Multistate manhunt underway for mass shooting suspect

Inside the Maine hospital that treated shooting victims

LEWISTON, Maine — Dr. Richard King was driving home from the Central Maine Medical Center on Wednesday night when he received an urgent call from a fellow trauma surgeon alerting him that victims of a mass casualty event were flooding the hospital.

King, the trauma medical director, immediately turned around. He arrived to discover what he later described in an interview as a nightmarish scene.

Within minutes, King went to work performing a “damage control” surgery on one gunshot victim to stop the bleeding and save the victim’s life before he hustled into a different operating room to begin work on another.

“It was a situation of organized chaos,” King said. “It was really quite surreal. We read about these events all too frequently, and then to be a part of one …”

King told Reuters by phone that the 250-bed medical center, which has undergone mass casualty event training, had never seen anything like the fallout from the Lewiston shooting.

Neighbor of suspect’s family say he seemed ‘perfectly normal’ weeks ago

There was nothing amiss when Rick Goddard last saw Robert Card at Card’s father’s property in Maine.

“The last time I saw him was two weeks ago when he was helping his father hay this field right here. Perfectly normal,” Goddard said on video from the Reuters news agency.

“I mean, there was nothing out of the norm,” said Goddard, 44. “Hard-working farming family doing their thing, you know, nothing out of the ordinary.”

Card is now the most wanted man in Maine.

A mass shooting roils a Maine city where ‘everybody kind of knows everybody’

LEWISTON, Maine — When chef Jeff Bailey and his daughter Gabriel woke up Thursday, the morning after the worst mass shooting in Maine’s history, and realized most businesses would be closed, they wondered how police hunting the killer and the medical staff members treating the wounded would find anything to eat. 

So they decided to open their Jamaican food truck exclusively for first responders, free of charge, making it one of the only places in town with a hot meal available.

The gesture like that by a Black immigrant family in the whitest state in the country is emblematic, Lewiston’s boosters say, of how a struggling postindustrial mill town has been revived in part by a recent influx of non-European immigrants.

The shooting will be an inflection point for a small city and state that are both frequently ranked among the safest in the country after a single night of bloodshed that resulted in roughly the annual number of homicides statewide.

“We’re always talking about how this kind of thing doesn’t happen here,” said Julien Leavitt, standing outside his house, the first one near a police cordon blocking access to one of the shooting sites. “And then it did.”

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