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Fellow reservist warned of mass shooting before gunman's attack in Maine

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Fellow reservist warned of mass shooting before gunman's attack in Maine


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An Army reservist and friend of the gunman behind Maine’s deadliest mass shooting testified Thursday about his friend’s mental decline, describing publicly for the first time the warning he issued a month before the tragedy unfolded.

Rain soaked memorials for those who died in a mass shooting sit along the roadside by Schemengees Bar & Grille, Oct. 30, 2023, in Lewiston, Maine. AP Photo/Matt York, File
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AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) — An Army reservist and friend of the gunman behind Maine’s deadliest mass shooting testified Thursday about his friend’s mental decline, describing publicly for the first time the warning he issued a month before the tragedy unfolded.

Sean Hodgson texted leaders of his reserve unit six weeks before the shooting that left 18 people dead and 13 wounded, telling them to change the passcode to the gate at their Army Reserve training facility and arm themselves if Robert Card showed up.

Hodgson told a panel investigating the mass shooting on Thursday that he issued the warning to superiors after Card’s delusional and violent behavior spiraled and ended with Card punching him in the face.

“I said ‘Just so you know, I love you. I’ll always be there for you. I won’t give up on you.’ He had that blank stare on his face. It was a dead stare and he drove away,” Hodgson recounted as his friend left him at a gas station.

The attacks happened six months ago, on Oct. 25, when Card opened fire at a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston, two locations where he held a delusional belief that people were talking about him behind his back. Two days later, the 40-year-old Reservist was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

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Hodgson told superiors on Sept. 15: “I believe he’s going to snap and do a mass shooting.”

But it wasn’t just Hodgson who was worried about Card. Several other reservists witnessed his deterioration during training last summer. That led to a two-week hospitalization in July for Card, months after relatives warned police he had grown paranoid and that they were concerned about his access to guns.

The failure of authorities to remove Card’s weapons in the weeks before the shooting has become the subject of a monthslong investigation in the state, which also has passed new gun safety laws since the tragedy.

In an interim report released last month, an independent commission launched by Gov. Janet Mills concluded that the Sagadahoc County sheriff’s office had probable cause under Maine’s “yellow flag” law to take Card into custody and seize his guns. It also criticized police for not following up with Hodgson about his warning text. A final report is expected this summer.

On Thursday, Hodgson said he warned of a mass shooting because Card threatened multiple members of the unit with violence and that his threats and delusions were escalating. And he had access to guns.

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“The way he was behaving was very threatening. It was escalating. The totality of the circumstances, the events leading to that moment, I was pretty convinced he was going to cause harm,” he said.

Another reservist, Daryl Reed, testified he witnessed Card’s mental and physical decline firsthand, seeing a “normal guy” who successfully traded stocks and loved hunting and the outdoors become increasingly paranoid and believing others were calling him a pedophile.

Card also acquired a thermal scope with a laser range finder that he said cost $10,000, and he demonstrated how it could be used to detect animals, including at night, Reed said.

He added fellow reservists started to become concerned Card could become a danger to colleagues. They were surprised, several testified, when Card was released from a psychiatric hospital after only two weeks.

In an exclusive series of interviews in January, Hodgson told The Associated Press he met Card in the Army Reserve in 2006 and that they became close friends after both divorced their spouses around the same time. They lived together for about a month in 2022, and when Card was hospitalized in New York in July, Hodgson drove him back to Maine.

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Growing increasingly worried about his friend’s mental health, Hodgson warned authorities after Card started “flipping out” after a night of gambling, pounding the steering wheel and nearly crashing multiple times. After ignoring his pleas to pull over, Card punched him in the face, Hodgson said.

“It took me a lot to report somebody I love,” he said. “But when the hair starts standing up on the back of your neck, you have to listen.”

Some officials downplayed Hodgson’s warning, suggesting he might have been drunk because of the late hour of his text. Army Reserve Capt. Jeremy Reamer, the commanding officer of the reserve unit, described him as “not the most credible of our soldiers” and said his message should be taken “with a grain of salt.”

Hodgson said he struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol addiction but said he wasn’t drinking that night and was awake because he works nights and was waiting for his boss to call.

“I grieve every day for the many lives that are lost for no reason and those that are still affected today,” he told the AP earlier this month.

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Cara Cookson, director of victim services for the Maine Office of the Attorney General, also testified Thursday and described through tears the daunting task of responding to the enormity of the tragedy with a “patchwork of resources.”

On Thursday evening, the Maine Resiliency Center, which provides support to people affected by the killings, held a six-month commemoration event that drew several hundred people to a park in Lewiston.

The names of the 18 people who died were read aloud at the start of the ceremony, and there were 18 empty chairs, each with a candle and a blue heart, honoring the victims.

The governor also acknowledged the anniversary.

“Our hearts are still healing, and the road to healing is long, but we will continue to walk it together,” Mills said in a statement.

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Program doubles enrollment, expands to more Maine schools

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Program doubles enrollment, expands to more Maine schools


Central Maine Power is expanding its Union Trade Internship Program in 2026, increasing opportunities for Maine high school students to gain hands-on experience in the electric utility industry.

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A sign for Central Maine Power, a subsidiary of Avangrid

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CMP expands union trade internship program for Maine students

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Central Maine Power is expanding its Union Trade Internship Program in 2026, increasing opportunities for Maine high school students to gain hands-on experience in the electric utility industry.

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Updated: 11:47 AM EDT Apr 14, 2026

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Central Maine Power is expanding its Union Trade Internship Program in 2026, increasing opportunities for Maine high school students to gain hands-on experience in the electric utility industry.Now in its second year, the 10-week paid program will double enrollment, expand to additional schools in central and southern Maine, and broaden training to include both line and substation operations. The program will serve 10 students ages 16 and older, selected through a competitive recruitment and interview process in partnership with participating schools.The internship runs from June to August and includes classroom instruction at CMP’s training center in Farmingdale, along with supervised field experience alongside union crews. Students will learn foundational skills such as pole climbing, bucket truck operation, breaker and transformer maintenance, and the safe use of tools and protective equipment. Participants will not work on live electrical wires.The program is aimed at strengthening the workforce pipeline for skilled trades while giving students early exposure to careers in the energy sector and supporting partnerships between CMP and Maine schools.

Central Maine Power is expanding its Union Trade Internship Program in 2026, increasing opportunities for Maine high school students to gain hands-on experience in the electric utility industry.

Now in its second year, the 10-week paid program will double enrollment, expand to additional schools in central and southern Maine, and broaden training to include both line and substation operations. The program will serve 10 students ages 16 and older, selected through a competitive recruitment and interview process in partnership with participating schools.

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The internship runs from June to August and includes classroom instruction at CMP’s training center in Farmingdale, along with supervised field experience alongside union crews. Students will learn foundational skills such as pole climbing, bucket truck operation, breaker and transformer maintenance, and the safe use of tools and protective equipment. Participants will not work on live electrical wires.

The program is aimed at strengthening the workforce pipeline for skilled trades while giving students early exposure to careers in the energy sector and supporting partnerships between CMP and Maine schools.

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Carbon removal project supports Maine’s blue economy, broader marine health

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Carbon removal project supports Maine’s blue economy, broader marine health


Oceans absorb roughly 25 to 30 percent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) that is released into the atmosphere. When this CO2 dissolves in seawater, it forms carbonic acid, making the water more acidic and altering its chemistry. Elevated levels of acidity are harmful to marine life like corals, oysters, and certain plankton that rely on calcium carbonate to build shells and skeletons.

“As the oceans absorb more CO2, the chemistry shifts — increasing bicarbonate while reducing carbonate ion availability — which means shellfish have less carbonate to form shells,” explains Kripa Varanasi, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “These changes can propagate through marine ecosystems, affecting organism health and, over time, broader food webs.”

Loss of shellfish can lead to water quality decline, coastal erosion, and other ecosystem disruptions, including significant economic consequences for coastal communities. “The U.S. has such an extensive coastline, and shellfish aquaculture is globally valued at roughly $60 billion,” says Varanasi. “With the right innovations, there is a substantial opportunity to expand domestic production.”

“One might think, ‘this [depletion] could happen in 100 years or something,’ but what we’re finding is that they are already affecting hatcheries and coastal systems today,” he adds. “Without intervention, these trends could significantly alter marine ecosystems and the coastal economies that rely on them over time.”

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Varanasi and T. Alan Hatton, the Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering, Post-Tenure, at MIT, have been collaborating for years to develop methods for removing carbon dioxide from seawater and turn acidic water back to alkaline. In recent years, they’ve partnered with researchers at the University of Maine Darling Marine Center to deploy the method in hatcheries.

“The way we farm oysters, we spawn them in special tanks and rear them through about a two-week larval period … until they’re big enough so that they can be transferred out into the river as the water warms up,” explains Bill Mook, founder of Mook Sea Farm. Around 2009, he noticed problems with production of early-stage larvae. “It was a catastrophe. We lost several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of production,” he says.

Ultimately, the problem was identified as the low pH of the water that was being brought in: The water was too acidic. The farm’s initial strategy, a common practice in oyster farming, was to buffer the water by adding sodium bicarbonate. The new approach avoids the use of chemicals or minerals.

“A lot of researchers are studying direct air capture, but very few are working in the ocean-capture space,” explains Hatton. “Our approach is to use electricity, in an electrochemical manner, rather than add chemicals to manipulate the solution pH.”

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The method uses reactive electrodes to release protons into seawater that is collected and fed into the cells, driving the release of the dissolved carbon dioxide from the water. The cyclic process acidifies the water to convert dissolved inorganic bicarbonates to molecular carbon dioxide, which is collected as a gas under vacuum. The water is then fed to a second set of cells with a reversed voltage to recover the protons and turn the acidic water back to alkaline before releasing it back to the sea.

Maine’s Damariscotta River Estuary, where Mook farms is located, provides about 70 percent of the state’s oyster crop. Damian Brady, a professor of oceanography based at the University of Maine and key collaborator on the project, says the Damariscotta community has “grown into an oyster-producing powerhouse … [that is] not only part of the economy, but part of the culture.” He adds, “there’s actually a huge amount that we could learn if we couple the engineering at MIT with the aquaculture science here at the University of Maine.”

“The scientific underpinning of our hypothesis was that these bivalve shellfish, including oysters, need calcium carbonate in order to form their shells,” says Simon Rufer PhD ’25, a former student in Varanasi’s lab and now CEO and co-founder of CoFlo Medical. “By alkalizing the water, we actually make it easier for the oysters to form and maintain their shells.”

In trials conducted by the team, results first showed that the approach is biocompatible and doesn’t kill the larvae, and later showed that the oysters treated by MIT’s buffer approach did better than mineral or chemical approaches. Importantly, Hatton also notes, the process creates no waste products. Ocean water goes in, CO2 comes out. This captured CO2 can potentially be used for other applications, including to grow algae to be used as food for shellfish.

Varanasi and Hatton first introduced their approach in 2023. Their most recent paper, “Thermodynamics of Electrochemical Marine Inorganic Carbon Removal,” which was published last year in journal Environmental Science & Technology, outlines the overall thermodynamics of the process and presents a design tool to compare different carbon removal processes. The team received a “plus-up award” from ARPA-E to collaborate with University of Maine and further develop and scale the technology for application in aquaculture environments.

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Brady says the project represents another avenue for aquaculture to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation. “It pushes a new technology for removing carbon dioxide from ocean environments forward simultaneously,” says Brady. “If they can be coupled, aquaculture and carbon dioxide removal improve each other’s bottom line.”

Through the collaboration, the team is improving the robustness of the cells and learning about their function in real ocean environments. The project aims to scale up the technology, and to have significant impact on climate and the environment, but it includes another big focus.

“It’s also about jobs,” says Varanasi. “It’s about supporting the local economy and coastal communities who rely on aquaculture for their livelihood. We could usher in a whole new resilient blue economy. We think that this is only the beginning. What we have developed can really be scaled.”

Mook says the work is very much an applied science, “[and] because it’s applied science, it means that we benefit hugely from being connected and plugged into academic institutions that are doing research very relevant to our livelihoods. Without science, we don’t have a prayer of continuing this industry.”

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New York homicide suspect arrested in Maine

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New York  homicide suspect arrested in Maine


WATERVILLE, Maine (WGME) — A 19-year-old wanted for homicide in connection with multiple gang-related shootings in New York has been arrested in Maine.

Police say they searched a home at 439 West River Road in Waterville on Friday around 11 a.m. and found 19-year-old David McCadney of New York.

According to police, McCadney was wanted in New York for second degree homicide in connection with multiple gang-related shootings.

McCadney was arrested and charged with fugitive from justice and is being held without bail at the Kennebec County Correctional Facility.

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McCadney is expected to be extradited back to New York at a later date.



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