A medical professional who works as a contractor for the U.S. Army did not appear Thursday before the commission investigating the Lewiston mass shooting despite receiving a subpoena to testify.
The panel investigating Maine’s deadliest mass shooting on record had subpoenaed a woman described as a “contracted civilian medical professional” with the Army. But the contractor did not appear during a virtual meeting of the commission at 1 p.m. Thursday.
Instead, Anne Jordan, the commission’s executive director, spent most of the short meeting laying out the many attempts the panel made since early June to contact the woman while copying Army officials on emails. Army officials have cooperated with the commission but cannot compel a contractor to testify, Jordan said.
After being informed of differing contact information for the contractor, Jordan said she eventually made contact this week with a person tied to the health care contractor who indicated the subpoena was passed along to the woman’s legal counsel.
That person also made a reference to the contractor potentially not participating in Thursday’s hearing due to a “notice of a potential claim for malpractice” with the request to testify, to which Jordan said she informed the person it was a validly issued subpoena. The contractor has still not responded to messages from the commission, Jordan said.
Dan Wathen, the commission’s chair and a former chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, said the panel will refer the contractor’s failure to appear Thursday to Attorney General Aaron Frey for “whatever action may be appropriate.”
The drama comes as the commission gets closer to wrapping up its work covering the lead-up and response to the Oct. 25 mass shooting at a Lewiston bowling alley and bar, in which Robert Card II, a 40-year-old Army reservist from Bowdoin, killed 18 people and injured 13 before police found him dead two days later of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The commission is otherwise set to hear at 5 p.m. Thursday from a nurse who worked at Keller Army Community Hospital in West Point, New York, where Card’s Army Reserve personnel drove him last July after he was acting erratically and threatening others. Card ended up the next day at Four Winds Hospital in Katonah, New York, where he received psychiatric treatment for about two weeks before returning to Maine.
Gov. Janet Mills formed the independent commission that has met publicly a dozen times since November, and much of the probe has focused on Card’s declining mental health before the shooting. Family and fellow reservists of Card had warned police and Army Reserve superiors repeatedly about his declining mental health, paranoia, access to guns and threats to “shoot up” places in the weeks and months leading up to Oct. 25.
Boston University experts found “significant evidence of trauma” in the brain of Card, who served for years as a grenade instructor at West Point. Card’s family and Maine’s congressional delegation have since pushed for more research and protections regarding the blasts that military members are exposed to in training and combat.
The independent commission plans to issue a final report later this summer. Its preliminary report in March faulted the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office and Card’s Army Reserve commander, Jeremy Reamer, for not using Maine’s “yellow flag” law to take away Card’s weapons and for not following the recommendations of New York mental health providers to ensure Card attended counseling and had all weapons removed from his Bowdoin home.
The Army’s inspector general and Army Reserve are wrapping up separate investigations into the shooting, and Maine State Police released more than 3,000 pages of documents in June that further illuminated the chaotic search and effort to respond to the shooting and false tips.
Earlier in June, an Army Reserve official testified Card was deemed a “low threat” who should be kept away from weapons after he was hospitalized in New York and that no indications existed he would do something as drastic as a mass shooting.
But Lt. Col. Ryan Vasquez also said the Army Reserve had no mechanism to seize Card’s personal weapons or store them while he was a civilian and not on military duty, after a reservist and friend warned superiors in September of Card’s threat to “shoot up” a Saco reserve facility.
Vasquez’s testimony appeared to contradict itself at times and drew questions from commission members while indicating part of the internal investigations would cover what the military is allowed to do with the personal weapons of members.
Sheriff’s deputies tried to reach Card in September via welfare checks at his Bowdoin residence, but he did not answer the door. A statewide law enforcement alert went out that month to locate an “armed and dangerous” Card.
But Card was not found before he carried out the attacks at Just-In-Time Recreation and Schemengees Bar and Grille. Police found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in nearby Lisbon after a 48-hour manhunt.
