An Army reservist warned a training supervisor that the man who shot more than two dozen people late last month in Lewiston, Maine, was having serious mental health issues and that he could snap and go on a shooting spree.
Law enforcement officials in Maine found the 40-year-old shooter dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound a couple days after he murdered 18 people and injured more than a dozen after he opened fire at two locations.
ABC News reported late this week that the shooter, who The Daily Wire is not naming due to company policy about not giving notoriety to mass killers, scared a fellow Army reservist so much that the reservist warned Army reserve training supervisor Kelvin L. Mote back in September that the passcode to the unit gate needed to be changed and that he needed to be armed if the shooter showed up.
“Please. I believe he’s messed up in the head,” the reservist texted Mote, adding that the shooter might “threaten the unit” and “other places.”
“I love [him] to death but i do not know how to help him and he refuses to get help or continue help,” the texts said. “I’m afraid he’s going to [expletive] up his life from hearing things he thinks he heard.”
“And yes he still has all of his weapons,” the texts added. “I believe he’s going to snap and do a mass shooting.”
Mote later contacted local law enforcement to conduct a welfare check on the shooter and Mote noted that the shooter had been “hearing voices” and that his mental health had “only gotten worse.”
The shooter had mental health issues that included “hearing voices and threats to shoot up the National Guard Base in Saco, ME,” a law enforcement bulletin said. “[The shooter] was also reported to have been committed to mental health facility for two weeks during summer 2023 and subsequently released.”
After his involuntary psychiatric commitment in July, the Army “decided he shouldn’t have a weapon, handle ammunition or ‘participate in live fire activity,'” according to a report from CBS News.
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The fact that the suspect was committed to a mental health facility for a period of weeks indicates that it was an involuntary commitment, which means that he would have been banned from owning or possessing firearms.
The ATF states: “Any person who has been ‘adjudicated as a mental defective’ or ‘committed to a mental institution’ is prohibited under Federal law from shipping, transporting, receiving, or possessing any firearm or ammunition.”