Robert Card, an Army reservist, killed 18 people and hurt 13 others in Lewiston, Maine, a year ago. Now, his family is trying to raise awareness about traumatic brain injuries.
Card, who taught people how to use guns and hand grenades, had a history of mental health issues before he used a Ruger SFAR to shoot up a bowling hall and a bar and grill on October 25, 2023. Two days later, police found him with a gunshot wound to the head that he had caused himself.
“We want to make sure this doesn’t ever, ever happen again to another family.” Card’s sister Nicole Herling told NBC News in an interview that came out Tuesday.
Herling and her husband James have talked in public about how they tried to get Card’s family to notice that he was mentally ill before the massacre, which was Maine’s deadliest mass killing.
Card’s family tried to get help by calling both a veterans’ crisis number and the military base where Card worked.
NBC reports that a month before the killing, police went to Card’s house after hearing from his family that he was being violent, but they didn’t make contact.
A fellow Army reservist even told his bosses on September 15 that he thought Card was “going to snap and do a mass shooting,” according to testimony from Card’s family at a meeting in May before Maine’s legislature as part of an independent investigation into the shooting.
After Card was shot, his brain was studied by researchers, who found that he had serious traumatic brain injuries.
NBC reports that Card may have been exposed to thousands of explosions during his work as a hand-grenade instructor. During the May hearing, Card’s family said that researchers told them it was “one of the worst” cases of traumatic brain injuries they had ever seen.
The Herlings are working on forming a non-profit group called Rising Over Brokenness to spread information about how dangerous brain injuries can be.
James Herling told NBC’s Lester Holt, “We knew we had to help other families, especially after we found out that Robbie’s brain had been damaged.”
The names of all 18 people killed in the shooting are also written on the walls of the Herlings’ house. NBC says that all 18 names are written on their land with blue hearts.
“I don’t ever want to talk about Robbie without acknowledging the pain that he’s caused to other people,” she said.
A Warfighter Brain Health Initiative was announced by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) in August. Its goal is to “identify and implement best practices to promote overall brain health and counter traumatic brain injury, including efforts to mitigate blast overpressure risks for service members.”
Lawyer Travis Brennan says that on Oct. 15, the families of 100 survivors and victims of the mass shooting on Oct. 25, 2023, sent a legal notice saying they wanted to sue the DOD, the Army, and Keller Army Community Hospital for “negligence in failing to respond to warning signs and an explicit threat to commit a mass shooting from Army Reserve Sergeant Robert Card.”
