In This Small Maine County, the Sheriff’s Race Is Haunted by a Mass Shooting

The race has become a referendum on what the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office did, and failed to do, before a shooting that killed 18 people in Lewiston last fall.

In an alternate reality — one in which a mentally unstable gunman did not kill 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, last October — the biggest issue in the race for Sagadahoc County sheriff this fall might have been the budget for the county jail.

Instead, the contest has become a referendum on the actions taken, and not taken, by the sheriff’s office in the run-up to the worst mass shooting in Maine’s history, and a study in the complexities of blame. The incumbent sheriff, Joel Merry, 66, is running for a fifth term, undeterred by the harsh criticism lobbed at his office for failing to seize a stash of weapons from the gunman — who lived in Sagadahoc County — as concerns about him mounted last fall.

His challenger, Sgt. Aaron Skolfield, a 26-year veteran of the same department, was singled out for particular rebuke by the state commission that investigated the shooting. Sergeant Skolfield has turned his campaign into a public crusade to clear his name, and to call out what he sees as unfair scapegoating.

For some voters in the county, the race is an uncomfortable reminder of all that has not changed in the last year — and of all the grief and blame that remains.

Sheriff Merry, who has defended his agency against the criticism, said he was seeking one last term to finish several projects that he hoped would strengthen it. He acknowledged that the election and the mass shooting could not be separated, though he maintained that they should be.

His opponent has also given up on that idea. For Sergeant Skolfield, 52, running for sheriff and defending his actions in the weeks before the shooting have merged into a single quest to reclaim his reputation from disgrace.

“People have told me to back off of this, to talk about my goals for the department, but it’s so entwined,” he said. “I think about it every day. I deal with it every day.”

The rural county, which has about 37,000 residents, sits along the coast, north of Portland and south of Lewiston. Its crime rates are low and most of its small towns have no police forces, giving the sheriff’s department of 22 officers an outsize role. Responding to mental health crises is a significant part of their job.

Last fall, Robert R. Card II was in need of such an intervention. A 40-year-old Army Reserve grenade instructor who lived in Bowdoin, 15 miles east of Lewiston, he had been hearing voices and making threats. His family was concerned and so were his Army supervisors, who sent him for a mental health evaluation last summer that led to a two-week stay in a psychiatric hospital.

When he was released that August, clinicians urged the Army to make sure he continued treatment and to take away his weapons, but follow-through was incomplete and unsuccessful. His deterioration continued. After a fellow reservist told his superiors he feared that Mr. Card “might snap and do a mass shooting,” the Army Reserve contacted the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office on Sept. 15, asking it to check on him.

The task fell to Sergeant Skolfield. He tried to make contact with Mr. Card at his home that day, and again the day after, but no one answered the door. He sent out a statewide alert to law enforcement about Mr. Card, tried calling him and contacted his family. When Sergeant Skolfield went on vacation the next day, his supervisor did not assign another deputy to take over.

When Sergeant Skolfield returned to work on Oct. 1, he closed the case.

On Oct. 25, 2023, Mr. Card shot and killed 18 people, and wounded 13 others, at a bar and bowling alley in Lewiston. After a two-day manhunt, he was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

In the year since, the state commission investigating the shooting found that both the Army Reserve and the sheriff’s office had failed to take all of the steps they should have.

Commission members, appointed by Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, found that Sergeant Skolfield “should have realized” that he could have used Maine’s “yellow flag” law to ask a judge’s permission to seize Mr. Card’s weapons.

Members of the commission called it an “abdication of responsibility” that Sergeant Skolfield, like the Army Reserve, reached out to the gunman’s brother after failing to make contact and asked that the family take away his weapons. They were unable to do so.

Sergeant Skolfield is still angry at the commission’s findings. He maintains that he did not have legal grounds to petition for the removal of a private citizen’s weapons under state law at the time. And he said the commission had failed to grasp the extent to which Army Reserve officials minimized their concern about the gunman; according to Sergeant Skolfield, they insinuated to him that Mr. Card’s reported threats had come from an unreliable source and said that letting him “cool off” might be the best course of action.

“All they had to say to me was, ‘This is the real deal — we’re worried,’” Sergeant Skolfield said in an interview last month. “That would have changed everything.”

An Army investigation into the shooting found that Army Reserve commanders had failed to follow procedures; three were given administrative punishments.

Sergeant Skolfield said he had long feared that the state commission’s investigation was stacked against him, in part because its reports inaccurately described his visit to Mr. Card’s home as 16 minutes long when he lingered there for more than two hours, hoping to make contact. He said he was nonetheless surprised when Governor Mills, a Democrat, directly addressed Sagadahoc County voters during a news conference on Sept. 6, urging them to fulfill their “duty to hold public officers accountable” and seeming to imply that they should vote against him.

“It was totally political,” said Sergeant Skolfield, who is running as a Republican. He posted a detailed rebuttal on his campaign’s Facebook page.

Sheriff Merry, a Democrat, was not much happier about the governor’s comments. “It was a little disheartening because it put our agency front and center with that notoriety again,” he said.

The two men said they reconsidered running for sheriff after the shooting but were urged by supporters to persist.

Whatever the election outcome, Sergeant Skolfield does not expect it to lift the weight he carries. “It’s always going to be there,” he said.

In interviews outside a grocery store in Topsham, several voters said they believed firmly that the sheriff’s office and the Army had both failed in the run-up to the shooting.

Hope Shaw, 50, of Topsham, said that she would reflect on her options and vote for the candidate she believed was “the lesser of two evils.”

Bill Small, 69, of Bowdoinham, strained to find another option.

“I could do a write-in candidate,” he mused. “But who?”

Both Sheriff Merry and Sergeant Skolfield said that changes made to Maine’s “yellow flag” law after the shooting had made it easier to use.

The law, which took effect in 2020, had never been used in Sagadahoc County before the Lewiston shooting. In the 11 months after the killings, the sheriff’s office used it 17 times for cases including a suicidal 17-year-old girl and an 83-year-old man threatening to shoot his wife.

“I’ve told them, if it looks like a threat, do it — I don’t care what the cost is,” Sheriff Merry said, referring to his officers. “We’re not taking any chances.”

Statewide, the law’s use increased more than tenfold after the shooting.

“Nobody wants to be —” Sheriff Merry paused, looking pained. Then he pointed a finger at himself.