Relatives of Maine Shooter Robert Card Describe Efforts to Get Him Psychiatric Help
“It’s on all of us to make sure the next time we need to get help for someone, we do better,” Cara Lamb, the gunman’s ex-wife, told the commission investigating the October mass shooting.Family members of the Army reservist who killed 18 people last fall in Lewiston, Maine, opened up on Thursday about their grief, remorse and anger in testimony before the commission investigating the shooting.Frequently struggling to maintain their composure, relatives of the gunman, Robert R. Card II, apologized to the families of his victims and shared wrenching accounts of the months leading up to the shooting, when they repeatedly tried to get help for the troubled 40-year-old as his mental health deteriorated.Nicole Herling, Mr. Card’s sister, addressed some of her most pointed remarks to the Army and Defense Department, calling for a clearer, more accessible system for families of military members to share concerns with their supervisors. Ms. Herling also said that the military should provide more education about the risk of brain injury to soldiers and reservists like her brother.Mr. Card, a longtime Army Reserve grenade instructor, was exposed to thousands of blasts in his years of training cadets; trauma detected in his brain by scientists after his death has raised questions about the effects of the repeated exposures on his mental health.“I brought the helmet that was meant to safeguard my brother’s brain,” Ms. Herling said on Thursday, placing a camouflage-patterned helmet on the table before her in a room on the University of Maine campus in Augusta. “To the Department of Defense: It failed.”In a statement, the Army said it was “committed to understanding how brain health is affected and to implementing evidence-based risk mitigation and treatment,” and that it was and that it was implementing new cognitive testing to detect changes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More