Just six weeks ago, the records show, he had grown increasingly paranoid, punched a friend and said he was going to carry out a shooting spree.
Credit: The New York Times
Lewiston, Maine: The Army Reserve and a Maine sheriff’s department were aware of a reservist’s deteriorating mental health more than five months before he killed 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, according to records released on Monday. Just six weeks ago, the records show, he had grown increasingly paranoid, punched a friend and said he was going to carry out a shooting spree.
But there is no indication in the documents that any law enforcement officials ever made contact with the reservist, Robert R Card II, 40, who carried out the deadliest mass shooting in America this year and set off a two-day search before he was found dead.
The warnings about Card were far more explicit than Maine officials had publicly acknowledged in the days since the shooting on Oct 25. They came from Card’s family members — who believed he was hearing voices — and his Army Reserve unit in Saco, Maine, and were investigated by the Sheriff’s Office in Sagadahoc County, where Card lived.
Card’s family told a sheriff’s deputy in May that Card had become angry and paranoid starting early this year. In particular, he had begun to claim — wrongly, the family said — that people were accusing him of being a pedophile.
When the deputy, Chad Carleton, reached out to Card’s base in Saco, he learned that people there already had “considerable concern” for Card’s mental health, according to a report that the deputy wrote.
Two months later, in July, Card was treated at a psychiatric hospital in New York for two weeks, according to a later report, after an incident at the US Military Academy in West Point. He had accused “several other soldiers” of calling him a pedophile, shoved one and made veiled threats that he would “take care” of things, the report said.
He made far more explicit threats in mid-September, telling a friend that he had guns and was “going to shoot up the drill center at Saco and other places,” according to a Sheriff’s Office report from that month.
The record of Card’s previous run-ins with reservists and warnings to the sheriff’s department are the latest to raise questions about whether more could have been done to prevent the Maine shooting or keep Card from buying guns.