Wednesday evening started like any other across the state of Maine. In Lewiston, people were starting a night of league bowling. They were playing pool. They were having dinner and drinks with friends and family. They were living their lives.
And then their lives were taken by someone with a gun.
A casual Wednesday night quickly became one of the worst nights that Maine has ever experienced. The peaceful, almost mundane normalcy was shattered around 6:56 p.m. when shots were first fired at the Just-In-Time Recreation bowling alley. Our state’s collective sense of safety was shattered with it.
We’ve known that a tragedy like this could happen anywhere, but now that it has happened here, it still does not seem possible. We, like the rest of Maine, are in shock. We are heartbroken.
And we are still on high alert, as suspect Robert R. Card II remains at large and is considered armed and dangerous as of mid-day Thursday. An arrest warrant for multiple counts of murder has been issued for him. State officials say he should not be approached if seen and anyone with information about him or the shootings should call 207-213-9526 or 207-509-9002.
The shootings at Just-In-Time and Schemengees Bar & Grille, which according to Gov. Janet Mills claimed 18 lives and injured 13 others, are the worst news we’ve personally witnessed here in the state. But more importantly, for so many people, this goes beyond a horrifying news story. For far too many this is a life-altering event, a human tragedy of devastating proportions, that our fellow Mainers are experiencing directly. They’ve lost family members and friends. They know members of law enforcement and health care workers who responded. They may have even responded themselves.
In a constantly evolving situation Wednesday night and Thursday morning, as some information became available but other questions remained unanswered, both the knowns and the unknowns added to the devastation. As of Thursday morning, Auburn City Councilor Leroy Walker was still trying to find answers about his son, Joseph Walker, a manager at Schemengees.
“For the life of me I just can’t understand this,” Leroy Walker said earlier Thursday. He later confirmed his son was one of the 18 victims killed. “It’s like we’re in a dream and we can’t get out of it. It’s a nightmare.”
Those few sentences say more than we ever could, even with unlimited ink and paper.
A tragedy that happens halfway across the country or halfway across the world is still a tragedy. Pain travels, and we have felt that pain when violence like this has erupted elsewhere. Now that it is reverberating out from Lewiston, however, the pain is so close and so acute that it overwhelms.
Bates College professor Michael Rocque was asked by News Center Maine how he was feeling in the hours after the shooting. Rocque, a criminologist, had said last year that Maine was “lucky” to have avoided this kind of mass shooting event. Clearly, heartbreakingly, that changed on Wednesday.
“I’m feeling all the things that people feel when their community has been attacked. I am somewhat in shock even though we’ve been saying that these things can happen anywhere, and they often happen in smaller communities. And Maine has just been lucky, for the most part, to not have an attack like this. Of course, this is an attack on a scale that is shocking by any measure,” Rocque said.
Maine often feels like a relatively calm and sheltered corner of an otherwise tumultuous world. That calm was shattered to pieces Wednesday night.
Even in this unsteady moment, though, we’re confident that Mainers will work together to put those pieces back together — at least as much as possible. That was already happening Wednesday night as members of law enforcement, EMTs, nurses, doctors, mental health professionals and others rushed to help. Journalists worked through the night to keep our communities informed. On what might be Maine’s worst night, and certainly the worst night for some of our fellow Mainers, we also saw the best of us in that response.
“At this point, we’re really going to focus inside of our community,” Jason Levesque, mayor of neighboring Auburn, said in the early hours of Thursday morning at a reunification center where loved ones were able to reconnect after the shootings. “We’re going to heal our community.”
We will have much more to say about this tragedy, the human toll it has taken, the unfolding details involved, and ways to potentially prevent future gun violence. As Mainers grapple with this shocking and traumatic event, however, we’ll offer this: Now is the time for you to feel however you want to feel, and think whatever you want to think. But be kind to yourself, and be kind to others. So many are going through so much right now.
