State Police say report about Lewiston shooter at shooting range before mass shooting was false

The man who told police he was at a shooting range with Robert Card hours before the Lewiston shooting was lying, a police spokesman confirmed Monday afternoon.

One of 3,000 pages of police documents released Friday contained what appeared to be a striking new detail in a case that has captured public attention for months: Card had scared a friend with his strange behavior at a beer stand. shot just hours before opening fire. at Just-in-Time Recreation on Oct. 25, according to an undated FBI bulletin.

But police say that never happened.

The shooting range clue, which the Press Herald and other media outlets highlighted in their coverage of Friday's release of the document, was an invention of a man who later admitted lying to police, said Department of Public Safety spokesperson Shannon Moss on Monday.

The documents released Friday include multiple references to one or more people making false statements to police during the 48-hour hunt for Card, but their identities and many details of what they told authorities were redacted, making it impossible to know if the files refer to the same individual or multiple fake tipsters.

According to a report written by Detective Ethel Ross, police spent several hours on October 26 and 27 interviewing a man who claimed to have been with Card immediately before the shooting and to have fled once the violence began. When the man suggested he knew where Card might be hiding, police sent a tactical team to search the area.

It wasn't until 4 p.m. on October 27 that Ross said he learned the source “had lied and made up the story about accompanying Card right before the incident.”

Moss said Monday that the man who lied to police was behind the shooting range story. She declined to answer questions about the man's identity, but confirmed he was never charged with a crime for carjacking police.

Sean Hodgson, who was among Card's closest friends, said Monday that the information seemed strange.

“It makes no sense that he was with anyone else at target practice because he pushed everyone away, including me,” he said. “There was a tree on his lawn that he shot at regularly and the only place he would have shot at long range was his father’s property.”

The man whose false information was included in the FBI bulletin was the same unreliable source that state police officials spoke about before the commission investigating the shooting in February, Moss said. At that Feb. 15 public hearing, Sgt. Chris Farley said police received a tip that the man was claiming on social media that he had helped Robert Card. After initially lying to police who questioned him, the man later admitted that he had nothing to do with the shooting and that he had not been around Card.

“We had to follow through on it because we wanted to make sure there was only one actor,” Farley told the commission. “We were convinced that this was just someone who wanted to get involved in the investigation.”

Police said combating misinformation was a challenge during the chaos of the manhunt. In addition to the handful of people who lied to authorities, hundreds more came forward with honest advice that went nowhere.

Susan Sharon, Maine's deputy director of public information, contributed to this report.

This story is part of an ongoing collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and Maine Public that includes an upcoming documentary. It is supported by FRONTLINE's Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

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