Several police officers responding to the Maine mass shooting last year may have been drunk, according to an internal report.
The report details an incident in which a Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office tactical vehicle nearly struck Portland Police Department officers during the chaotic search for gunman Robert Card.
Portland police tactical team leader Nicholas Goodman said he noted the “smell of intoxicants” when Cumberland County cops stepped out of the vehicle, according to the after-action report obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.
Goodman said he asked the other cops if they’d been drinking, and they said only that they were coming from a funeral.
Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce slammed any allegation that his officers had been drinking. He said an internal investigation cleared all the cops and their supervisors.
Portland police were set up on a bridge near the Androscoggin River when the Cumberland County tactical vehicle nearly hit them, according to the report. They were blocking a road near Card’s abandoned vehicle.
After fatally shooting 18 people and wounding 13 others on Oct. 25, 2023 in Lewiston, Card fled and sparked a massive manhunt across the state. He was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound two days later.
The after-action report was strongly critical of cops throughout Maine who “self-dispatched” themselves to aid the search for Card.
“I have never seen the amount of self-dispatching, federal involvement with plain clothes and utter chaos with self-dispatching in my career,” Goodman wrote in the report. He said plainclothes officers easily could’ve been mistaken for the suspect and shot.
An independent commission set up to investigate the Lewiston shooting said it will examine the after-action report at a meeting scheduled for Friday.
With News Wire Services
