MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Maine massacre perpetrator found dead

Sauschuck declined to answer questions about warnings police may have received about Card before the shootings

Authorities in the US State of Maine said that Robert Card, the alleged perpetrator of back-to-back shooting sprees late Wednesday that left 18 people dead and dozens wounded has been found dead, it was reported Friday.

“There is no longer any threat in Maine, as Card has been located and is deceased,” NBC Boston said. Card was found dead with a wound from a self-inflicted state, it was also explained. Card's body was found in woods near Lisbon, about eight miles from Lewiston, near a recycling center where he previously had worked.

“A tremendous amount of police personnel, time and effort is being devoted 24 hours a day to find the prime suspect,” Lewiston City Police Chief David St. Pierre told a news conference.

Maine Public Safety Commissioner Michael Sauschuck said that several teams were deployed by land, water, and air along the Androscoggin River in the towns of Lisbon and Lewinston, where the incidents took place and where a car presumably belonging to Card had been found.

On Wednesday night, residents of Lewiston, a town of 36,000 people, the second largest in Maine, were urged to stay in their homes as the armed and dangerous Card, 40, was said to be at large. Sauschuck had warned the population that Card was an Army reservist possibly capable of surviving on the run and remained a threat.

This new massacre, one of the deadliest since Las Vegas in 2017, adds to the long list of shootings in the United States, where laws allow easy gun purchases. The United States has more guns than inhabitants: one adult in three owns at least one gun and almost one adult in two lives in a house where there is a gun.

Suicides aside, over 15,000 people have been killed by gun violence this year nationwide, with 565 shootings in 10 months, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA).

Sauschuck declined to answer questions about warnings police may have received about Card before the shootings and whether they warranted triggering the state's yellow flag gun law which allows police to take guns from mentally ill or violent people.