Last week, a new investigative documentary produced in partnership by PBS, Maine Public Radio and the Portland Press Herald, told the story of the 2023 Lewiston mass shooting as it hadn't been told before.
"Breakdown in Maine," a credit to both local journalism and public broadcasting, used compelling interviews and carefully assembled footage to set out the timeline of events that culminated in the deadly evening of Oct. 25, 2023.
The documentary does a very moving job of personalizing the tragedy - which already felt and feels plenty personal to many of us here in Maine.
For just over 53 minutes, it brings vividly to life the heartbreak endured by those who loved and were concerned for and about shooter Robert Card, people who acted with care and compassion as they attempted to both get help for him and raise the alarm about his erratic and paranoid behavior and claims. For months on end, theirs was not an easy place to be.
Viewers are confronted by the tormented accounts of family members and close friends, people who stuck with Card, despite the 40-year-old Army reservist's resistance to their input. In the end, they found themselves with nowhere to go and scant official recourse or assistance.
"It became clear, days after the shooting, that there were breakdowns on a whole lot of levels," Press Herald reporter John Terhune tells the camera at the film's opening. "It wasn't one mistake. It wasn't one person, it wasn't one institution."
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The documentary very effectively charts the fall of these dominos, one by one. Person by person, hospital wing by hospital wing, officer by officer.
The moment that was most resonant for this editorial board, however, takes place within the documentary's opening quarter, when a map of the United States appears on screen. A host of states, scattered across the country, light up in red. There on the upper right-hand side, Maine lights up in yellow.
In an interview, Maine Public's Steve Mistler offers the words that play out as the graphic is introduced. This portion of the documentary pertains to "Maine's yellow flag law ... used by police officers to begin the process of confiscating somebody's weapons if they're a harm to themselves or others."
The map shows this - "unique" - law for what it is: an unacceptable national aberration. No other state has this version.
The red flag (or Extreme Risk Protection Order) law, in effect in 21 other states and Washington, D.C., is the "gold standard." Can Maine's yellow flag law be thought of as a counterpart? No. It's all in the name.
Prohibitively weak, highly conditional and requiring an arduous and time-consuming series of steps, the yellow flag law sets a needlessly high bar for the removal of weapons from people who may do unspeakable harm with them.
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It's not that we didn't already know this.
Writing in a September op-ed in these pages ("Maine's yellow flag law was set up to fail. It's time for red flag."), Lisa Geller, the senior advisor for implementation at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, put it this way: "While there were missed opportunities, Maine's yellow flag law was a compromise that prioritized political expediency and palatability over public health and safety. It's time to learn from mistakes of the past and pass a full ERPO law in Maine. Lives depend on it."
We agree with every word.
Last April, incensed by the state Legislature's failure to pass such a law, this editorial board wrote the following: "Had an effective red flag regime existed in Maine, the killer's family - who both knew enough and spoke up - would have had a better, more direct route to weapon removal available to them. That should haunt anybody who continues to oppose this reform."
In the final year of his life, Robert Card's family and his closest friend ran out of the road. The system failed them - and, as the FRONTLINE documentary makes clear, failed the people they appealed to who felt unable to make the right move at the right time. If we are to make any effort at all to prevent mass shootings, we must start by scrapping Maine's terrifyingly unreliable yellow flag law.
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