The interim report from the commission investigating Maine's deadliest mass shooting focused mostly on whether authorities should have taken shooter Robert Card into custody and seized his guns under the state's so-called yellow flag law. The commission said the sheriff's office should have initiated that process.
FILE - This photo released by the Lewiston Maine Police Department shows Robert Card, who was responsible for the mass shootings in Lewiston, Maine, on Oct. 25, 2023. Beyond the yellow flag law, the commission investigating Maine’s deadliest mass shooting concluded that law enforcement also had ample grounds to pursue assault charges against Robert Card for punching a fellow reservist in the face.
“I believe he’s going to snap and do a mass shooting,” Hodgson wrote in reporting the incident to his U.S. Army Reserve supervisors on Sept. 15. “The Commission finds that there is a misperception among some law enforcement officers, including Sgt. Skolfield, that they need to have a victim ‘press charges’ to bring a case to the prosecutor’s office,” the commission wrote. “This is simply wrong. It is the prosecutor ... who brings the charges, but a prosecutor can only act when those charged with investigating crimes, i.e., law enforcement officers, follow through with their investigations.
“Even though I agree with their assessment, at the same time, I didn’t want to see him in trouble. I wanted him to get some sort of help,” he said. Jim Burke, professor emeritus at the University of Maine School of Law, said it is clear that law enforcement and perhaps military officials didn’t do everything they could have done, including pursuing criminal charges, but the more difficult question is what would have happened if they had done so.
“If the deputy sheriff had taken the story to a court and asked for an arrest warrant, I doubt that they would have gotten the arrest warrant just because a fellow Army buddy said, so-and-so did …. to me,” he said.
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