lewiston and we're a little concerned. We might know who the photo is,” reads a transcript from the 911 call identifying Card.
“Well, do you have his name?” the dispatcher asks.
“Robert Card. He's from — uh, he lives on West Road in Bowdoin.”
Herling’s older brother Ryan, who immediately recognized Just-In-Time and Schemengees as places where Robert had paranoid incidents, passed along several other businesses where he thought his brother might go next, including Gowell’s Shop ’n Save in Litchfield and Mixers Nightclub & Lounge in Sabattus. At the top of his list was Maine Recycling.
“That’s where it all started,” Ryan Card said. “That’s where he had the most anger towards.”
Chaos at the boat launch
McGee, one of the first to arrive at the boat launch on Wednesday night before state police took over the scene, got on the radio and requested that officers sweep the area, according to a narrative written by Kennebec County Sheriff’s Deputy Jordan Gaudet.
Gaudet and Kennebec Sgt. Mike Dutil heard McGee’s message and set out for the industrial park located a mile south of the boat launch.
They may have been the first officers to drive through Maine Recycling Corp. that night, sometime between 10 p.m. Wednesday and 1 a.m. Thursday, though the dearth of time stamps and specifics within the reports released by Maine State Police makes it difficult to pin down the timeline of the manhunt with any precision.
The officers started at Maine Recycling, where they knew the gunman used to work, and performed “a cursory search,” but there are few details in Gaudet’s report. It’s unclear whether they ever made it to the nearby overflow lot, where the body would later be found, before they were told to return to the boat launch.
Then, like many other officers that night, they waited there for something to do.
“Our team had no orders and we were not receiving any information about operations and our responsibility moving forward,” Gaudet wrote.
A Brunswick police officer said he tried to get answers.
“There were a significant amount of guns on the car, but nothing was happening. I attempted to get information from a State Trooper and Lewiston Officer, but no one knew who was in charge on scene,” Sgt. Patrick Scott wrote. “I was attempting to find an answer or start negotiations due to the long silence, but was then ushered up the road.”
Monmouth police Chief Paul Ferland had been on a moose hunt in the tiny Aroostook County town of Oxbow when he learned of the shooting. He drove some 230 miles south and arrived at the parking lot at the intersection of routes 196 and 9 in Lisbon shortly before midnight.
“It became obvious to me that there was a lack of communications between agencies and no one knew what was going on,” Ferland wrote in his report.
He found a member of the U.S. Marshals Service and asked for an update, but the marshals hadn’t been getting any information either and were on the verge of beginning to follow up on their own leads without waiting for orders.
A group of Lisbon officers, too, had yet to receive specific instructions.
“I observed that there were at least 60 to 70 officers standing around in this parking lot awaiting instruction or deployment, this never came,” Ferland wrote.
It had been hours since police had found the car.
Gaudet and the rest of the Kennebec contingent were eventually sent to Schemengees to relieve the Lewiston officers guarding that scene. Ferland later took his officers back to Monmouth. He had decided the lack of communication could put his officers at risk, and he pulled them from Lewiston for their own safety, he wrote in his report.
When Maine State Police arrived at the boat launch at 10:23 p.m., tactical team commander Sgt. Greg Roy had to balance two goals, he later told the commission investigating the shooting: capturing the suspect as quickly as possible and acting with enough caution to ensure the safety of his team.
K-9 teams were ready and waiting to attempt tracking from the Subaru. Tactical team units were also prepared to venture onto the nearby wooded trail and hunt for the shooter.
Roy decided to hold off on the K-9 search for 12 hours.
“A high-risk K-9 track, which is what this would be, is extremely challenging and extremely dangerous,” Roy told the commission in February. “Against this individual, under these circumstances, I would not even consider that an option.”
That choice drew immediate criticism from a K-9 expert who told the Press Herald in October that tracks should be conducted as quickly as possible.
“Maine State Police has got one of the best K-9 units in the country,” said Michael Gould, a police canine expert and one of the founding officers of the New York Police Department’s K-9 team. “That should be the first tool.”
But police have for months continued to stand by the decision. When questioned by the commission, Roy offered several explanations.
First, he said, a K-9 search likely would have been ineffective given the several-hour delay between when the car was abandoned and when police discovered it. A bloodhound may have been able to pick up the scent, but the types of dogs police had available would have struggled because of the exhaust fumes from the police cars that had circled the lot. Maine State Police have since acquired a tracking bloodhound, Roy said in May, but it was still in training.
Police also feared that bringing a K-9 team down the footpath in the dark would be dangerous. They were worried about an advanced night-vision scope the shooter had told friends and family he owned. It would have been easy to take up a position anywhere along the wooded edge of the trail and line up a clear shot. And officers who had taken it upon themselves to search the footpath were unaccounted for; if they were still down there, Roy said, a search team could have mistaken them for the shooter and started firing.
Roy told the commission that to conduct a search safely, the tactical team would have needed to devote too many resources to the operation, leaving them unable to respond quickly if the gunman appeared in another area.
Police had been particularly worried that he might target the homes of his ex-wife and ex-girlfriend. He’d had a contentious relationship for years with his ex-wife and had met his ex-girlfriend at Schemengees — Nicole Herling initially told police she thought the breakup could have been a turning point in his mental health.
A review conducted by the Pennsylvania State Police at the request of Maine authorities backed up the decision not to conduct a K-9 search of the trail that night.
Both Klaver, the retired FBI agent, and Higgins, the former New Jersey police chief, agreed that it was defensible to wait until morning to begin a thorough search of the area given the safety concerns.
In this type of situation, they said, it is essential for police to form a tight perimeter around the search area to contain the suspect, then begin a methodical sweep at first light.
“You get the resources necessary, you wait for daylight hours, and then you conduct a thorough search,” Klaver said.
Though the frustration seeping through many of the police narratives calls into question how organized the initial perimeter around Lisbon was, the documents show that police at least attempted to secure the area and pin the shooter down.
Dozens of officers spent hours that first night standing watch along key points — in parking lots, on rooftops and shielded behind armored vehicles — waiting to catch a glimpse of Card.
But according to these narratives and testimony at public hearings, the methodical search that should have followed didn’t really start until Friday, more than a full day later.
'Actionable intelligence'
Around 2 a.m. on the morning after the shooting, three Lisbon police officers came within a few feet of where the gunman’s body was eventually discovered.
Detective Richard St. Amant, patrol officer Glenn Darby and school resource officer Renee Bernard started their search of the industrial park near the boat launch by checking the doors of several businesses.
“The area of Capitol Ave is roughly one mile from where the suspect’s vehicle was located and would have been very accessible via the walking path by traveling east from the boat launch area,” Darby wrote in his report.
They scanned for tracks leading into Maine Recycling but found the “wet dew of the grass” undisturbed near a gap in the fencing, he said.
Then they turned their attention to the company’s nearby overflow lot and the roughly 40 trailers that packed it.
They drove through the lot, frequently hopping out of the car to peer into open trailers. But they did not search every one; according to Darby’s report, the group was keenly aware that they were at risk of an ambush should the shooter be hiding in one of the closed trailers.
Armed only with pistols, they would be easy targets if the shooter was lying in wait for them to open the door.
They might have called for backup, as they did a few minutes later upon finding an unlocked door at another business. But with no real evidence that he was there, they moved on.
Soon after, they received orders to clear the area. State police would take over the search in the daylight.
McGee, the Lisbon chief, said in his report that he spoke with Roy that night about sending in a tactical team the next day to search Maine Recycling. But it would be more than 36 hours until the overflow lot was thoroughly searched for the first time.
Around the same time, state police leadership was still getting set up at the new headquarters at Lewiston High School.
When major emergencies demand that many agencies come together and respond collaboratively, an organizational structure known as incident command system can help lead agencies bring order.
The system, which all Maine police officers are trained to use, involves creating separate branches, such as operations, planning and logistics, and establishing hierarchies within each team so that everyone knows what their goals are, from whom they will get orders and to whom they will report.
The system worked well when it was up and running, state police leaders later said. Some things should have been done differently in hindsight — more inter-team briefings could have been helpful — but the structure allowed hundreds of officials from the FBI, the ATF and numerous state and local agencies to communicate effectively, Maj. Scott Gosselin told the commission in February.
But Ross, the state police colonel, also speaking before the commission this spring, admitted that the transition would ideally have been smoother — the process of setting up headquarters wasn’t finished until 2 a.m.
Complaints about radio silence from state police largely disappeared from police narratives after Wednesday night. But early miscommunications can have lasting impacts, said Klaver, the former FBI agent.
“It didn’t seem like they were really keeping track of all the leads that needed to be completed,” he said. “These errors happen and there’s no way to catch them.”
On Thursday morning, police dogs finally searched the woods along the footpath north of the boat landing, where a helicopter had captured a heat signature the night before, according to a police timeline.
But it’s not clear how thoroughly they scoured the southern end of the footpath that connected the boat launch to the Maine Recycling overflow lot.
When a state tactical team at last searched Maine Recycling that afternoon they found nothing on the company’s main property and moved on. Unlike the local officers who had been there the night before, the state police officers did not know about the secondary lot.
Department leaders have made contradictory statements about whether they learned about the overflow lot on Thursday or Friday.
But the miscommunication might not have made a difference had police elected to perform a thorough grid search of the industrial park, as Higgins, the expert from John Jay, suggested they should have been able to do by Thursday morning.
Instead, they were focused more on responding to “actionable intelligence” — the most promising of the more than 800 tips and reported sightings police began receiving shortly after the shooting.
Though state police have not yet released the full list of those tips, their narratives describe a tangled mess of credible information, honest mistakes and outright lies.
A mysterious loud bang from the other side of a locked bathroom door at Springworks Farm terrified an employee, who called police for help on Wednesday night while officers were crowding the Subaru at the boat launch. It took more than an hour for tactical forces to clear the farm, which turned out to be empty.
A report of “female yelling” in Lisbon shortly after 8:30 a.m. on Thursday led police to a family of goats.
Someone who said on social media that he had helped the gunman carry out the shooting was detained and questioned on Thursday night before police determined he was a fraud.
Higgins said that the huge number of police forces available — including 16 tactical teams and 350 tactical units from around the Northeast — should have allowed officials to begin a methodical grid search on Thursday even as they kept some units on standby to respond to fresh calls for help.
And even while focused on actionable intelligence, he said, police should have paid more attention to Maine Recycling because — unlike most of the tips coming in — they had heard about it from the people who knew the shooter best.
“If you have multiple sources telling you this is probably where he is — even if it’s, ‘We don’t know the shooter, but this is probably where a person would go’ — you need to check that out more thoroughly,” Higgins said. “That should have been your top priority for a very thorough search.”
The family who tried to help
Ryan Card and his wife, Katie, had been living a slow-motion nightmare long before Robert strode into the bowling alley with his rifle.
In a series of exclusive interviews with the Press Herald this summer, the couple said they had been worried about Robert ever since they noticed him losing unusual amounts of weight and acting increasingly paranoid that spring.
Katie, a nurse, worried he had a brain tumor.
When they learned that his behavior was scaring their teenage nephew, they worked with the local sheriff’s department and Card’s Army Reserve unit to try to get him medical attention. They felt helpless when that plan came to nothing and then again when Card was briefly hospitalized at a psychiatric facility in New York in July, only to be released — without explanation — after two weeks with the same paranoia.
By the time police reached out to them again in September after Card’s one remaining friend said Card threatened to commit a mass shooting, Robert had already cut Ryan and Katie out of his life and receded into an angry isolation.
Ryan Card was two hours up the coast in Ellsworth on Oct. 25 when he saw the photo of the shooter in the bowling alley. Unlike his wife, he didn’t immediately recognize the man as his brother (Robert didn’t normally have a beard), but the locations of the shootings set off alarms in his head.
He told Katie to bring the kids to a family friend’s house and said he’d be there soon. His brother had never been violent before, but now Ryan couldn’t be totally sure they weren’t in danger.
During that first sleepless night, the couple said officials from several agencies conducted what felt like a never-ending series of interviews. It was the same story the next day.
Ryan Card, a former Army Ranger, took issue with the investigation’s disjointed nature and didn’t hide his impatience with being asked the same questions repeatedly.
He didn’t understand who was in charge or why they wouldn’t confirm that they had checked Maine Recycling, where he was sure they would find his brother.
“I was pretty forceful about what I thought they were doing wrong. They didn’t even search all our barns,” he said. “They were just picking random houses on our property and using it as a big training exercise. I’m trying to tell (investigators), ‘Yeah, you can search those properties, but this is where he’s at.’”
It took a while before the couple came to understand that police didn’t trust them – a painful realization after they had spent months fighting in vain to get officials to check on Robert and confiscate his guns.
“We started to realize it was much more accusatory,” Katie Card said. “It was Thursday morning that they were trying to very much keep us (at our friend’s house).”
That afternoon, police finally had a warrant to search Robert Card’s home. There had been confusion about which house was even his – he had sold one of his properties a few years back and was living in a trailer nearby. His dog was tied up outside when police arrived.
Investigators found a pill bottle on the nightstand and a folder with medical records on the living room table, though what exactly the documents say, like many aspects of Card’s medical history, is still being withheld from the public and the Card family.
A handwritten note included the passcode to his phone, which he’d left behind, along with instructions to access his bank accounts.
“Love you and enjoy your life,” the note read. “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story I guess. I just wanted to play cornhole with my hot girlfriend and be left the (expletive) alone.”
Ryan and Katie Card gave the FBI permission to search their house that afternoon. Ryan drew a diagram of the entrances and furniture so investigators could easily clear the building. The couple were surprised to learn later that agents launched gas into their home and garage, knocking the doors off both buildings.
The crumpled remains of the doors now sit in the driveway, while plywood sheets cover the entrances. The family said they have not yet received compensation for the damage, and they’re unsure if they ever will.
Only after Card’s body was discovered Friday evening did the public learn just how cooperative the family had been with police both before and after the shooting.
Reports from the night of the shooting show that officials were initially skeptical of the information that family members provided. Ross, the state police colonel, later told the commission that it was difficult not to fully trust the Card family, but it was the right decision at the time.
“After 10/25, the dynamic swings. They’re now the family of the offender, and as law enforcement we need to be very guarded,” he said. “People lie to us. It happens.”
Pressure mounts in final hours
Lisbon officers Jeffrey Williams and Shawn Kelly were back at Maine Recycling’s main property on Friday morning when they noticed something unusual: a seat in one of the truck cabs appeared to be moved as if someone had accessed the sleeping area behind it.
Soon after, they discovered an open door to the main building. They called for backup, and Androscoggin County and Lisbon officers arrived to clear the structure as well as the vehicles and the storage trailers on the main lot.
It was at least the fourth time police had searched Maine Recycling, according to the official narratives. When they didn’t find anything, they moved on again.
At a news conference Friday morning at Lewiston City Hall, the small space usually reserved for council meetings was packed with local, national and global media squatting in front of tripods, trying not to trip over the mass of wires.
Sauschuck, the public safety commissioner, appeared more open and confident than he had the day before, when officials had remained tight-lipped about how police were handling the search.
“Every minute that goes on we’re more and more concerned because, ‘What’s the next thing that’s going to happen?’ We understand that. That’s why we’re working 24/7 to bring this individual to justice and to try to bring some closure and overall safety to our communities,” he said. “There’s no question in my mind that we will bring this individual into custody one way or another.”
Aides hauled large maps into the crowded room as Sauschuck laid out a plan to methodically sweep the area around the boat launch Friday while dive teams off the bank of the Androscoggin River used sonar to search the water below.
Behind closed doors, Ross held a virtual meeting with the leaders of local police agencies to bring them up to speed on the investigation. The meeting helped ease the concerns of some chiefs who had felt out of the loop, Ross later told the commission.
But in another sense, what Ross told them was deflating: a day and a half after the shooting, he had no leads to share.
Pressure to find the shooter was mounting. The approaching weekend meant that officials had only a little time before they needed to decide whether to once again cancel school. Halloween loomed after that. And the scheduled start of deer hunting season on Saturday posed its own challenges in a state where about one in every nine people has a hunting license.
The delay in finding the shooter left Mainers around the state afraid to leave their homes and pained the families of shooting victims, who already had been subject to unimaginable trauma.
“From the minute that first shot goes off until (the shooter is killed or captured), even if it’s only two to five minutes, that will feel like the longest eternity of your life,” said Dr. Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium, part of the public policy think tank at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in New York. “I can tell you that’s not a healthy place to be.”
The process of healing from the trauma of a mass shooting is different for each person who experiences one, said Schildkraut, whose research centers on the experiences and needs of survivors.
Some survivors might be able to function normally days after the violence. Others will struggle to truly feel safe again for years, possibly for the rest of their lives, she said.
In Lewiston, survivors could not yet even begin that process – not while the man behind the shooting remained on the loose and police cruisers and news vans jammed into their city.
“What people are looking for from the minute that that first gunshot goes off is closure,” Schildkraut said. “They want this to be done, whatever ‘done’ looks like.”
At a moment when no one felt safe, how would the public react to sudden blasts of gunshots across the region? Feeling the pressure from Maine’s hunting community, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife settled on a compromise: The start of deer hunting season would be delayed, but only in the towns of Bowdoin, Lewiston, Lisbon and Monmouth, at the center of the search.
It may have been Friday morning when the gunman took his own life, according to the best guess of the medical examiner who performed the autopsy. It’s an estimate former chief medical examiner Dr. Mark Flomenbaum has held to, though he acknowledged in his testimony to the commission that it was still only a best estimate.
“Biologically, there’s always a huge range,” he said. “In his case, it was more complicated than normal because of the way that he died.”
The assertion that the shooter may have been alive but unable to escape or strike again for some 36 hours after the shooting points to the effectiveness of the police swarm on Lewiston, said McGee, the Lisbon police chief, in an email to the Press Herald; even though law enforcement didn’t manage to find him right away, their perimeter kept him contained.
But other experts who looked at the shooter’s autopsy report told the Press Herald in April that he just as easily could have died on Thursday morning – the science of determining time of death is too imprecise to be more specific.
“Under perfect circumstances ... you could potentially give an estimate on time of death,” said Dr. Kendall Crowns, chief medical examiner in Tarrant County, Texas. “But because none of those circumstances ever happened, it’s impossible to be accurate.”
Whether or not the shooter was still alive on Friday morning, the evidence suggests there was no longer a tight perimeter pinning him down.
Ryan and Katie Card, desperate to get some fresh air after another sleepless night in their friend’s home, were out getting gas and coffee when they decided to take their own trip to the industrial park, which police still hadn’t confirmed to them had been searched. They didn’t linger long or get out of the car, but they noted that there wasn’t a significant police presence – just company employees warming up their trucks to go to work for the day.
“We wanted him to be found,” Ryan Card said. “We wanted it to stop for us.”
Soon after, Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Deputy Matthew Noyes, who also served in the Reserve unit with Robert Card, drove to the overflow lot, but not to search for the suspect. After becoming frustrated by the hordes of national reporters trying to film investigators at work, Noyes said he and fellow Deputy Christopher Miller decided they needed a quiet place to talk in private.
That spot, as it turned out, was only a few feet from where the shooter would be discovered hours later.
A final assessment
In the end, it was the owner of Maine Recycling who untangled the crossed wires between Lisbon police and the state tactical team. According to police reports, he reached out to the Lisbon police team on Friday afternoon and pointed out that the trailers in the overflow lot would make a natural hiding spot – all someone would need to do was climb into one of the unsecured units and tuck behind the many bags of bottles that filled them.
Lisbon passed that information along to state police, and after some double-checking, they discovered that the lot still hadn’t been thoroughly checked.
Soon, a tactical team found what they were looking for.
While state police leaders have acknowledged the miscommunication about the overflow lot was an unfortunate mistake, they said they would have performed a methodical sweep of the overflow lot and the rest of the industrial park later that weekend.
“We made the right decisions, and we are responsible for those decisions. I wish this thing was wrapped up in 48 minutes instead of 48 hours,” Ross said in a radio interview shortly after the mass shooting. “But I think those decisions protected the people that were involved in that search, and I think that’s important too.”
The state tactical team’s after-action report called the operation “an overall success.”
And they have emphasized the difficulty of their mission – a point with which both Higgins and Klaver agreed.
“They make it look easy in TV and movies,” Klaver said. “But it's hard to find one person who doesn't want to be found.”
Ross told the commission that law enforcement can always find ways to improve, and state police have highlighted several lessons they’ve learned that could help them do better next time.
- They have taken steps to secure tactical team equipment that could have aided their initial search for the shooter on Wednesday night.
- They’re looking into mapping tools designed to keep track of what locations have and haven’t been searched during manhunts.
- They hope to host more interdepartmental training exercises with local and federal partners.
- The next time they use the incident command system, they’ll work on establishing a command post more quickly and on improving the lines of communication between criminal investigators and tactical forces.
But given the inherent chaos in a crisis like the one that gripped Lewiston last fall, it’s unrealistic to ever expect a perfect response, Ross said in May. There will always be leaks to the media. There will always be officers who rush to help without waiting for orders. And there will always be communication challenges.
“The complexities of this case – that’s a lot to smooth out,” he said.
The commission’s final report, which is expected later this summer, will include its own analysis of how police responded to the shooting. But it will likely focus more on the many moments before the bloodshed – when police, doctors and Army commanders did not or could not help or disarm the gunman despite his family’s calls for help.
“Nothing we do can ever change what happened on that terrible day,” Commission Chair Daniel Wathen said in March when releasing the group's interim report. “But knowing the facts can help provide the answers that the victims, their families, and the people of Maine need and deserve.”
Press Herald reporters Nikki Harris and Dana Richie contributed to data analysis for this story.
This story is part of an ongoing collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Portland Press Herald that includes an upcoming documentary. It is supported through FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism Initiative, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
