After nine months of subpoenaing witnesses and documents and listening to a wide range of testimony during sixteen public hearings, the Independent Commission To Investigate the Facts of the Tragedy in Lewiston issued its final report on August 20th.
The 215-page report, while substantive in details that led to the failure to stop Robert Card II from killing eighteen Mainers on October 25, 2023, did not make any recommendations on how to fix the myriad shortcomings of law enforcement, the Army Reserves, and mental health professionals.
It also fails to mention the egregious errors made by the Maine State Police over the 46 hours it took them to find the shooter’s body, which was just over one mile from where he had parked his car. In that respect, the commission was guilty of omission.
In his remarks while presenting the report, retired Maine SJC Chief Justice Daniel Wathen, the commission chairman, pointed out that Maine Governor Janet Mills tasked the group of retired judges, state and federal prosecutors, and mental health professionals with arriving at the facts, not producing recommendations.
“We could have, but that wasn’t the job we were charged with,” he replied when asked why the commission offered nothing in the way of solutions.
Instead, the commission said the body of facts it created could help guide the future decision making of authorities. That sounds reasonable on paper. But history has taught us that time grinds on, authorities and priorities change, and reports like this gather dust in state or federal archival offices.
In a perfect world, we would expect that local law enforcement officers would now recognize that a future Robert Card II needs to be disarmed and in the care of mental health professionals ASAP.
We would expect that the Army Reserve would acknowledge that they have a responsibility to ensure that when one of fellow soldiers is demonstrating violent and paranoid behavior, their obligation is to the safety of the public no matter if he’s in their view 24//7 or a weekend a month.
We could expect mental health professionals to understand their responsibility to prioritize follow-up care for a person displaying such troubling behavior and be able to coordinate care with other agencies.
There have been some policy changes in the ten months since the shootings that move the needle in the right direction. The Maine Legislature gave police the ability to obtain a warrant for a protective custody hold. The number of yellow flag petitions to remove firearms from dangerous individuals increased statewide from eighty-one in a three-year period prior to the Lewiston shootings to 290 in the nine-month period after. That includes fourteen in Sagadahoc County - which had never utilized the law before. Its failure to do so for Robert Card II was the most glaring of the many missed opportunities the commission cited.
In time, there could be more piecemeal changes. But the commission's decision to withhold providing a roadmap with actionable on-ramps feels very much like another institutional failure and another missed opportunity.
