On October 23, 2023, Robert Card went on a senseless rampage in Lewiston, Maine. He murdered a total of 18 people from multiple locations, including a bowling alley and Schemengees Bar & Grille Restaurant. A massive manhunt ensued, with Card being found four days later, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a recycling center in nearby Lisbon, his former place of employment. Months later, a new medical report sheds some light on Card’s warped psyche and how it got that way.
For days, there were shelter-in-place orders as law enforcement hunted Card down. The media and the anti-gun left were primed for a gun control push, but this story was like most: the laws on the books could’ve prevented this tragedy if they were enforced, with Card being known to law enforcement and suffering from severe mental illness.
Mr. Card was committed to a mental health clinic in the summer of 2023 but was later released. He was a firearms and grenade instructor with the US Army Reserve, heard voices in his head, and threatened to attack a military base in Saco, Maine. In July 2023, the US Army determined Card to be unfit to handle firearms on base. The military was also concerned about Card’s erratic behavior, reaching out to a local sheriff’s office to do a “health and welfare check” before his rampage.
Given his work with explosives, his brain was sent to Boston University’s C.T.E. Center for analysis. It was determined that Card didn’t suffer from C.T.E., commonly found in professional athletes of contact sports. Still, the moderate damage seen as a result of exposure to weapons blasts likely played a role in the deterioration of his mental health (via NYT):
The gunman, Robert Card, was a grenade instructor in the Army Reserve. In 2023, after eight years of being exposed to thousands of skull-shaking blasts on the training range, he began hearing voices and was stalked by paranoid delusions, his family said. He grew increasingly erratic and violent in the months before the October rampage in Lewiston, in which he killed 18 people and then himself.
[…]
According to the lab’s report, prepared on Feb. 26 and updated on Wednesday, the white matter that forms the wiring deep in the brain had “moderately severe” damage, and in some areas was missing entirely. The delicate tissue sheaths that insulate each biological circuit lay in “disorganized clumps,” and throughout Mr. Card’s brain there was scarring and inflammation suggesting repeated trauma.
This was not C.T.E., the report said. It was a characteristic pattern of damage that has been found before in military veterans who were repeatedly exposed to weapons blasts during their service.
“While it is unclear whether these pathological findings are responsible for Mr. Card’s behavioral changes in the last 10 months of life, based on our previous studies it is likely that brain injury played a role in his symptoms,” the report concluded.
The findings have grave implications for the military, because Mr. Card never saw combat, and had never been exposed to explosions from enemy fire or roadside bombs. The only blasts that hit his brain came from training that the Army said was safe.
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Congress has been pushing the military in recent years to investigate whether the blasts from repeatedly firing heavy weapons cause brain damage, but the military has proceeded at a halting pace that has yielded few changes in the field.
Soldiers like Mr. Card are still being exposed to large numbers of blasts from grenades, mortars, cannons and rocket launchers in training every day. And current Pentagon guidelines say that absorbing thousands of grenade blasts, as Mr. Card did over his career, poses no risk to troops’ brains.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Army said it had issued recommendations in recent months to reduce blast exposure in combat units.
I’m not sure this brings any closure to the victims of the families. If Card was suffering from C.T.E., that’s a more definitive diagnosis than an educated guess that repeated bomb blasts might have degraded his mental faculties. It offers some reasoning for the voices, maybe. But Card still murdered 18 people and then took his own life. I doubt the families of those murdered by Card are satisfied with the explanation that exposure to exploding grenades is what led them to experience this unspeakable and preventable tragedy. There were red flags everywhere with Card.