New information is coming out about the months leading up to the Lewiston, Maine, mass shooting. An independent commission created to review the facts surrounding the events heard testimony Thursday from Army personnel who served alongside the gunman.
An Army reservist who served with a man who fatally shot 18 people in Maine last year and participated in the search for him after the killings on Thursday described the response to the tragedy as chaotic.
Matthew Noyes told a special commission that is holding hearings into the Oct. 25 massacre that the search for the shooter was hampered by confusion about who was in charge and poor communications.
“I recognize this is a complex response and investigation. Unfortunately with this responsibility comes Monday Morning quarterbacking,” said Noyes, who participated in the search as a member of Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Office.
Robert Card, a 40-year-old Army reservist, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after a two-day search. He had showed signs of mental health decline before the massacre; evidence now shows he suffered from traumatic brain injuries, according to a brain tissue analysis by researchers from Boston University.
Noyes, one of his former Army colleagues to testify Thursday, encouraged the commission to interview more first responders who were “boots on the ground” during the shooting response, because he and others felt “communication was poor and caused several issues” and there was “little to no direction in the field” in the aftermath of the shooting. He also described the search for his former Army colleague as “very complex and perhaps surreal” at the time.
The analysis of the Lewiston shooter's brain was released Wednesday by his family. There was degeneration in the nerve fibers that allow for communication between different areas of the brain, inflammation and small blood vessel injury, according to Dr. Ann McKee of Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center.
He had been an instructor at an Army hand grenade training range, where it is believed he was exposed to repeated low-level blasts. It is unknown if that caused his brain injury and what role brain injury played in his decline in mental health in the months before he opened fire at a bowling alley and bar in Lewiston on Oct. 25. McKee made no connection between the brain injury and the gunman's violent actions.
“While I cannot say with certainty that these pathological findings underlie Mr. Card’s behavioral changes in the last 10 months of life, based on our previous work, brain injury likely played a role in his symptoms," McKee said in the statement.
The brain tissue sample was sent to the lab last fall by Maine's chief medical examiner. At that time, a Pentagon spokesperson said the Army was working to better understand the relationship between “blast overpressure” and brain health effects and had instituted several measures to reduce soldiers’ exposure, including limiting the number of personnel near blasts. An Army spokesperson didn’t respond to an email seeking comment Wednesday.
In their first public comments since the shooting, the gunman's family members also apologized for the attack, saying they are heartbroken for the victims, survivors and their loved ones.
“We are hurting for you and with you, and it is hard to put into words how badly we wish we could undo what happened,” they said in the statement. “While we cannot go back, we are releasing the findings of Robert's brain study with the goal of supporting ongoing efforts to learn from this tragedy to ensure it never happens again.”
Police and the Army were both warned that the shooter was suffering from deteriorating mental health in the months that preceded the shootings.
Some of his relatives warned police that he was displaying paranoid behavior and they were concerned about his access to guns. Body camera video of police interviews with reservists before his two-week hospitalization in upstate New York last summer also showed fellow reservists expressing worry and alarm about his behavior and weight loss.
The shooter was hospitalized in July after he shoved a fellow reservist and locked himself in a motel room during training. Later, in September, a fellow reservist told an Army superior he was concerned the gunman was going to “snap and do a mass shooting.” The reservist, Sean Hodgson, was not among those who testified Thursday.
Noyes and other Army reservists who knew the shooter were testifying before a special established by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills to investigate the shooting. The hearing in Augusta is the seventh and final one currently slated for the commission. Commission chair Daniel Wathen said at a hearing with victims earlier this week that an interim report could be released by April 1.
In previous hearings, law enforcement officials have defended the approach they took with the gunman in the months before the shootings. Members of the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office testified that the state’s yellow flag law makes it difficult to remove guns from a potentially dangerous person.
Democrats in Maine are looking to make changes to the state’s gun laws in the wake of the shootings. Mills wants to change state law to allow law enforcement to go directly to a judge to seek a protective custody warrant to take a dangerous person into custody to remove weapons. Other Democrats in Maine have proposed a 72-hour waiting period for most gun purchases.
