The bowling alley in southwestern Maine where a former army reservist shot eight people dead before also fatally shooting 10 others at a nearby bar last October in the state’s deadliest mass shooting reopened Friday, according to the Associated Press (AP).
“I’m excited about opening,” Samantha Juray, co-owner of the bowling alley, Just-In-Time Recreation in Lewiston, told the AP, according to the outlet’s video report. “I know it’s definitely going to be a very long day and probably a good emotional day, but I think that we are fully ready — I know that we are fully ready to get open back up and see familiar faces and just get back to our new normal.”
Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline attended the reopening ceremony. “This is us standing back up again,” he said at the event, according to the AP. “With all of you here, it’s very clear: Lewiston can never be kept down.”
AP’s video report showed the bowling alley filled with patrons during the reopening and memorial bowling pins bearing the names of the 18 victims. (RELATED: Here’s What We Know About The Suspected Maine Shooter)
“When I walked in, I came back up this way, that’s when I saw all the commotion and I heard the gunfire and I realized it was real. And the kids were running down this lane here,” Tom Giberti, a worker at the bowling alley and survivor of the mass shooting, recalled the tragic incident while speaking with AP. “And when I went up, I got the kids in front of me and I helped them to their doorway and as I was going to go through the doorway is [sic] when I was shot.”
Giberti praised the community for supporting survivors like him and working to make the reopening happen.
“It’s never gonna leave my head,” Juray said, before trailing off, on the edge of tears. “I think that if we just don’t move forward, then there’s — not that there’s a point to this whole thing anyways but that we’re just going to allow people that have taken so much from us win.”
Robert Card, the gunman during the Oct. 25, 2023 mass shooting that killed 18 and injured 13, was a sergeant first class in the Army who served as a petroleum supply specialist with the Army Reserve. Recognized for his services, he however reportedly struggled with mental illness. He once reportedly told law enforcement agents who came to take him to Keller Army Community Hospital in West Point, New York for mental evaluation that he was hearing different people say degrading things about him. He added that his close colleagues — one of whom reportedly feared Card could “snap and do a mass shooting” — were not concerned about him but rather were “scared, because I’m gonna freaking do something, because I’m capable.” When pressed about that comment, he said it meant nothing.
Card apparently shot himself dead after the mass shooting, aged 40.