PORTLAND, Maine — (Oct. 24, 2024) In the year since Maine experienced its first mass shooting – and the nation’s most lethal gun tragedy of 2023 – Maine law enforcement use of the state’s yellow flaw law, designed to disarm dangerous people, has soared.
As reported in the NEWS CENTER Maine & REAL NEWS PRODUCTIONS documentary, "LEWISTON: What Went Wrong," the law led to 407 weapons confiscation orders between October 25, 2023, and October 19, 2024, according to the latest data available before our broadcast from the Maine Attorney General’s office.
That’s a pace of 34 confiscation orders every month, or more than one every day, a 17-fold increase. Before the rampage, Maine’s yellow flag law had been used only 81 times in the 40 months after taking effect in July 2020, or twice a month.
On October 25, 2023, 40-year-old Robert Card, suffering from paranoia, delusions, and hearing voices, killed 18 people and wounded 13 others with a semi-automatic rifle in back-to-back attacks at Just-in-Time Recreation and Schemengee’s Bar & Grille, sites in Lewiston that he used to frequent and where he believed patrons were making derogatory comments about him.
The four-year-old yellow flag law empowers law enforcement agencies to confiscate guns from people deemed by a medical professional to be a danger to themselves or others and likely to commit serious harm, if a judge signs off on those findings.
Either Card or the Lewiston mass shooting were referenced in more than a dozen summaries of the 407 weapons restriction orders executed in the past year.
A 20-year-old Auburn man told police last November he was going to be “the next Robert Card.” A 32-year-old Bangor man told police last December he felt “a connection to Robert Card” and feared he would act on his thoughts. A 37-year-old man told the Hancock County Sheriff’s Office he wished police would die and that Card was still alive to help him “take more out.” A 33-year-old man told the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office in July he would make “the Lewiston shooter look like child’s play.”
Since the Lewiston mass shooting, 203 weapons restriction orders, or 50%, involved suicidal threats, while 115, or 28%, involved homicidal threats, and 89, or 22%, involved both, according to our analysis of the attorney general’s data.
Many people subjected to the orders were reported to be suffering from depression or delusions. A 38-year-old man armed with an AK-47 told Brewer police that Maine author Stephen King was after him. A 46-year-old man with a handgun told the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Office the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Administration were holding his family hostage “up the road,” and they needed to be rescued.
The ages of people ordered to surrender their guns in the past year ranged from a 17-year-old girl in Sagadahoc County who threatened to kill herself to an 84-year-old Lincoln County man who threatened to kill his neighbor. The weapons are not always guns. Knives, machetes, a spear, a crossbow, and a pulp hook appear on the list.
Of the 488 orders processed between July 1, 2020, and October 19, 2024, gender was not always indicated in the restriction order summaries, but nine out of ten affected men.
Read the full list of Weapons Restriction Orders here:
A spokeswoman for the attorney general, Danna Hayes, said the number of restriction orders sought but rejected is not required to be reported to the office.
However, in an interview for the documentary, Ben Strick, who oversees adult behavioral health at Spurwink, the nonprofit that has conducted most of the yellow flag medical assessments via telehealth appointments since the fall of 2022, said judicial rejections are very rare.
“I'm only aware of one that's been turned down by a judge,” Strick said. “These are not ambiguous. People are not bringing things to us that aren't a slam dunk.”
The seven-person independent Lewiston Commission, comprised of five former judges and prosecutors and two mental health professionals appointed by Maine Governor Janet Mills and Attorney General Aaron Frey to investigate what happened and what more could have been done to prevent the mass shooting, unanimously concluded in its final report issued in August the yellow flag law should have been used in Card’s case.
But the police agency with jurisdiction over his hometown, the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office, did not even try. The office never carried out a weapons restriction order prior to October 25, 2023, but has since executed 20, and several of those orders have involved the pair of sheriff’s deputies who handled the Card case, Chad Carleton and Aaron Skolfield.
“We are responding very much differently now,” Sagadahoc County Sheriff Joel Merry said in an interview for the documentary.
His office received tips twice in 2023 about Card’s mental health decline and potential dangerousness, first from his immediate family, in May, and then from members of his U.S. Army Reserve unit, in September, as well as information that Card, an expert marksman and Army weapons instructor, had access to 10 to 15 guns.
Neither Carleton nor Skolfield achieved a face-to-face meeting with Card, precluding the possibility of taking him into protective custody, the first step in the yellow flag process. Skolfield asked Card’s family to try to separate him from his guns.
Card owned at least 12 guns he had purchased starting in 1989, according to a Maine State Police report summarizing crime scene evidence and weapons recovered in his trailer home in Bowdoin, 15 miles from Lewiston, after the mass shooting. The cache included four handguns, four semi-automatic long rifles, including the .308 caliber Ruger he used to carry out his attack (which Card left in his car), and three .22 caliber rifles.
Skolfield’s involvement occurred after an Army reservist, who was a close friend of Card’s, had warned his commanding officers in mid-September, “I believe he is going to snap and do a mass shooting.”
Skolfield learned the Army had ordered Card to a mental hospital exam in July 2023, resulting in a 19-day stay and the Army denying Card access to any military-issued weapons. But Skolfield maintains reserve unit leaders downplayed the reported Card threat and did not express any urgency to check on him.
No one from the unit said, “Aaron, this is the real deal. We're worried.’ That changes things,” Skolfield said in an interview for the documentary.
Skolfield went to Card’s trailer home two consecutive days in mid-September 2023. On the first day, Card was not home. On the second, Card refused to answer the door. The deputy never tried to find Card at his job.
Deputy Carleton told the commission in a public hearing, “When it comes to protective custody, no crime has been committed, and if somebody simply doesn’t want to come to the door, you are out of options.”
Lewiston Commission Chairman Dan Wathen, a retired chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, said upon release of the panel’s report, “The Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office had sufficient probable cause to take Card into protective custody under Maine’s yellow flag law and to initiate a petition to confiscate any firearms he possessed or over which he had control.”
In an interview for the documentary, Sagadahoc County Sheriff Joel Merry said, “Now that we know what happened, it makes it really easy, doesn't it, to say, ‘Well, should we have done this at that point, at that juncture, at another juncture, should we have responded differently? Should there have been a different strategy in place?’ I understand that.”
Merry and Skolfield assert the Army and members Card’s reserve unit withheld information from them that would have painted a clearer picture of Card’s deteriorating mental health and potential for violence.
“I want to fix this. I want to make sure that there are no gaps, that there is nothing that is falling through any cracks at this point,” said Merry, who’s seeing a fifth four-year term as sheriff this November, in his interview. “I think we're being very responsible in our response in the aftermath of this unfortunate situation.”