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Hundreds of law enforcement officers for a second day searched for mass shooting suspect Robert Card, accused of killing 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, in the nation’s latest instance of gunfire at public places as Americans went about their lives.
An arrest warrant for eight counts of murder — because only eight identifications of the 18 dead had been made — has been issued, Maine State police said Thursday morning.
Search warrants were carried out in Bowdoin, the town east of Lewiston where Card lived, authorities said.
Police broadcast messages over loudspeakers during the search warrants, which a spokesperson for Maine State Police said was routine during the execution of warrants like them.
Residents in Lewiston, Maine’s second-largest city but still a small one at around 37,000, were told for a second day to shelter in place. In Lisbon, where Card’s SUV was found, a similar warning was issued. Schools would be closed Friday, both cities said.
Meanwhile, stories of the dead began to emerge.
Joseph “Joey” Walker was a manager at Schemengees Bar and Grille, one of the two businesses where the gunman opened fire at around 7 p.m. Wednesday.
Walker was shot to death, his father, Leroy Walker Sr., said. He described waiting at the hospital in Lewiston where almost all the shooting patients were taken, hoping for word — along with others.
“It was awful to see the families sitting there. None of them knew nothing, just like me, they knew nothing,” Leroy Walker said.
He said the family was told that Walker died a hero, because he grabbed a butcher knife and went to confront the gunman. Leroy Walker said that makes his grief even worse.
“My kid was a super kid with people,” he said.
At the Just-in-Time Recreation bowling alley, the other place targeted by the gunman that night, it was youth night when the shooter entered and started firing.
What we know about the shootings
- At least 18 people are dead and 13 others are injured after shootings at a bar and a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine.
- Police named Robert Card, 40, as a suspect in the shootings, and an arrest warrant on murder charges has been issued. He remains at large.
- Seven people were found dead at the Just-In-Time Recreation bowling alley, eight were found dead at Schemengees Bar and Grille, and three were pronounced dead at area hospitals.
- Officials have urged residents of Lewiston, Maine's second-largest city, about 30 miles north of Portland, and nearby Auburn to shelter in place. Residents in other communities have also been asked to stay put, and many schools and businesses are closed.
- NBC News’ Lester Holt, Emilie Ikeda, Sam Brock, Emma Barnett, Rehema Ellis, Antonia Hylton, George Solis, Alex Seitz-Wald, Minyvonne Burke and Erik Ortiz are reporting from Maine.
Vigils, memorials, and communities in shock due to gun violence are all to familiar in the U.S.
The mass shooting in Lewiston was 565th mass shooting in the U.S. in 2023 and the deadliest so far this year, according the Gun Violence Archive, which collates data from law enforcement, media, government and commercial sources.
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.”
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.
It felt like the whole hospital rushed to help, he said, and more than 30 surgeons arrived within minutes of the first ambulances.
As one victim after another was rushed into the emergency room — more than a dozen gunshot victims eventually arrived — doctors grew concerned about the blood supply.
The surgeons did all they could to stem the loss of blood, and more blood was secured from nearby hospitals, he said.
“We really just did what we would normally do, just at maximum capacity and with maximum effort,” King said. “It was inspiring to see how all our staff responded, how everybody stepped up to the plate.”
Neighbor of suspect Robert Card's family says 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.
Hundreds of law enforcement personnel are searching for Card, who is a suspect in mass shootings in Lewiston that left 18 people dead.
“Nothing’s going to be the same,” Goddard said. “I feel so bad for his father, what he’s going to go through, the rest of his family. You know, it’s not their fault, but it’s going to fall on them. There’s no getting around it. It’s going to fall on them.”
Many families have spent hours sheltering in place as the manhunt continues more than 24 hours after the deadly shootings in Lewiston.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills at a news conference called the shootings an assault on Lewiston's citizens, its peace of mind and its sense of security.
It was youth night at a Maine bowling alley when gunfire erupted
LEWISTON, Maine — It was supposed to be a night of fun competition.
A group of young people gathered at a bowling alley in Lewiston on Wednesday evening for youth league matches. Four miles away, members of a cornhole team for deaf people hosted an evening of games.
But before long, the revelry was interrupted by gunfire.
A shooter unleashed a barrage of bullets on the bowling event at Just-in-Time Recreation, where he killed seven people, before he moved on to Schemengees Bar and Grille about 12 minutes later, where he killed eight more. The death toll stands at 18, including those who died later at hospitals.
“They’re just innocent people out for a night of bowling,” said Kim McConville, whose cousin and his 14-year-old son were killed at the bowling alley. “This was a children’s event. Who expects a shooter to go into a children’s event?”
John Mulaney and Pete Davidson postpone Maine shows after shooting
Comedians John Mulaney and Pete Davidson said today they are postponing planned shows in Maine this weekend because of the shootings in Lewiston.
“We are devastated by the events in Lewiston. Shows scheduled for this weekend in Maine on Saturday, 10/28 and Sunday, 10/29 have been postponed. We are thinking of you all,” they said on X.
The show, “John & Pete,” was scheduled for Portland on Saturday and Bangor on Sunday.
NBC News' Cynthia McFadden grew up in Auburn, Maine, across the river from Lewiston, and tonight the close-knit communities are hurting.
Maine launches website to help people access mental health support
Maine Gov. Janet Mills said her administration is launching a website to make it easier for those affected by the mass shootings to get mental health support.
“Incidents of mass violence can lead to a range of emotional reactions, including anxiety, fear, anger, despair and a sense of helplessness that may begin immediately or in the days or weeks following the event,” the website says.
Bar shooting suspect had been there before, father of slain manager says
Robert Card, the man suspected of killing 18 people in mass shootings at a bar and a bowling alley, had been to the bar before, the father of the slain manager there said.
“All of the people over there know him,” Leroy Walker told NBC News’ Lester Holt. “He would actually come to Schemengees; he’d been there off and on.”
Walker said his son, Joseph “Joey” Walker, who was the manager at Schemengees, was killed. Leroy Walker said he did not know Card personally but had seen him before.
The manhunt for Card continues.