Army Warned That Maine Gunman ‘Should Not Have a Weapon,’ Behaved ‘Erratically’ Months Before Shooting
Weeks before the shooting: “An alert was then sent to law enforcement warning that Card was ‘armed and dangerous.'”
The latest report on the Maine gunman delivers another blow to those who want to grab our guns.
In July, the Army warned that Robert Card, 40, was a dangerous man:
The Army in July said that Robert Card, 40, “should not have a weapon, handle ammunition, and not participate in live fire activity,” after he was seen “behaving erratically” and sent for an evaluation at an Army hospital, Army spokesperson Lt. Col. Ruth Castro said.
About two months later, a deputy was sent to check on Card twice in mid-September after a soldier became concerned the reservist would “snap and commit a mass shooting,” according to a document from the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Department. An alert was then sent to law enforcement warning that Card was “armed and dangerous.”
Six weeks later, Card killed 18 people in Lewiston, ME.
We already know that Card’s family made many attempts to contact officials about him before the Army’s warning in July:
The Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office was contacted on May 3 by Card’s family, who said they were concerned for his well-being and shared that he had access to firearms, documents show.
Card’s 18-year-old son told a deputy that starting around January, his father was “starting to claim that people were saying things about him, while out in public,” according to documents shared by the sheriff’s office.
His ex-wife also told the deputy that Card had “picked up 10-15 handguns/rifles” that were at his brother’s house, the document says.
The ex-wife and son said their plan was to stay away from Card, according to the documents.
The sheriff’s department claimed that the deputy who spoke to the family went to the 3rd Battalion 304 Training Group representatives and put them in touch with the family.
The representatives told the family the office “would ensure that Card received medical attention.”
Deputies also went to Card’s home weeks before the shooting. He never showed up to the military facility he threatened to shoot up. His unit asked for a health and wellness check.
The deputy never saw him on September 15 and 16.
That led to a File 6 alert:
The Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office sent a File 6 alert – an attempt to locate teletype – to other law enforcement agencies about Card, warning that he’s known to be armed and dangerous. The sheriff’s office said File 6 alerts are “common and are issued by law enforcement when they are trying to locate a person.”
“Robert has been suffering from psychotic episodes & hearing voices,” the alert to law enforcement says. “He is a firearms instructor and made threats to shoot up the National Guard armory in Saco. He was committed over the summer for two weeks due to his altered mental health state, but then released… if located, use extreme caution.”
The office canceled the File 6 alert on October 18, only a week before Card killed 18 people.
So many red flags.
But it’s the guns! It’s definitely not the shooter or the numerous people in charge who did nothing or didn’t put in enough effort.
“Oh, I showed up, and no one was there.” Yeah, that totally counts.
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Comments
When the vaunted left’s gun control laws fail, add more laws. As Mark Steyn says of wanker cops… they police everything except crime. One would almost think this was an intentional avoidance of intervening to allow the shooting to happen. SOOOOO convenient when a Federal judge in California overturned the state’s assault weapons ban… and then … front and center a mass shooting. One step further….. the Feds knew he was a loose cannon… did someone “nudge” him? Dead killers tell no truths.
The only people they want to police are the law abiding. The criminals are means to the end–control.
The problem is the false alarm rate. There’s type I and type II errors, you miss a positive and you detect a false negative.
You can set the system up for any error rate you want for one of those but not for the other at the same time.
Never miss a positive: everybody is red-flagged.
Never a false negative: everybody is not red-flagged.
MIssing a positive by itself does not say that the system needs tuning. You have to decide about relative costs of the two types of error and how you want to balance those costs, and it may well be balanced already.
In this case….. active warnings and verifiable facts were eventually dismissed. All of this was not hearsay and was well documented. This was a true positive if there ever was one. The fact that he couldn’t be found should have been a further concern as he didn’t want to be found.
“You have to decide about relative costs of the two types of error”. Hum…THX 1138?
If he doesn’t shoot anybody, it’s a false positive, no matter the signs.
Simple…. just ignore then all and then there won’t be any “mistakes”.
The reality is these laws exist so we are not working from a blank slate. Based on the info publicly available and how these laws were sold the ‘authorities’ should have been more diligent in the performance of their responsibility. IMO there needs to be a rating system for levels of intervention to be performed. An objective point system for behavior that seems troubling. Telling others you hear voices and threatening to shoot up someplace leading to an involuntary commitment lasting two weeks then a few weeks later another set of warning signs noted and provided to the ‘authorities’ (not by someone with a grudge or ax to grind) should be enough to require a more diligent response than ‘hey, we swung by but he wasn’t home’. Unless you are arguing for scrapping the red flag laws entirely which is totes fine with me.
This guy was sent to a mental ward for evaluation. They evaluated him and let him go. In hindsight, that was a mistake – but a long time ago, I learned psychiatrists don’t do much better than flipping a coin.
I went to school with a psychopath. Every student knew he was a psychopath – but the shrinks that evaluated him didn’t see anything more than slightly disturbed, and neither did any other authority figure until he actually killed someone. He fooled the shrinks again, and was free in less than 10 years – and that’s when he got caught burglarizing a tent in a campground in Alaska, and murdered 4 people in an attempt to cover up this misdemeanor.
So Robert Card was evaluated by the supposed experts, and they let him go. There was no red flag raised for gun ownership, not that this would have done any good. Teenage gangsters regularly get guns. As far as I can tell, a felon who cannot even touch a gun legally is more likely to be armed in this country than a law-abiding citizen.
There is no way that we can turn an E7 Sergeant First Class and arms instructor free and expect to keep him from getting a gun if he wants one. For that matter, drop him and a hundred average American citizens on an island with no firearms at all, but with the normal array of cars, household cleaning products, etc., and he could find a half-dozen other ways to murder them all, if that’s what he wanted.
If a person is proven dangerous enough to lose his 2nd Amendment rights, he’s too dangerous to be loose without a gun. The only way to keep us safe from him is to lock him up and tightly control everything that comes into his cell. But psychiatry is too inexact to furnish that proof.
Leftists – ‘we need red flag laws’
2A community – ‘are y’all really gonna use them routinely to keep communities safe from folks with no shit mental illness?’
Leftists – ‘absolutely, and we promise not to go after normal folks who some bitter ex Spouse is trying to get hemmed up or use these powers to harass ordinary folks’
2A community ‘we don’t trust you’
Leftists – ‘tough cookies, we already hoodwinked much of the public into believing this is common sense + legacy media and all the anti 2A advocacy groups are all in and y’all gonna get voted out at election time if you oppose it’
2A – ‘fine, we don’t have the public support to stop y’all but we know y’all gonna get it passed and then drop the ball anyway, just like you do with all the other laws already on the books’
And here we are, just as many predicted. The ‘authorities’ can’t be bothered to do their damn job even when the dots are connected for them. Just as many mental health practitioners don’t want to deal with truly disturbed people b/c its very hard and pays much less. They would rather stick to relatively nice, non dangerous middle and upper class women unhappy with work or marriage and hand out anti depressant RX, which makes sense from their point of view.
Years ago Cruz Grqassley wanted to streamline these reports but everyone’s favorite liberal Chuck You refused it.
Once again, we are presented with the known wolf, the person who everyone knew in their heart of hearts was a homicidal psychopath with multiple loud warnings of an impending psychological break and nothing was done.
Once again we are faced with a pile of innocent bodies asking why – oh, why – was not a single person armed?
We know the answer.
Don’t be fooled. Maine has swung so hard to the left that if Marx were still alive he’d be calling for an intervention.
Lesson: be armed and ready to kill in self defense everywhere except the shower.
Because in Maine if a place that serves alcohol has a sign posted saying that no guns are allowed, that has the force of law. And all the places he shot up do serve alcohol, and do have such signs. At one of them the sign is very polite, but it’s still a “no guns” sign at a licensed premises, so it still means if you carry there you can get arrested, so nobody did. Except, of course, the nut case, which is the problem with such signs and such laws.
Yep. Exactly. IMO, the statutes need updating to create an affirmative duty of protection wherever a ‘gun free zone’ is established. At minimum it needs armed security on site sufficient to deter most whackos if not prevent an especially motivated whacko from shooting the place up.
Lesson: be armed and ready to kill in self defense everywhere except the shower.
You don’t have a shower gun? You’ve never seen Psycho?
For shower defense I was thinking of the John Wayne scene where he blasts somebody with a shotgun from where he was taking a shower or bath.
sent for an evaluation
So, it appears this might have been an “involuntary” bit. Which should have triggered the red flag law in Maine (by the arguments of those who push for them).
“bit” => “commitment”
I couldn’t think of the word….
It’s a never ending source of amusement that the male suffix is never objected to when part of a pejorative noun.