Report: Army and police missed opportunities before mass shootings in Maine

LEWISTON, Maine (AP) — Both the Army Reserve and police missed an opportunity to intervene in a shooter's psychiatric crisis and take steps to confiscate weapons from the rioting reservist who was serving time for the deadliest shootings in Maine historysays the final report of a special commission set up to investigate the attacks in which 18 people were killed and which was published on Tuesday.

The independent commission, which held 16 public meetings, heard dozens of witnesses and reviewed thousands of pages of evidence, reiterated its earlier conclusion that Maine police officers had the authority under the state's yellow flag law but did not use it to Confiscation of reservist Robert Card’s weapons and took him into protective custody weeks before the shooting.

The 215-page report also faulted the Army Reserve for not doing more to ensure Card's health and care for his weapons, and noted that no one used New York's Red Flag Law to take steps to confiscate the shooter's weapons when he was hospitalized last summer, even though the law had been used on non-New York residents before.

The commission, appointed by Democratic Governor Janet Mills, announced its conclusions on October 25, 2023, at Lewiston City Hall, less than three miles from the two locations where the shootings occurred.

“Our ability to heal – as a people and as a state – rests on the ability to know and understand as fully as possible the facts and circumstances of the tragedy in Lewiston. The release of the independent commission's final report is another step on that long road to healing,” the governor said in a statement.

Although the report contained no major surprises, Commission Chairman Daniel Wathen noted that the facts presented in the document could be used by others to make changes and prevent future tragedies.

Megan Vozzella, who lost her husband two weeks before the first anniversary of her death, spoke through an American Sign Language interpreter and said she wants to hold accountable those who did not take action to stop the shootings.

“We deal with grief and the loss of our loved ones. And it's a journey. We can only learn from it and make our lives better,” she said, comparing the process to dealing with broken pieces. “It's like walking through the pieces,” she said.

Ben Gideon, an attorney for Vozzella and other relatives of the dead, described the shootings as the result of a dangerous combination of gun ownership and mental illness, as well as the failure to intervene described in the report.

“Ultimately, this was a mating between an individual who was known to be paranoid and delusional and suffering from a diagnosed psychosis and someone who possessed numerous weapons of war,” Gideon said.

The commission began its work a month after the mass shooting by Card, who killed his victims in a bowling alley and a bar before taking his own life. Over nine months, it heard emotional testimony from family members and survivors of the shooting, police officers, members of the U.S. Army Reserve and others.

The commission praised the police's swift response to the shootings, but noted that “utter chaos” reigned Tuesday as hundreds of law enforcement officers arrived to search for the gunman. Wathen, a former chief justice of the Maine Supreme Court, described it as “utter chaos.” The commission only recommended that state police conduct a debriefing of what happened.

Family members and fellow reservists said Card had been exhibiting delusional and paranoid behavior for months before the shootings. He was hospitalized by the Army in July 2023 while training in New York, where his unit was training West Point cadets, but Army Reserve officials acknowledged that no one made sure Card took his medications or followed his aftercare at home in Bowdoin, Maine.

The clearest warning came in September in a text by a reservist comrade: “I think he's going to freak out and commit a mass shooting.”

The commission report included new details about Card's stay at a private psychiatric hospital – Four Winds in Katonah, New York – where Card admitted to being on a “death list,” and officials planned to ask a judge to extend Card's hospital stay. But the court hearing never took place, and his psychiatrist felt the hospital's request would have been unsuccessful because Card's condition had stabilized and progressed and he had agreed to continue taking medication and attending therapy. The psychiatrist felt he was safe to be released after 19 days.

The report also addressed New York's Red Flag Law but did not conclude whether it should have been used to take away Card's guns while he was in New York. An Army health official testified that he did not believe he could take action to take away the guns from someone who was not a New York resident. The report did note, however, that petitions under New York's Extreme Risk Protection Act were successfully brought against nonresidents, although it was unclear whether the law could be enforced in Maine at the time.

After the shootings, Army officials conducted their own investigation, which, according to Lt. Gen. Jody Daniels, then head of the Army Reserve, uncovered “a number of failures in unit leadership.” Three Army Reserve leaders were disciplined for dereliction of duty. according to reportThe army said in a statement on Tuesday that it was “committed to reviewing the findings and making meaningful changes to prevent a recurrence of such tragedies.”

The investigative report found that the last call to Card's cell phone was from the Army Reserve Psychological Health Program the day before the shooting. When the caller identified herself, he hung up. That same day, he also received the last of five emails from the Army Reserve Medical Management Center; he did not respond to any of them, the report said.

After the shootings, Maine's legislature new gun laws passed for the state, which has a long tradition of hunting and gun ownership, after the shootings. A three-day waiting period for gun purchases went into effect this month.

In addition to Wathen, the seven-member commission included two former federal prosecutors, two other former judges, including a former member of the Maine Supreme Court, the state's former chief forensic psychologist and a private psychiatrist who serves as chief of staff at a mental health clinic.

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Sharp reported from Portland, Maine. Associated Press writers Kathy McCormack in New Hampshire and Lisa Rathke in Vermont contributed to this report.