BOWDOIN — It was a small, private service.

The family did not have a body to bury. But after two months in purgatory, they felt like they needed to take a step toward closure — if only for the youngest among them, who were still struggling to understand what happened to their uncle.

Not that any of the adults really did either.

Ryan Card usually cries at funerals. But on that day last January, he could not shed a tear. For him, the crushing weight of the sadness, anger and shame wrought by his little brother’s actions had long ago resolved to numbness.

“I’m in therapy; nothing bothers me. I had his funeral; nothing bothers me. It’s, like, dead,” Ryan Card said in an exclusive interview last spring. “I’ve never grieved any of it, you know what I mean?”

As the people of Maine have learned in the aftermath of October 25, 2023, it’s impossible to quantify the destructive force of a mass shooter’s bullets.

Many of the initial news reports following the massacre in Lewiston focused on the 18 people killed at Just-In-Time Recreation and Schemengees Bar & Grille. Over time, other stories emerged: of those who pressed themselves into dark corners and waited for the thunder of gunfire to cease; of the parents and spouses and children of victims who stayed up through the night seeking confirmation of news they did not want to believe; of police officers and medical professionals and Army leaders who had known the gunman was sick and angry and trained to kill, but who ultimately failed to get him the help he needed.

Victims. Heroes. Villains.

The people who loved Robert Card don’t fit into simple categories.

They tried harder than anyone else to help him. They are haunted by the knowledge they could have done more.

Last year, reporters from the Portland Press Herald and Maine Public spoke with members of Card’s family. The interviews, spread over several months, offer glimpses into their struggle to process what happened and their search for a way forward.

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“If it happened in such a loving, kind place, it could happen anywhere.”

— Katie Card 

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Some members of the family were initially reluctant to speak on the record. Others made clear that they could only bear to tell their story once. For months after the shooting, they hid from public view to mourn their losses and process their fury and give space to the victims they deemed worthier of the public’s sympathy.

But though it causes them anguish to talk about Robert and his descent into a state of madness, they viewed it as their penance and their duty to explain how we got to Lewiston — and to warn that, until the systems that failed are fixed, it could all happen again.

“We have a really good family. We’re close. We’re kind to each other,” Ryan Card’s wife Katie said. “We work hard together on this farm. We get together for dinners, holidays. Our children have grown up together.”

“If it happened in such a loving, kind place, it could happen anywhere.”

 

SOMETHING AMISS

Cara Lamb and her ex-husband hadn’t been on speaking terms in years.

As Robert’s high school sweetheart, she had been taken by his quiet work ethic. She loved how his big farming family packed his parents’ house in rural Bowdoin for meals and holiday celebrations. Traditions like waking up early on Christmas morning to milk the cows were so unlike what she had experienced in her tiny Brunswick family, and she loved the idea of her son Colby, born in 2005, growing up with a foot in each world.

The marriage fell apart after just two years.

Cara bristled against Robert’s stubbornness — his unwavering belief that he knew what he knew, that his way was the right way.

After years of butting heads culminated in a trip to family court, the adults basically cut off all direct contact. Robert’s family knew not to discuss Cara around him. But the bitterness never extended to their son.

When Colby reached high school, he and his dad grew especially close. They played in bowling and cornhole leagues and built a garage on Robert’s property. Hardly a weekend went by that they weren’t on a lake or river, fishing rods in hand.

“Their relationship had hit the sweet spot,” Cara said. “He was a good dad. I never would have shared a child for all those years with somebody who could really have been a threat to my kid.”

So, it was jarring when Colby, just weeks away from his 18th birthday, told her in April 2023 that he didn’t feel safe around his dad anymore.

Cara tried to stay calm as she coaxed the details out of her son: Robert had become convinced that people everywhere he went were whispering behind his back that he was gay or a pedophile; he had accused Colby of being in on the conspiracy; that he had recently picked up a large stockpile of guns he’d been keeping at his brother’s old home.

“This wasn’t normal behavior. It was scary. And he didn’t know what to do, and he didn’t feel like he had any backup at that point,” Cara said. “He was afraid his dad was getting violent and getting so aggressive that he was going to be physically violent. And he was right.”

 

WALKING ON EGGSHELLS

Robert’s behavior was making it hard for Ryan to hold his tongue.

As adults, the brothers had in some ways swapped the roles they’d held as children. Once the dorky younger sibling, Robert now went out of his way to look out for Ryan — a disabled former Army Ranger who saw combat in Iraq — and Katie and their kids.

But the little brother complex never fully went away. Ryan said that once he got a few beers in him, Robert would often try to fight him, as if to prove he could take care of himself.

That was well and good when all they had to argue about was cornhole and drinking games. But Robert was tougher to deal with once the paranoia set in.

Robert quit the Schemengees cornhole league he played in with Ryan, complaining that people in the bar were insulting him. Ryan took on the uncomfortable task of asking their friends whether they had said anything. Everyone was adamant they hadn’t.

Katie, suspecting Robert might have a brain tumor, gently pushed him to set up a doctor’s appointment. When he brushed her off, she decided to leave the issue to her husband.

Robert had never been known to back down when he thought he was in the right, even if that meant walking away from a job. When the brothers got into arguments, Robert would sometimes cut off contact. There was never any real resolution. Days later, when Robert decided he was ready to be done fighting, they would just pick the relationship up again as if nothing had happened.

Now, Robert believed he was the target of a malicious conspiracy. He took any suggestion that he was unwell as evidence that whoever brought it up was part of the plot against him.

“He loved testing you, feeling you out,” Katie said. “You say one wrong thing — you’re done.”

Robert’s loyalty tests grated on his loved ones. They wanted to help him, but they had their own busy lives to lead. And Ryan doubted that indulging his brother’s delusions would do him any good. He went back to the cornhole league, and Robert largely cut his brother out of his life.

“He thought of me as a traitor for still going back there,” Ryan said. “Colby became the enemy, and I became the enemy. Because we cared, and we wouldn’t put (stock) into these voices.”

 

‘WHAT IF THIS WASN’T TRUE?’

With Ryan and Robert on bad terms, it fell to the youngest Card sibling to figure out what to do.

Nicole Herling set to work looking for answers. She researched the over-the-counter hearing aids Robert had bought months earlier, searching for evidence that the devices might be responsible for the voices he thought he was hearing.

She called a military helpline in June and asked them for advice. But the system was not easy to navigate. Nicole didn’t know many specific details about Robert’s military service or the people he worked with. Neither did her parents. Nicole finally got through to someone on a Veterans Crisis Line, only to encounter a glitch that projected her own uncertain voice back at her, making it difficult to communicate.

The advice she ended up getting — that Robert could get in trouble and even lose his retirement if his commanders heard rumors that he was a pedophile — was on her mind when she called the Saco base and left several intentionally vague voicemails: she was the sister of a unit member, and she needed help.

“What if this wasn’t true?” she remembers thinking. “Here I am, like, ruining my brother’s life. He’s almost got his papers.”

She hoped that if she just got the right person to call her back, then she could explain what was going on. Nobody did.

It felt like there was nothing to do except grieve a loss that was happening in slow-motion.

Now, she wonders if calling and leaving a message on a Saturday when nobody was around was a mistake. But she and her husband had work and church and kids to think about, too. As worried as they were about Robert, it was so hard to keep taking the extra step, making the extra call when none of it seemed to get them anywhere.

“I knew my brother was struggling, and I knew that he was going to commit suicide,” Nicole said. “I could have gone to his house and said, ‘I love you. Let’s do something different.’ And I chose not to. So I’m responsible, just as responsible as all the other people that made a mistake.”

 

THE MAN WITH THE GUN

Some of them knew instantly. The man in the grainy image captured by surveillance cameras wore a beard, which Robert never did, but there was some signature in the gunman’s stance and shoulders that identified him to Cara as her ex-husband.

Others were unsure as they squinted at the frame. They called one another and asked could that be Rob? Could that be Dad?

“I’m not going to say I didn’t know right away,” Ryan said. “It’s just that I didn’t want to.”

Though Robert’s siblings had feared that he was on the road to suicide, they had never imagined that he was capable of hurting innocent people.

Once they knew that he was, they had to consider whether they were in danger. Nicole raced to her parents’ home to warn them that Robert might be coming to hurt them. Her mother wondered whether that might have been better.

“My mom said, ‘Why couldn’t he just have killed me?’” Nicole said. “’Why couldn’t he have just killed me?”

Her parents have not spoken publicly about the shooting and did not respond to interview requests.

During the 48 hours it took for the police to find his body, several family members hid at friends’ homes. They learned not to answer their phones, inundated with calls from the press and even some anonymous members of the public who berated them for being related to a killer.

Nicole’s husband James confronted people who showed up on their family property. Police and federal agents searched homes owned by the Cards, leaving behind damaged fences and battered doors.

The family spoke with law enforcement over and over again, realizing slowly that officials didn’t trust them, even though they were the ones who had first identified Robert as the shooter, and they had shared as much as they could about where he might think to hide.

On the second day of the manhunt, Nicole wrote a message for her brother. She sat with her pen and notepad, awash in fear and sadness and pity, and asked Robert to surrender. She told him that she still loved him and God loved him and they would figure things out together.

Robert never got her message. He was already dead.

 

GUNS AND BROTHERS

It’s impossible to determine with any certainty when Robert stowed himself away in the trailer at Maine Recycling Corporation where his body was found. No one knows what was going through his head in the minutes or hours before he turned his weapon on himself.

When Ryan talks about the shooting, something pulls him toward that stretch of time. He imagines that there must have been a moment when Robert came back to reality — that the person he once knew was still in there somewhere, underneath the rage and the psychosis, and that he recognized the evil he had committed and could not live with it.

“I don’t think he made it through the first night and witnessing what he saw,” Ryan said. “I’ve witnessed that shit. It wasn’t my fault. He witnessed it, and he caused it.”

Part of him wishes his brother had been found alive — for the victims who never got their day in court, for the family members who have to go on without him, for his own sake.

“Then again, I hate the fact that he’d have to live with that the rest of his life. But what can I say? He deserved it,” Ryan said. “I know that it’s not completely his fault. But it is his fault. How many people in the history of the world have gone through the same kind of brain injury as that and not done it?”

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“I hate the fact that he’d have to live with that the rest of his life. But what can I say? He deserved it.”

– Ryan Card

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Three weeks after the shooting, Ryan was butchering a deer when he sliced his forearm to the bone. He wasn’t consciously trying to kill himself, he says. But it wasn’t exactly an accident.

Doctors were worried that he would hurt himself again, so he spent the next two weeks in a psychiatric hospital, where he experienced a psychotic break. He remembers attacking people and being attacked. He heard his dogs barking inside the hospital and saw snakes coming out of the wall. Only later he learned that none of it had actually happened.

“It was real, you know what I mean?” he said. “I felt it.”

A few days later, police invoked Maine’s yellow flag law to confiscate his guns. In the chaos after he cut himself, Ryan had threatened to hurt himself and others. Since the shooting, those types of threats were already being taken more seriously in Maine.

Ryan’s case was only the second time the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office initiated the yellow flag law; like many other departments across the state, it had never used the statute before Lewiston brought it into the public eye.

Ryan was glad the police came for his guns.

A longtime hunter, he said he does not blame the weapons for his brother’s crimes, and like many Mainers he’s skeptical that additional gun safety legislation will do much to stop someone who really wants to commit an act of evil. But he also believes that there should be certain things you cannot say without losing the right to have a gun, at least temporarily.

He’s willing to miss a hunting season if it means that people are starting to take this seriously — if it means the next time someone gives the people around them every reason to think something is wrong, they’ll work to avoid the worst-case scenario rather than just hoping for the best.

“If I made those threats to people — especially me, after everything I just went through — I don’t need you to question me. You just tell the judge that I voluntarily … give up my access to weapons,” he said. “I should have known better. I think people should know better.”

 

BREAKING THE SILENCE

The family members sometimes find it difficult not to be furious at Robert. For killing their friends. For leaving Colby without a father. For forcing them to endlessly second guess the moments where they could have done more but didn’t because they were frustrated or scared or just busy.

Other times they feel sorry for him. They imagine what it must have been like to feel persecuted and alone for so many months. They regret that in his head, if not in reality, they had hurt him.

During the hazy weeks after the shooting, Nicole says she felt God at her side, helping her navigate life at a time when just making it through the day required a monumental effort.

Then she started to learn more about what might have caused Robert’s psychosis. Boston University researchers concluded that damage in Robert’s brain was most likely related to blasts he was around during his military service.

The findings offered her a new purpose: maybe this all happened so she could advocate for better brain safety policies and awareness and spare others from suffering like her brother — and from redirecting that suffering onto others.

It’s still difficult for her to talk about what happened. Interviews with reporters are challenging and exhausting. Confronting the U.S. military for what she sees as its failure to adequately protect its soldiers is daunting. Her faith guides her forward, still, even as she sometimes wonders whether her advocacy is as much for her as for others.

“I don’t know if this mission is so I don’t have to feel that pain, or whether it is the truth, and this is what we’ve got to do, and we’re being led to do it because it needs to be done,” she said. “I don’t know. I’ve asked, and I’ve asked, and I’ve asked.”

It is uncomfortable to label Robert a victim when he destroyed so many lives. The family feels that weight — their hesitation to speak publicly stemmed partly from a fear of causing further pain. But they also believe Robert was failed by systems and by individuals, and they believe changes need to be made.

Consumed by their own guilt, they are especially frustrated when they see police and military officials seemingly sidestep accountability for their failure to help or at least disarm Robert. They believe that honestly confronting the problems that led to Lewiston is the only way to prevent the next tragedy.

“If the Card family can accept that they wish they would have done differently,” Cara said, “then everybody else should as well.”

Maine Public Deputy News Director Susan Sharon contributed reporting for this story. 

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