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Thousands of pages of Maine Department of Public Safety documents released Friday include detailed descriptions of the chaos and carnage surrounding the state’s deadliest mass shooting.
Officers arrived at the two shooting sites in Lewiston last October, not knowing if the shooter was still there and with dead and alive victims on the floor. One police officer described desperate survivors screaming for help as he searched for the shooter.
“They grab our legs and try to stop us and we can’t help them,” wrote Lewiston Officer Keith Cauvet. “We have to go through and keep looking and hope they’re alive when we get back.”
Another officer’s first instinct was that an act of domestic terrorism had been committed, highlighted by the increased police presence and flashing blue lights. “It really felt like I was at war,” wrote Lt. Steven Gosselin of Auburn.
Their descriptions of the scenes at the bowling alley and bar and grill, where 18 people were killed and 13 others injured, were included in more than 3,000 pages released Friday in response to Freedom of Access Act requests by The Associated Press and other news outlets. organizations.
Associated Press reporters had reviewed more than a third of the pages before the documents’ website crashed late Friday afternoon. State officials said the documents would be made available again on Monday.
Among the details included in the report were words from a note left by the shooter, 40-year-old Army reservist Robert Card, who wrote that he just wanted “to leave the (expletive) alone,” the Portland Press Herald reported. The note also contained his phone password and the passwords needed to access his various accounts.
The shooter’s family and fellow soldiers said he suffered a mental breakdown in the months leading up to the Oct. 25, 2023, shooting. The Maine Legislature subsequently passed new gun laws that strengthened the state’s “yellow flag” law, which criminalized the transfer of guns to prohibited people and expanded funding for crisis mental health care.
Card’s body was found two days after the shooting in the back of a tractor trailer on his former employer’s property in nearby Lisbon. An autopsy concluded that he committed suicide.
The documents, which were released Friday, provided officers’ first-hand accounts of what they saw, along with additional details about the massive manhunt for Card and the investigation.
At its peak, the law enforcement presence was overwhelming, with 16 SWAT teams and officers from 14 different agencies, along with eight helicopters and additional aircraft, as well as an underwater recovery team, state police Lt. Tyler Stevenson wrote.
“I’ve been through several large-scale manhunts in my career, but this was the largest manhunt I’ve ever been involved in,” Stevenson wrote.
Officers used lasers to map shooting scenes, searched Tracfone purchases at Walmart in case Card had a cell phone with a “recording” phone, and even pulled data from Card’s Subaru infotainment system.
Police recovered hundreds of potential pieces of evidence from a number of locations, including cartridges and bullet fragments, phones, hair, fibers, gas pedal pads, a handwritten letter, a tomahawk knife, arrows, a hearing aid, broken glasses, blue sneakers, a black chain, purses, various military records, $255 in cash and a night vision monocular.
The documents highlight the chaos as police officers pour into the region. In addition to the two crime scenes, police responded to unfounded reports of a gunman in a field near the scene of the shooting, at another restaurant and at a massive Walmart distribution center.
“I asked who was in charge and got no answer,” Androscoggin County Deputy Jason Challux wrote, describing the scene outside the bar.
Others described the horrific scenes inside. Cell phones ringing on bloodstained countertops, tablecloths and a pool table cover turned into makeshift stretchers.
“A quick scan of the building revealed blood and flesh scattered throughout the business,” Lewiston Detective Zachary Provost wrote of the bowling alley. “I could also smell the heavy smell of gunpowder mixed with burning flesh.”
Caoeutte, the Lewiston officer who responded to the bar and grill, said some witnesses yelled that the shooter was still in the building when he arrived, while others said he had already left. He told a man lying on the floor to “stay there,” but by the time he returned to him, the man was dead.
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