2023 Lewiston shootings

• 1. Introduction

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  The 2023 Lewiston shootings began at 6:54 p.m. on the 25th of October 2023, inside a bowling alley in Maine. A youth league event was under way at Just-In-Time Recreation when 40-year-old Robert Card walked in. The first emergency call reached police at 6:55:31 p.m. Before the evening was over, a second business in the same city had been attacked.

  In all, 18 people were killed and 13 others were wounded. It is the deadliest shooting in the history of Maine, and the tenth-deadliest in the United States.

  This documentary asks how those two attacks unfolded, and how a state searched for a gunman who had vanished. It asks who the victims were. And it asks the harder questions about the months before. Who saw the warning signs, what did they do with them, and what would a scientific examination of Card's brain later reveal?

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• 2. The Two Attacks

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  The rifle Card carried into the bowling alley was a Ruger SFAR chambered in .308 Winchester. It had an extended magazine, a flashlight, and an optic. He fired a single shot, and then the rifle jammed. As he worked to clear it, two league bowlers, Jason Walker and Michael Deslauriers II, charged at him to try to disarm him. Card cleared the jam, loaded a new magazine, and killed both men. He then fired several more shots at other patrons. From the moment he entered to the moment he left, 45 seconds had passed.

  Plainclothes officers at a nearby shooting range heard the gunfire and responded. The first officers reached the scene within four minutes of the first call. Card killed seven people and injured three others at the bowling alley, firing 18 rounds.

  Schemengees Bar & Grille stood roughly 4 mi south of the bowling alley, and it was the next target. Card went in at 7:07:34 p.m. and opened fire as he moved toward the cornhole section. Bar manager Joseph Walker was fatally shot when he tried to intervene with a butcher knife.

  While Card was reloading, a patron cut the power to the building. Law enforcement later said that action likely saved numerous lives. Six seconds after the lights went out, Card left through a side door. Within 78 seconds he had fired 36 rounds inside and outside the business. Police arrived two minutes after the first emergency calls from the bar, and ten people there were injured. Across both locations, the rifle was fired at least 54 times.

  The Central Maine Medical Center coordinated with other area hospitals to receive the wounded. Several victims were taken to the Maine Medical Center in Portland, the largest hospital in the state.

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• 3. Forty-Nine Hours

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  At 8:00 p.m., the Androscoggin County Sheriff's Office and the Maine State Police warned residents of an active shooter. The sheriff's office released images of Card inside the bowling alley, carrying what it called a "high-powered assault-style rifle." It also published a photograph of his 2013 Subaru Outback and described him as "armed and dangerous." Police would later call the search that followed the most extensive manhunt in the state's history.

  Three hours after the shooting, police in Lisbon found Card's abandoned vehicle at a boat launch on the Androscoggin River. Lisbon is a small town 8 mi southeast of Lewiston. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Federal Protective Service all assisted local authorities.

  On the 26th of October, Governor Janet Mills and the Maine State Police confirmed the number of victims and announced an arrest warrant. It charged Card with eight counts of murder. That same day, police surrounded a house in Bowdoin while executing a search warrant.

  On the 27th of October, public safety commissioner Michael Sauschuck described dive teams, sonar, and remotely operated underwater vehicles searching the water near the abandoned car. He said investigators did not definitively know how Card had left the scene. The shelter-in-place order in Lewiston was lifted that day. In its place came hunting restrictions in Bowdoin, Lewiston, Lisbon, and Monmouth.

  At 7:45 p.m. on the 27th of October, searchers found Card dead near a recycling center beside the Androscoggin River in Lisbon, where he had previously worked. The site had been searched the night before. His body lay in a truck on a part of the land that had not been covered. The medical examiner ruled the death a suicide, from a gunshot wound to the head fired from his handgun, and estimated he had died 8 to 12 hours before he was found.

  The hunting restrictions were removed once the search was over.

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• 4. Those Who Died

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  The youngest victim was 14 and the oldest was 76. All 18 had been identified by the 27th of October. Fifteen of them were male.

  Six men and one woman died at the bowling alley. At Schemengees, eight men were killed, and three more people died at a hospital after they arrived.

  Four of those killed at the bar were deaf. They had been taking part in a cornhole tournament for the deaf community. One was Joshua Seal, who had worked as an American Sign Language interpreter during the COVID-19 pandemic. His employer then was the Maine Center for Disease Control, led by Nirav Shah. Shah, who later became deputy director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, offered his condolences for Seal.

  Karen Hopkins, director of the Maine Education Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, shared similar condolences. Three of the people killed were graduates of her center.

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• 5. The Man and the Warnings

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  Robert Russell Card II was born on the 4th of April 1983 and was a longtime resident of Bowdoin. He attended Bowdoin Central School and then Mount Ararat High School in nearby Topsham, graduating in 2001. He studied engineering at the University of Maine from 2001 to 2004 but did not finish. His family described him as quiet and friendly, and for much of his life as dependable. Before 2023, his only recorded contact with law enforcement was a 2007 arrest for drunk driving, to which he pleaded guilty, and speeding charges in 2001 and 2002.

  In December 2002, Card enlisted in the United States Army Reserve, where he became a sergeant first class. For 12 years he served as a petroleum supply specialist. In 2014 he joined a training unit with the 3rd Battalion, 304th Infantry Regiment in Saco, Maine. Until 2022, he taught West Point cadets how to use hand grenades. He never had an overseas or combat deployment.

  The change began in 2022, when Card's hearing started to deteriorate. His family noticed that he grew sullen and short-tempered. By the spring of 2023, he had started to believe that people at a local market, and at the bar where he liked to play cornhole, were gossiping about him and calling him a pedophile. He also lost a significant amount of weight.

  In May 2023, Card's son and ex-wife reported his declining mental health to a Sagadahoc County sheriff's deputy. They linked his reports of hearing voices to being fitted for hearing aids in February 2023.

  In July 2023, leaders of Card's Army Reserve unit made their own report to law enforcement. They described alarming comments and erratic behavior during training at Camp Smith, near the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The Army Reserve told police that Card had threatened to "shoot up" a military base in Saco. He was pulled from training, and New York State Police took him to Keller Army Community Hospital for a psychological evaluation. He then spent two weeks of further treatment at the Four Winds Psychiatric Hospital in Katonah, New York. Doctors prescribed lithium but, according to his sister, did not assess him for a traumatic brain injury. After he left the hospital, he stopped taking the medication.

  Card returned home on the 3rd of August 2023. The Army barred him from handling guns or ammunition and classed him as "non-deployable." That same day, a gun shop in Auburn, Maine, refused to sell him a silencer. He had answered "yes" to a question on ATF Form 4473 asking whether he had ever been committed to a mental institution. In the months that followed he had several angry and violent episodes. His mother once found him crying on her front porch, convinced people were talking about him. He also quit his job as a recycling truck driver.

  In mid-September 2023, the Army Reserve asked the Sagadahoc County Sheriff's Department to check on Card's well-being. He had punched a fellow reservist who asked him to stop talking about "shooting up places and people." Card did not answer the door of his trailer home, though the deputy outside could hear him moving around inside. Commanders had described Card as a top marksman, so the deputy asked for backup from the Kennebec County Sheriff's Department, about 45 minutes away. The deputy wrote in his report that "due to being in a very disadvantageous position we decided to back away."

  A police affidavit later recorded what Card's family said he believed. In his mind, businesses and people were broadcasting him online as a pedophile. He named Just-In-Time, Schemengees, and a manager at Schemengees, who was one of the eight victims killed there that night.

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• 6. Inside the Brain

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  At the request of the Maine Chief Medical Examiner's office, a sample of Card's brain tissue went to Boston University's CTE Center. Card's family released the findings. They described profound damage, including missing white matter and white matter with "moderately severe" injury. The tissue also showed "disorganized clumps" of myelin, the fatty sheaths that surround axons, along with damaged axons and scarring and inflammation throughout the brain.

  The tissue showed no evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. It did confirm a traumatic brain injury that resembled the damage seen in veterans exposed to blasts. Card never saw combat, but his grenade instruction would have exposed him to thousands of blasts. Because he never deployed, the military never tested him for symptoms of brain injury. Such testing is standard for every soldier sent to a war zone.

  Neurologist Ann McKee, who directs the CTE Center, said the results matched her earlier work. In her words, "These findings align with our previous studies on the effects of blast injury in humans and experimental models." She cautioned that she could not say with certainty that the damage underlies his behavioral changes in the last 10 months of his life. Still, she said that, based on her previous work, "brain injury likely played a role in his symptoms."

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• 7. A State Shuts Down

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  On the 25th of October, a shelter-in-place order went into effect in Lewiston, and schools across southern Maine went on lockdown. Auburn issued its own order and told businesses to lock their doors. On the 26th of October, classes were canceled at the Lewiston Public Schools, Central Maine Community College, Bates College, and several other districts within a 50-mile radius. The advisory was extended to Bowdoin that day. Bates College postponed the inauguration of its president, which had been set for the 27th of October. Along the border, the Canada Border Services Agency issued an "armed and dangerous" alert, and extra security measures followed on the Canada-United States line.

  Gun sales rose almost at once. One store owner told reporters that he did more business the day after the shooting than in the whole previous month. Deer season was due to begin that Saturday, but he believed most buyers were thinking about safety. Some shoppers reportedly waited in line for more than an hour at one shop.

  Lewiston mayor Carl Sheline said he was "heartbroken." Jason Levesque, mayor of the twin city of Auburn, said, "we will get this situation settled." Governor Mills urged residents to follow instructions from law enforcement. Senator Angus King wrote on Twitter that he was "deeply sad." Senator Susan Collins said, "This is the darkest day in Maine history in my lifetime." Representatives Jared Golden and Chellie Pingree both released statements of shock.

  Golden went further. He announced his support for an assault weapons ban, reversing his earlier opposition to gun control, and asked the community and the victims' families for "forgiveness" for his previous position.

  On the 25th of October, President Joe Biden called several Maine lawmakers to offer full federal support. The next day he ordered flags lowered to half-staff for five days, as "a mark of respect for the victims of the senseless acts of violence perpetrated in Lewiston, Maine." In a later statement he urged lawmakers to impose an assault weapons ban. He said the violence was "not normal, and we cannot accept it," and that current safety measures were "simply not enough."

  Online, the days after the shooting brought both scrutiny and falsehood. Multiple outlets reported that Card had used Twitter to like and retweet far-right extremist views, including transphobic posts by right-wing figures. According to Wired, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter were flooded with disinformation about him right after the attack. Some posts falsely claimed he had already been arrested. Others wrongly attributed a 2016 arrest for sexually explicit materials to him, based on information about a different person with the same name.

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• 8. Accountability

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  In August 2024, a 215-page report was announced at Lewiston City Hall. It came from an independent commission created by Governor Mills. The seven-member panel, chaired by Daniel Wathen, had reviewed thousands of pages of documents, gathered facts from many witnesses, and held public meetings.

  The commission concluded that both police and the Army Reserve missed opportunities to prevent the tragedy. It found that Card's behavior gave the local sheriff's office enough evidence to obtain a "yellow flag" order to seize his guns in September 2023, but the office did not do so. It also found that the Army Reserve failed to give Card appropriate healthcare or to remove his access to weapons. That failure came even after a reservist texted an Army supervisor: "I believe he Card's going to snap and do a mass shooting."

  In October 2024, a press conference brought together victims represented by the law firms Berman & Simmons, Gideon Asen, Koskoff, and National Trial Law. Collectively they represented 100 clients. They announced their intention to file a tort complaint under the Federal Tort Claims Act to begin the process.

  On the 3rd of September 2025, the lawsuit was filed against the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, and Keller Community Army Hospital. It alleged criminal negligence in failing to respond to Card's mental illness. According to the suit, the Army did little about his worsening condition, even though it knew about mass violence and his threats were predictable. Cynthia Young, whose husband and son were both killed, said the Army's inaction cost her family everything.

  A 2023 audit of the Army found that it failed to make required reports of violent threats by service members about 50 percent of the time. Attorneys refiled and amended the lawsuit to include the report from the Department of Defense. Its assessment said the lack of protocol raised the likelihood of violence in the community, including the shooting in Maine. The attorneys expect the Army to tighten training and follow its protocols. The Defense Department's public operations duty officer declined to comment on ongoing legal proceedings.

  In February 2026, the federal government asked the court to dismiss the case. It argued that Robert Card was at fault and that the government had not protected the victims from his act. It also maintained sovereign immunity. Attorney Travis Brennan said his team is opposing the motion, but the court makes the final decision.

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