A specialized lab that examined the brain of the gunman who carried out Maine’s deadliest mass shooting found deep brain damage similar to that seen in veterans exposed to repeated blasts from gun use.
The lab’s findings were included in an autopsy report prepared by the Maine Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and released by the gunman’s family.
The gunman, Robert Card, was a grenade instructor in the Army Reserve. In 2023, after eight years of exposure to thousands of skull-shattering blasts on the training ground, he began hearing voices and was haunted by paranoid delusions, his family said. He became increasingly volatile and violent in the months before the October rampage in Lewiston, in which he killed 18 people and then himself.
His brain was sent to a veterans affairs lab in Boston known for its pioneering work documenting chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in athletes.
According to the lab’s report, drawn up on February 26 and updated on Wednesday, the white matter that forms the wiring deep in the brain was “moderately severe” damaged and in some areas was completely missing. The delicate tissue sheaths that insulate each biological circuit were in “disorganized clumps” and all over Mr Card’s brain there was scarring and inflammation suggesting repeated trauma.
This was not CTE, the report said. It was a typical pattern of damage previously found in military veterans who had been repeatedly exposed to weapon blasts during their service.
“While it is unclear whether these pathological findings are responsible for Mr. Card’s behavioral changes in the last 10 months of his life, based on our previous studies it is likely that the brain injury played a role in his symptoms,” the report concluded.
The findings have serious implications for the military because Mr. Card had never seen combat and had never been exposed to blasts from enemy fire or roadside bombs. The only blasts that hit his brain came from training that the military said was safe.
“We know very little about the risks of exposure to blasts,” said Dr Ann McKee, who leads the lab and signed the report. “I think these results should be a warning. We need to do more research.”
Congress has been pushing the military in recent years to investigate whether blasts from repeated rounds of heavy weapons cause brain damage, but the military has moved at a halting pace that has yielded little change in the field.
Soldiers like Mr. Card are still exposed to large numbers of explosions from grenades, mortars, cannons and rocket launchers during training every day. And current Pentagon guidelines say that absorbing thousands of grenade blasts, as Mr. Card did during his career, poses no risk to troops’ brains.
In a statement Wednesday, the military said it had issued recommendations in recent months to reduce exposure to explosives in combat units. “The Army is committed to understanding, mitigating, accurately diagnosing and responding in a timely manner to blast overpressure and its effects in all forms,” the statement said. “While prolonged exposure to explosives can be potentially dangerous, even if encountered on the training ground rather than on the battlefield, there is still much to learn.”
For much of his life, Robert Card was a quiet, friendly, reliable man with no history of causing trouble, his family said. He grew up on his family’s dairy farm in Bowdoin, Maine, and drove a delivery truck for work. He enjoyed fishing at local lakes with his son and often took his nieces and nephews along.
“He was always there to do chores on the farm, there for the kids and Sunday dinner,” his sister, Nicole Herling, said in an interview.
Mr. Card joined the Army Reserve in 2002 and for his first 12 years in the service was an oil supply specialist. In 2014, he was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 304th Regiment, a training unit based in Saco, Maine.
Each summer, his platoon of the 3rd Battalion conducted a two-week field course for cadets from the US Military Academy West Point, teaching them to use rifles, machine guns and shoulder-mounted anti-tank weapons. Soldiers said that during the march, Mr. Card spent most of his time at the grenade range. Each of the 1,200 cadets had to throw at least one grenade. most dropped two. Troopers said that over the years, Mr. Card could easily have been exposed to more than 10,000 blasts.
The Department of Defense has a list of 14 weapons that, in normal use, release an explosion powerful enough to be potentially dangerous to the troops using them. Grenades are not listed. Soldiers in Mr Card’s platoon said they had not been briefed on the dangers of repeated exposure.
In 2022, Mr. Card began to lose his hearing. His family noticed that he was becoming sullen and short-tempered. In the spring of 2023, he began to believe that people at a local market and the bar where he liked to play stilettos were talking about him behind his back and calling him a pedophile. He also started losing weight rapidly.
His brothers and sister tried to intervene several times, encouraging him to see a doctor. At one point, his sister called a veterans crisis line. But Mr. Card pushed his relatives away, they said, and accused them of conspiring against him.
In July, the army committed Mr Card to a psychiatric hospital for two weeks after he complained of hearing voices and making threats against colleagues. Doctors at the hospital prescribed him lithium, his sister said, but he was not evaluated for a traumatic brain injury. When he got out of the hospital, he stopped taking the medicine.
Mr Card had a series of other angry and violent interactions in the months that followed. One day, his mother came home to find him crying on her front porch over his delusions that people were talking about him.
He lost his job driving a recycling truck. Police came to his parents’ home in September, warning that he was making threats against soldiers in his Army unit. Mr Card’s brother and father both tried to take his guns from him, but he became angry and told them to get off his property.
A few weeks later, when local news reported that a man had opened fire at a bar and bowling alley in Lewiston, Mr. Card’s siblings saw the video and recognized their brother.
As the state of Maine agonized over the loss of life and disputed the missed warning signs, Mr. Card’s brain was sent to Boston, where researchers examined thin sections of tissue.
“The damage was just massive,” said Dr. Lee Goldstein, a professor of neurology at Boston University, who analyzed Mr. Card’s brain tissue under an electron microscope.
The long, thin, wire-like cells called axons that pass messages deep into the brain were tattered, Dr. Goldstein said in an interview. “I see wires that have lost their protective sheath, wires that are just missing, wires that are inflamed and diseased, wires that are basically filled with honeycomb garbage bags,” he said. “These wires control how one part of the brain communicates with another. If they are damaged, you cannot function properly.”
The findings are not the first indication that the military has addressed the potential risk of repeated explosions in grenade trainers.
In 2015 and 2017, Army research teams investigated reports from instructors in Georgia and South Carolina complaining of headaches, fatigue, memory problems and confusion. The Army collected counts of grenade explosions, but did not take widespread action to limit exposure to explosions.
Similar concerns were raised at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri in 2020. A small study funded by the Army examined the brains of new grenade and explosives trainers using PET scans. The researchers found that before dealing with the blasts, the trainers’ brains appeared healthy. But in follow-up scans five months later, their brains were filled with an abnormal protein called beta amyloid that is associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
“In a young brain you shouldn’t see amyloid. No one. Zero,” said Dr. Carlos Leiva-Salinas, the University of Missouri neuroradiologist who conducted the study. “We were surprised, very surprised.”
Mr Card’s sister said the analysis of his brain, which the family learned about on Friday, changed the way the family saw the shooting and their brother.
“He allowed me to forgive him,” he said. “I know a lot of people are hurting a lot,” he added. “Maybe we can use what happened to help other people.”
In a statement Wednesday, the family wrote: “We want to start by saying how deeply sorry and sorry we are for all the victims, survivors and their loved ones, and for everyone in Maine and beyond who was affected and hurt by this tragedy. .”
“While we cannot go back,” the statement continued, “we are publishing the findings of Robert’s brain study with the goal of supporting ongoing efforts to learn from this tragedy to ensure it never happens again.”
