The signs were there: hearing voices, expressing paranoid thoughts and making threats so violent that extra patrols were sent to guard a military installation.
Documents and information shared by authorities and law enforcement sources show that for months, those who knew the US Army reservist who went on a shooting rampage in northern Maine on 25 October reported his deteriorating mental health and serious concerns that he might become violent.
The state is the only one in the country with a so-called “yellow flag” law, a more relaxed version of the popular “red flag” laws used by nearly half the US states to prevent dangerous individuals from accessing firearms, gun policy experts told CNN.
Experts say Maine’s law was designed specifically for people like Robert Card, the 40-year-old firearms expert who went on two shooting rampages at a bar and bowling alley in Lewiston. In the end, the gunman killed 18 people and wounded 13 others with an assault rifle at Just-in-Time Recreation and Schemengees Bar & Grille.
But there’s no way of knowing whether the law would have worked, because authorities never attempted to use what gun policy experts say is the best tool at their disposal that might have disarmed him – a glaring issue that experts say points to the law’s weakness compared to legislation in other states. Instead, law enforcement officials relied on the shooter’s family to keep guns away from him after trying unsuccessfully to talk to the reservist.
“This is a textbook case for the yellow flag law,” said Michael Rocque, chair of the sociology department and a criminologist who has studied gun laws and mass shootings at Bates College in Lewiston. “That’s what it was intended for. Someone who is having a mental health crisis, who has shown themselves to be a threat.”
Authorities have said Maine gun laws do not prohibit a person from buying a gun based solely on a mental health diagnosis or treatment. The state, with its robust hunting culture, doesn’t require background checks before all gun purchases, nor does it require gun owners to register their weapons. It also doesn’t require permits to carry concealed firearms in public.
But police officers can use its yellow flag law to take a person in crisis into protective custody for a medical evaluation. A judge can then decide whether to approve an order to temporarily remove the person’s access to firearms, according to the law.
The law, passed in 2019, was a compromise between gun rights and gun control advocates on the red flag laws in place in 21 US states and Washington, D.C., also known as extreme risk protection orders, Rocque said.
Red flag laws vary from state to state, but generally allow anyone who knows someone who poses a threat to themselves or others to petition a court to temporarily remove their access to firearms.
What makes Maine’s law different are the additional hurdles in the process to remove a person’s guns – starting with the fact that only law enforcement can invoke the yellow flag process, and it can only be triggered by officers physically taking a person into protective custody, according to Rocque.
The process also includes an extra step. The firearm restriction can’t be imposed without an agreement between a doctor and police that the case warrants an application to a judge, according to the law.
“I don’t see the benefit of a compromise policy of talking about taking action when people are clearly saying, clearly expressing to us, that they’re going to do bad things,” said Shannon Frattaroli, a professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a member of its Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
“We know from research that about 50% of mass shooters say they have plans to do just that before they commit their atrocities,” Frattaroli continued. “In the absence of extreme risk protection order laws, we as a society are ill-equipped to respond, as the tragedy in Maine once again demonstrated in this country.”
The US Army asked local police to check on the reservist in September after a soldier became concerned he might “snap and commit a mass shooting,” according to an incident report released by the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office. It was one of several warnings that relatives and those who knew him had reported to authorities since the spring.
Sheriff Joel Merry told CNN on Saturday that law enforcement officers couldn’t make contact with Card during two visits. That meant they couldn’t invoke the state’s yellow flag law because the statute makes clear that an officer must first take a person into protective custody, the sheriff said.
“This prevented us from invoking the yellow flag law,” Sheriff Merry told CNN. “It’s very unfortunate, but we have to follow the law.”
It’s impossible to know whether Maine’s law would have prevented the Lewiston tragedy, but “it certainly would have caused a disruption,” said Alex Piquero, professor of criminology at the University of Miami and former director of the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.
“Everything was there for people to act, but no one opened the toolbox,” Piquero said.
Piquero noted that Card’s case was an opportunity for law enforcement to “err on the side of caution” to make sure he wasn’t a danger. The warning signs were like “a concert of flashing lights” as different people reported that Card needed help and shouldn’t be armed.
After a 48-hour manhunt following the shooting, Card was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head near a river about 10 miles from Lewiston.