Armed with a semi-automatic rifle, Robert Card killed 18 people in a bowling alley and in a bar-restaurant. “The commission unanimously concluded that the course of the tragic events could have been altered on numerous occasions,” said the former chief justice of the Maine Supreme Court.
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Error. Police and the Army Reserve in the US state of Maine are responsible for failing to prevent the nation’s worst mass killing in 2023, which left 18 dead, an independent commission charged on Tuesday (20 August). Armed with a semi-automatic rifle, Robert Card opened fire Oct. 25 at a bowling alley in Lewiston, then about ten minutes later, at a bar-restaurant in this northeastern US city of 36,000, killing 18 people and wounding 13.
“The Commission unanimously concluded that the course of the tragic events could have been changed on many occasions” last October, former Maine Supreme Court Chief Justice Daniel Wathen told the press, heading a seven-person independent body that investigated for months and issued a report unveiled Tuesday by Boston Globe.
The killer, who then committed suicide, suffered from significant mental illness to the point that one of his colleagues feared he would “go crazy” and does not commit “mass murder”according to the first testimony revealed at the end of October by the great newspaper Boston, the historic city of this region of New England. Robert Card had become paranoid, “heard voices” and stored as many as 10 or 15 guns at his brother’s house, his ex-wife told police.
Thus, the Wathen Commission report accuses the local sheriff’s office of not placing him in preventive custody or confiscating his firearm. As for the army reserve he came from, that “failed in his duty to take the necessary steps to reduce the threat he posed”. Especially because of its “hallucinations, his increasingly aggressive behavior, his collection of firearms, and his unequivocal comments about his intentions”.
