Homes and businesses in Lewiston and surrounding counties in Maine have closed their doors and the streets are almost devoid of people. It is an eerie and surreal scene as the hunt for the suspected gunman who killed 18 people continues with no sign of his current whereabouts – or even if he is dead or alive.
A sense of dread pervades the area and comes as various shelter-in-place orders remain in effect. Law enforcement patrol in armored vehicles; helicopters and drones buzz in the sky. The coast guard has searched the Kennebec River. And all in pursuit of 40-year-old Robert Card, named on Thursday as the murder suspect in eight of the killings with a further 10 charges sure to follow.
But Card remains a ghost in the story. On Thursday, the FBI confirmed it had searched a home in Lisbon, several miles from Lewiston, where Card’s Subaru was found, and later a farm on Meadow Road in Bowdoin where the suspect had left a note. Its contents have not been disclosed.
Late on Thursday, police appeared to be close to a breakthrough when they surrounded a farmhouse believed to be owned by a family member. But after several hours, they withdrew – but without notifying the public of their reasoning, or if they believed the US Army reservist had even been there since the shooting.
Earlier in the day, police had shouted through a megaphone: “You need to come outside now with nothing in your hands. Your hands in the air.”
The scene came days short of Halloween and three days after Maine was named as having the lowest rate of violent crime despite high local levels of gun ownership. “Maine has one of the highest levels of gun ownership in the country and one of the lowest levels of gun crime in the country,” Maine senator Angus King said on Thursday. “Until last night.”
But the state, which had just 29 homicides in 2022, is also facing criticism because it does not require permits to carry guns. In 2019, Maine passed a “yellow flag”, requiring police to seek a medical evaluation of anyone believed to be dangerous before trying to take their guns away.
With the world’s media camped out on a meadow across from the farmhouse, the search for Card has been fluid. Police directed press to turn their camera lights off, and with helicopters and drones flying overhead, the scene has taken on the quality of a New England monster-loose-in-the-village tale of primal fear.
A component of that lies in Card’s experience as an army reservist trained in survival skills. It’s also been confirmed that he’d been taken away by police for an evaluation in mid-July after commanders at the US Military Academy at West Point in New York, where he was training, became concerned about his behavior.
A bulletin sent out to police after the attack said Card had been committed to a mental health facility for two weeks after “hearing voices and threats to shoot up” a military base.
The urgency of the manhunt comes as the victims from the attack on a bowling alley, Just-in-Time Recreation (known locally by its former name, Sparetime), and Schemengees Bar in Lewiston have started to emerge.
They include Bob Violette, a 76-year-old bowling instructor; Joseph Walker, a bar manager at Schemengees who, according to his father, went after the gunman with a butcher knife; Michael Deslauriers II, who was bowling; Peyton Brewer-Ross, 40, an employee at Bath Iron Works; and Arthur Strout, a father of five, who was killed at Schemengees.
Lewiston, best known prior to Wednesday for hosting the May 1965 heavyweight bout between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston, now has a new and unenviable reputation – but one shared with many communities as the US endures its appalling plague of mass shootings.
Fears that Card could even have left Maine prompted Canada’s border services to issue an “armed and dangerous” alert to officers on the Canada-US border. Maine’s largest city, Portland, 40 miles south of Lewiston, has closed its public buildings.
Extraordinary for the aftermath of a mass shooting – in this instance the worst in the US since the May 2022 Robb elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 students and two teachers were killed – the ongoing danger has prevented any prayer vigils for the dead and wounded from being held.
The Lewiston mass shooting is unusual, too – if anything about massing shootings can be considered usual – because suspects are typically found, dead or alive, almost immediately. It is also the 36th mass killing in the US this year, according to a database maintained by the Associated Press and USA Today.
But now Friday’s manhunt promises to be much the same as Thursday’s – area schools will be closed, a shelter-in-place order is still in effect, and Card remains the unwelcome specter at the center of the fear and grief gripping Lewiston.
“The community is on edge because this kind of thing doesn’t happen here,” resident Heather Thurlow said. “It’s scary because this is tight-knit community.” But with the region shut down, there were about to be other, pressing concerns as many fear to venture out into their new, closed-in and shut-down world.
“People don’t have food,” Thurlow said.
