For Bryan MacFarlane, Wednesday was supposed to be a time of fun and camaraderie with eight other friends.
All deaf, it was their night to play in a regular cornhole league hosted by Schemengees Bar and Grille in Lewiston.
Then a gunman took MacFarlane’s life, said his sister, Keri Brooks.
That night the shooter, Robert R. Card II, also took the lives of three others in the deaf community: Steve Vozzella, 45; Joshua Seal, 36; and Billy Brackett, 48, according to the Maine Educational Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
The shootings injured 13 others.
Now Brooks is trying to make sense of her world in the wake of the shootings at the bar and nearby Just-In-Time Recreation bowling alley, and the loss of friends and family.
“Our Maine deaf community gathered last night for a virtual candlelight vigil,” she said on Friday in a text message. “I know we will be OK, but we are forever changed.”
Among the great joys in 41-year-old MacFarlane’s life were M&Ms and the pet dog he named after the chocolate candy. Now the Shih Tzu he called M&M is staying with friends until a permanent home can be found for him.
MacFarlane attended the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf and then set his sights on a challenging goal: training for and earned his commercial trucking license.
“His greatest life achievement was obtaining his Class D CDL trucking license,” Brooks said. “He was the first deaf person to do so in the state of Vermont and one of the very few deaf people nationwide to obtain such a license.”
She said he also loved riding his motorcycle, camping, snowmobiling, fishing and hanging out with his friends.
“He especially loved his dog named M&M,” Brooks said. “That was [also] his favorite candy.”
Brooks, who herself is deaf, is a certified deaf interpreter and had attended conferences with and worked with Seal, who also was an interpreter who worked on state COVID-19 briefings earlier in the pandemic.
“My best friend Regan [Thibodeau] has also been interpreting press briefings,” Brooks said. “She said it perfect: ‘The world does not make sense without Joshua.’”
Brooks said she was relieved when police discovered Card’s body on Friday.
“Now the other layer of complicity is that we will possibly never get answers to why these shootings occurred,” she said.
