Bowling alley, then a bar: how a quiet night in Maine turned into a massacre

When visitors leave Just-In-Time Recreation, a 22-lane bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine, they are encouraged to come back by a cheery sign in art deco font: “Thanks for playing. See you again in your spare time!”

Surveillance video from Wednesday evening captured a man with his back to that door as he entered the alley. He was carrying a black AR-15-style firearm fitted with a powerful riflescope for accurate targeting.

The man was dressed in brown hoodie and slacks, a surprisingly casual outfit given what he was about to unleash. Mass shooters often aspire to look the part in military fatigues, flak jackets and helmets. Yet the way the man held the gun, and his confident and alert posture, suggested someone at ease with his weapon.

He entered the alley at 6.56pm, police said. About 100 people, many of them children, were inside. Witnesses described how a loud pop rent the air.

One bowler, who gave his name as Brandon, was putting on his bowling shoes. The obvious thought was that the noise was from one of the many children’s events taking place around him.

“I thought it was a balloon,” he told the Associated Press.

But when he turned, he saw the man expertly brandishing a rifle.

“I just booked it down the lane, and I slid where the pins are and climbed up in the machine,” Brandon said.

He remained clinging to the bowling-pin machinery while what he called “a lot of ruckus” erupted in the building.

When Riley Dumont heard that first loud bang, she rushed into a corner, where she and family members used tables and a bench to try to protect themselves. She had come to the alley to watch her 11-year-old daughter compete in a children’s league.

Dumont told ABC News: “I was laying on top of my daughter. My mother was laying on top of me. It felt like it lasted a lifetime.”

By the end of that lifetime, seven people lay dead, including one woman.

The man with the gun was not done. He drove four miles to Schemengees Bar and Grille, where another night of quintessential American activity was getting under way. It was cornhole night, players tossing bean bags at holes in angled boards.

“It was just a fun night playing cornhole,” Schemengees’ owner, Kathy Lebel, said.

At 7.08pm, the first 911 calls were made by several people in the bar.

“My heart is crushed,” Lebel wrote on Facebook, hours later. “I am at a loss for words. In a split second your world gets turn upside down.”

Another eight people, all male, died at the bar. A further three people died in hospital, bringing the toll to at least 18. Police on Thursday said 13 had been injured.

Maine police named Robert Card, 40, of Bowdoin, Maine, as a person of interest and later the suspect. He was described as a trained firearms instructor and a US army reservist.

Authorities let it be known Card had reported mental health problems. He had been hearing voices, had made threats to a national guard base in Saco, Maine, and had spent two weeks this summer in a mental health facility.

The shootings sparked a huge manhunt. Card’s white Subaru Outback was found in a neighboring town, Lisbon, close to a boat landing, raising the possibility the search might extend into the state’s vast and craggy coastline.

A police officer in Lisbon, Maine amid the search for the gunman. Photograph: Robert F Bukaty/AP

Schools were closed, businesses shuttered, residents told to stay at home and not approach Card, who was “armed and dangerous”.

Running parallel to the search for the gunman was a separate search for answers. Zoe Levesque, a 10-year-old grazed by a bullet in the bowling alley, spoke for many.

“I never thought I’d grow up and get a bullet in my leg,” she told CNN. “Like why, why do people do this?”

Levesque’s question is certain to reverberate around the US, as after every mass shooting: 565 have been recorded so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

One factor in any explanation should be the 400m or so guns owned in the US – more than the 332 million population. The Small Arms Survey found in 2018 that 120 guns are held by every 100 Americans, by far the highest such rate in the world and more than twice the next highest, in Yemen.

According to the Trace, a non-partisan outlet tracking gun violence, US gun sales run at more than a million a month.

And then there is Maine. With strong libertarian and hunting traditions, the northern state has some of the loosest gun laws in America. Residents can carry concealed weapons without a permit. Private gun dealers can operate without background checks.

Most pertinently, given Card’s reported mental health problems, there is no “red flag” or “extreme risk” law that would allow police to temporarily confiscate guns from someone who poses a risk to themselves or others.

Both chambers of the Maine legislature are controlled by Democrats, as is the governor’s mansion. Yet bills attempting to introduce even basic controls are routinely rejected.

“It’s uncomfortable in Maine to talk about guns,” the district attorney of Cumberland county told the Portland Press Herald last month. “Maine has a kind of bipartisan support for the second amendment in its most extreme form.”

Stephen King, the bestselling novelist who lives about 50 miles from Wednesday’s carnage, expressed his anger at his state and country’s laissez-faire approach.

“It’s the rapid-fire killing machines, people,” King said on social media, pointing to the lack of restrictions on semi-automatic rifles of the kind used in Lewiston. “This is madness in the name of freedom. Stop electing apologists for murder.

“THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN IN OTHER COUNTRIES,” the horror writer wrote, referring to the real-life horror that has descended on his community.