By Gabriella Borter
LEWISTON, Maine (Reuters) -Police in Maine searched the waters of the Androscoggin River on Friday with divers, robots and sonar in their pursuit of U.S. Army reservist Robert R. Card, who they suspect is the mass shooter who killed 18 people at a bar and a bowling alley in Lewiston this week.
Tens of thousands of people in the area remained under orders to stay indoors for their safety while hundreds of officers extended a manhunt underway since the Wednesday night shootings.
Investigators focused on the river as the last known location of Card, whose white SUV was found abandoned at a boat launch. Public records show Card has at least one watercraft registered in his name, a 12-foot (3.6-meter), 155-horsepower vessel made by jet ski company Sea-Doo.
Card, 40, liked to hunt and fish and was a sergeant at a nearby U.S. Army Reserve base who law enforcement officials said had been temporarily committed to a mental health facility over the summer.
Mike Sauschuck, the Maine Department of Public Safety’s commissioner, warned the public not to be alarmed at the site of divers entering the river.
Sonar and robots were also being deployed in the Androscoggin and the Sabattus River, a smaller tributary that drains into the Androscoggin, local media reported.
Divers were in the water, WGME television reported on Friday afternoon with a journalist near the scene. About 40 officers swept the shoreline, the Lewiston Sun Journal reported, citing a Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife spokesperson.
As two boats outfitted with sonar covered the river, a helicopter overhead scanned the water with thermal imaging, the Sun Journal said.
A Thursday night search in the neighboring town of Bowdoin, where Card has a home, turned up a note, Sauschuck said, though he declined to say who wrote it or what it said.
Lewiston, a former textile hub of 38,000 people, and neighboring communities have been largely shut down since the Wednesday evening attacks to enable hundreds of officers to conduct their search. Colleges and public schools in the area canceled classes for a second day.
“I will ask the community to be as patient as possible with this process,” Lewiston Police Chief David St. Pierre said at a press conference.
The bloodshed rattled towns throughout Androscoggin County where residents were urged to “shelter in place,” or remain indoors.
More people were driving around Lewiston and neighboring Auburn on Friday as some grocery stores and fast-food stops opened their doors after a near-total shutdown on Thursday. Some people were anxious at the thought of how long the shelter-in-place would keep them out of work.
“Am I going to fall behind on my rent, my bills?” said Toni Martin, a 50-year-old employee at a casino in Oxford, Maine, that has kept its doors closed since Wednesday night.
14-YEAR-OLD BOY AMONG DEAD
The victims included Bill Young and his 14-year-old son Aaron, who were shot and killed at the Just-In-Time Recreation bowling alley, Bill’s brother Rob Young told Reuters.
Also among the dead was Bryan MacFarlane, 40, a member of a deaf community group participating in a cornhole beanbag-throwing tournament at Schemengees Bar & Grille when he was killed, his sister Keri Brooks told CNN.
Guns are lightly regulated in Maine, where about half of all adults live in a household with a firearm, according to a 2020 study by RAND Corporation.
Maine does not require a permit to buy or carry a gun, and it does not have so-called “red flag” laws seen in some other states that allow law enforcement to temporarily disarm people deemed to be dangerous.
U.S. Representative Jared Golden, a Democrat from Lewiston, told reporters that the attacks have reversed his opposition to banning certain kinds of semi-automatic rifles.
“I now call on the United States Congress to ban assault rifles, like the one used by the perpetrator of this mass killing in my hometown,” Golden told a news conference.
But his change of heart does not change the equation in Washington, where President Joe Biden’s push to reinstate a ban of such guns has been a non-starter for Republicans who control the House of Representatives and back gun rights
A landmark 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling has made it more difficult to pass gun laws. The court found that individuals have a constitutional right to carry weapons in public, and that lawmakers can only pass gun regulations that resemble those that existed in the United States in the 18th century.
(Reporting by Gabriella Borter in Lewiston; Additional reporting by Nick Pfosi in Lewiston and Lisbon, Maine, and by Rich McKay; Writing by Daniel Trotta and Jonathan Allen; Editing by Stephen Coates, Mark Porter and Jonathan Oatis)
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