A distraught Maine councilor has said he knows his son was killed in the Lewiston massacre, while a 10-year-old girl has spoken of being grazed by a stray bullet – as police fear the gunman has crossed into Massachusetts.
Survivors and relatives have begun to speak out after the bloody massacre at the Sparetime Recreation and Schemengees Bar and Grille in Lewiston that left at least 22 people dead.
Police have named Robert Card, 40, a former Army reserve firearms instructor, as a person of interest. Card is from Bowdoin and his car was found abandoned in Lisbon shortly after the shooting.
Leroy Walker, whose son managed the bar, said he is convinced his son is dead.
“If you had my feelings right now, I feel like I’ve been flattened by a vice,” Walker told NBC. “It feels like the back of my neck is being pushed the other way by a vice.”
“And I don’t know, to tell you the truth, what kind of night this is going to be from now until tomorrow, when I wake up to the true facts that my son is dead – and I know he is dead.
Zoey, 10, wondered ‘why do people do this’ as she sat next to her mother Meghan Hutchinson the morning after they survived the shocking attack at Sparetime Recreation in Lewiston
Police have named Robert Card, 40, a former Army reserve firearms instructor, as a person of interest. Card is from Bowdoin and his car was found abandoned in Lisbon shortly after the shooting
The gunman targeted Sparetime Recreation in Lewiston on Wednesday around 7 p.m. before shooting into the nearby Schemengees Bar and Grille.
“I know it as well as I know it, because he’s not here and he’s not in another hospital and he’s not running around the streets, otherwise he would have called us, because he runs Schemengees, so I know that he was there.’
Meanwhile, 10-year-old Zoey wondered ‘why do people do this’ as she sat next to her mother the morning after they survived the shocking attack at the bowling alley with their city still on lockdown.
“I never thought I would grow up and get a bullet in the leg,” Zoey told CNN. “Like, why do people do this?
“I was more concerned about: Am I going to live and get out of here?” What’s going to happen? Are the police coming?’
Mother Meghan Hutchinson said her daughter was ‘grazed by a bullet’ amid the terrifying rampage.
“She got grazed by a bullet while we were running,” Hutchinson said ABC.
‘We were in the back room. Another child came in whose arm had massive swelling and was bleeding profusely.
“So we barricaded in there and another parent was in the room with me. She had a phone and called 911.”
Another Lewiston mother, Riley Dumont, was at the bowling alley with her daughter and her parents, including her father, a retired police officer, who jumped into action and saved the lives of several people.
‘I heard a very loud bang. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but my dad looked at me,” Dumont told ABC.
“The next thing I knew, he just took the group we were in and just put us in the corner,” she said.
“He set up tables above us and just made sure we were safe. He just sprang into action at that moment. It felt like it took forever.”
“I was kind of on top of (my daughter), and my mom was kind of on top of me. We had two other children with us and two other mothers.”
The gunman used an AR-15-style rifle to open fire at the Sparetime Recreation bowling alley around 7 p.m. Wednesday before targeting Schemengees Bar and Grille, about four miles away.
A woman is hugged by a man at a reunification center at Auburn Middle School after shootings in Lewiston
Police officers in tactical gear prepare in the gymnasium of Lisbon’s high school as an active search continues for the shooter
Robert Card, a 40-year-old Army reservist and firearms instructor, was named Wednesday as a suspect in the killings of 22 people in Lewiston, Maine.
Lewiston Councilman Robert McCarthy said Thursday morning that the death toll had risen to 22, and that the city was struggling to deal with “shootings like this.”
Lewiston, a small city of about 38,000 residents, is on lockdown as police hunt for Card, who struggled with mental health issues this summer. He previously reported hearing voices and threatening to shoot up his National Guard base in Saco, Maine.
“Please remain inside your homes as over a hundred investigators, both local and federal, work to locate Robert Card, a person of interest in the Lewiston shootings,” Maine police said on Facebook.
Lisbon Police Chief Ryan McGee has called the entire police department to assist in the search and has closed local businesses.
There is a heavy police presence outside Central Maine Medical Center Thursday morning, with police stationed at every entrance with high-powered rifles. The hospital is on lockdown and no visitors are allowed.
The FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agents have joined the search.
Detectives said they are examining cell phone signals, social media and electronic records to build a timeline of his movements before the shooting.
The mayor of Auburn, a city next to Lewistown, told TODAY that some witnesses thought the disaster was a Halloween prank.
Tactical team members prepare to hit the road again to search for the suspect in a shooting in Lisbon
The gunman used an AR-15 style rifle to open fire at the Sparetime Recreation bowling alley Wednesday evening. The location is pictured above
The shooter then made his way to the nearby Schemengees Bar and Grille, pictured above
Jason Levesque said: ‘They thought it was some kind of Halloween prank or something, first pops if you like, until everything started to escalate quite quickly.’
An unnamed mother asked for prayers for her 22-year-old son, who was hit four times and is on a ventilator. She told WMTV that 20 other people were in the hospital waiting for updates on their loved ones.
The shooting in the state’s second-largest city is the 36th mass murder in the United States this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.
A police bulletin describes the suspect, Card, as a firearms instructor believed to be in the Army Reserve and assigned to a training center in Saco, Maine.
The document, which was distributed to law enforcement officials, stated that Card had been committed to a mental health facility for two weeks in the summer of 2023.
It did not provide details of his treatment or condition, but said Card reported hearing “voices and threats to shoot up the military base.”
Maine has a long-standing culture of gun ownership, linked to traditions of hunting and target shooting. The state does not require a permit to carry weapons.
The death toll was staggering for a state that had 29 homicides for the entire year in 2022.
