Before Mass Shooting, Army Supervisors Ignored Advice

A commission that investigated the deadliest mass shooting in Maine’s history released its final findings Tuesday, saying police and the Army missed opportunities “that, if taken, might have changed the course of these tragic events.” Army reservist Robert Card killed 18 people at a bar and a bowling alley in Lewiston before taking his own life on Oct. 25 last year. In the months before the shooting, friends and other reservists had warned that he was showing paranoid and delusional behavior, the AP reports. Less than six weeks before the shooting, a longtime friend warned their Army supervisor: “I believe he’s going to snap and do a mass shooting.”

• Commission chair Daniel Wathen, former chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, said Tuesday that “Robert Card is totally responsible for his own conduct, solely responsible,” the Boston Herald reports. “We will never know if he might still have committed a mass shooting even if someone had managed to remove his firearms before Oct. 25,” Wathen said. “But the Commission unanimously found that there were several opportunities that, if taken, might have changed the course of these tragic events.