Suspect found dead in shootings that killed 18 people in Maine

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2023-10-28 22:23:18

Robert Card is dead. “Our community can now breathe easy,” Lewiston Police Chief David Pierde Maine announced late on Friday – early morning this Saturday in Spain. It was a strange celebration for anyone who did not know the anguishing search that had kept the small state of New England in suspense, where until Wednesday night the massacres were unknown. The 40-year-old man who kept the authorities in check for 48 hours had left 18 dead and 13 injured in a bowling alley and a restaurant, in what is the worst massacre of the year.

From there they searched for him by sky, sea and land and although it is still not known when he decided to take his life, his death explains that, no matter how many resources the state and the FBI had made available to the local police, no one could be found. found him until his body appeared. It was in a wooded area near the recycling center where he worked until last summer, when he was admitted for two weeks for psychiatric evaluation at the request of his commander. Card, a soldier in the reserves, heard voices. Unfortunately, the psychiatrists who treated him did not consider him dangerous and let him leave with the right to continue possessing firearms.

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They will have to answer for all of this in the investigation with which the Police do not want to interfere. Hence the shortness of the press conference. That is why this Saturday the content of the letter found in his house was unknown, apparently a suicide note that he had left for his son, according to Associated Press sources. More than half of the perpetrators of mass shootings in the United States end up taking their own lives, in line with the statistic that 54% of firearm deaths that occur in the country are suicides, according to a Pew Research study. . That is why it is said that a campaign to prevent them would alleviate the heavy burden of the massacres that are repeated with increasing frequency.

Like almost everyone before him in the macabre pantheon of mass shootings, Card did not intend to make it out alive. Most of them expect to shoot themselves in the head before the police do so. That could have been his case, because the area where his body was found was cordoned off on Thursday. Just a mile from where he parked the car, and relatively close to the Recycling Center where he worked, the agents had soon inspected that wooded area. AP sources claim that in the note he told his son that he would not let them take him alive.

Trained and intelligent

After 48 hours of pursuit, it was clear that Card was a smart guy, trained to outwit his pursuers, or he was dead. It turned out to be both. If what he intended was to get revenge on her girlfriend, with whom he had recently broken up, he failed to get her in front of her. Some sources say that the Just-In-Time Recreation bowling alley, where he left 7 people dead, and the Schemengees Bar & Grille restaurant, where he killed 8 other people, were places he frequented with her. If he was looking for her, he did not find her, but along the way he killed her parents and children, like Bill and Aaron Young, the latter 14 years old, who were playing bowling; members of the deaf community, such as Joshua Seal, a sign interpreter, or Tricia Asselin, who was at the bowling alley with much of her family when Card put her in the sights of her rifle.

He was a good marksman, a shooting instructor in the Army, a lover of nature and survival, who knew his surroundings well and was capable of hiding in that wooded area “for a long time,” warned the neighbors, who remembered that he knew those places like the palm of your hand. To prevent anyone from stumbling upon it before the Police, the authorities had declared a state of siege in the region for two days and prohibited hunting this weekend. It wasn’t necessary. Whoever wants to vent their anger with shots can now do so, because Card will not pull the trigger again.

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