'A Glooming Darkness Over Maine'
Carolyn Scott spent hours huddled in the basement of Christ Temple Church of God in Christ in Auburn, Maine, with her pastor and a dozen other Bible-study participants, after someone’s phone rang with the news: A gunman had opened fire at two places in nearby Lewiston and was on the loose.
It was shortly after 7 p.m. Wednesday. They sought safety with each other until midnight, praying for peace until they felt secure enough to quickly get out. She hadn’t left her home since, heeding a shelter-in-place order that closed schools and businesses for two consecutive days.
“I just feel heaviness, like a glooming darkness over Maine,” Scott told me.
I was part of The Wall Street Journal team that covered the shootings last week, including this article about what it was like to be in a locked-down city. I covered last year’s mass shooting in Buffalo and other natural disasters before. Things were different in Lewiston because there were initially no mass memorials or public displays of grief and healing.
In their place was a heavy law enforcement presence that closed roads, surrounded homes and surged heavily armed personnel to thickets and fields. Police found the body of Robert Card Jr. about 48 hours after he started his murderous rampage at Just-In-Time Recreation, a bowling alley. He later attacked Schemengees Bar and Grille. A total of 18 people lost their lives and more than a dozen more were injured, police said.
The elongated and, at times, chaotic manhunt—with drones and helicopters, in what would otherwise be sleepy skies, and armored trucks on concealed rural roads—had left Lewiston and surrounding areas emptied out.
Some people hung “Lewiston Strong” signs. City Hall and the public library locked their doors. One of the few hives of activity was Central Maine Medical Center hospital, where eight of the shooting victims remained hospitalized late Thursday, an executive said. Police officers holding rifles stood at the entrances.
Lee Cayton was one of the few people who did go to work, arriving at his job at a meat-processing facility at 7 a.m. Thursday. In the course of his shift, his boss learned that one friend was killed and another, who had been playing cornhole tournament at Schemengees, was hospitalized with several gunshots.
“I’m still in a fog from all this,” Cayton, 57, told me from his porch. “You hear about [mass shootings], but it’s never happened to me. It kind of blows my mind.”
He is a lifelong Mainer who has spent the last 28 years in Lewiston, known to locals as “the Dirty Lew.” The city sits on the eastern bank of the Androscoggin River, which is lined by former textile mills that fueled the city’s growth. The mills’ closure led to a steady population drop in the latter half of the 20th century. Somali immigrants, who started arriving two decades ago, helped stem the town’s population and economic decline.
We’re now left with two competing thought lines that, sadly, seem familiar after mass shootings: mourning and wondering. Now that the lockdown is lifted, a vigil will take place tonight at a downtown church. One sign of the depths of grief in my short visit: two people, without prompting, started praying for me and the rest of the city as we spoke.
They also wondered: why? How?
Police have so-far declined to offer detailed answers about Card’s past and what drove him to kill. My colleagues reported that Card received inpatient psychiatric care this past summer after he started hearing voices, according to his sister-in-law. A law enforcement bulletin said Card, an Army reservist, also threatened to shoot up a National Guard base.
That’s drawn new attention to a unique Maine statute —known as a “yellow flag” law—that was passed in 2019. It is a narrower version of “red flag” laws on the books in 21 states that allow authorities to temporarily seize guns from people who pose a danger to themselves or others.
Under Maine’s yellow flag law, anyone concerned that someone who owns a gun might be dangerous can call the police, who can take that person into protective custody and have them evaluated by a mental health practitioner. The police then must take that written evaluation to a judge, who has to sign off on seizing the person’s firearms.
Red flag laws in other states allow police or family members to directly ask the court to seize guns. I expect debate over tightening that law, as New York did last year after the Buffalo shootings, will continue for months. I won’t make any predictions about the results.
THE QUESTION: I usually try to be topical with the question, but I don’t want to do that this week. So let’s go back to Nuremberg. What shoe company, credited with helping Germany win the 1954 World Cup, is based there?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: Walter Cronkite covered the Nuremberg trials before becoming an anchor for CBS.