A video released Thursday shows New York State Police officers trying and failing to convince Robert Card that people aren’t insulting him behind his back before they take him for a psychiatric evaluation at an Army hospital.
Robert Card
In the 15-minute clip from July 16, which was obtained and published by television station WMTW, Card tells officers that “everywhere” he goes, people accuse him of being a pedophile or gay, and he warns he’s “going to frigging do something.”
“I am capable,” he says.
The footage, the first of Card that police have made public, aligns with reports released by the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office and confirmed by an Army spokesperson days after Card killed 18 people and injured 13 others at two locations in Lewiston on Oct. 25.
According to the sheriff’s office’s reports, Card’s ex-wife and son reported in May that he had grown increasingly paranoid since the start of 2023. He was obsessed with the idea that people around him were calling him a pedophile behind his back and refused to believe friends and family members who promised that no one had said anything.
While at his annual training with his Army Reserve Unit in New York in July, Card became physically aggressive and accused others of calling him a pedophile, Cpl. Kelvin Mote later wrote in a letter to the sheriff’s department. On the ride home from the convenience store where the incident occurred, Card repeatedly said “he would take care of it” but wouldn’t elaborate on what he meant.
Mote said Card continued to act paranoid the next day, which prompted the police check-in shown in the video.
The footage shows officers attempting to convince Card that it doesn’t make sense that his friends would say insulting things about him. They reference his new hearing aids, which Card said he got a few months after he started hearing voices.
Card, dressed in gym shorts and an Army T-shirt, appears relatively calm throughout the video. But while he agrees to go to the hospital because that’s what his commanding officer ordered, he is adamant that counseling won’t help him.
“I’m pretty invisible until all of a sudden everyone knows who I am,” he says. “It’s happening everywhere. I quit my job, went to a different place to try to leave it. And it’s there.”
It remains unclear exactly what steps the Army took to get Card help after a Sagadahoc deputy reported his declining mental health in May. An Army spokesperson confirmed that Card spent two weeks in a New York psychiatric hospital following his encounter with New York state troopers. The spokesperson said Army medical staff made “multiple attempts” to contact Card over the next several months but has not confirmed whether they ever reached him or provided him help.
In September, after Card told a friend and fellow unit member that he planned to shoot up the Army Reserve base in Saco, the unit’s leadership asked Sagadahoc County deputies to check on him.
“The only thing I would ask is if you could just document it,” Army Reserve Capt. Jeremy Reamer said to a Sagadahoc deputy after Card refused to answer his door. “Just to say he was there, he was uncooperative, but we confirmed that he was alive and breathing. That’s kind of from our end here all we’re really looking for.”
The Lewiston shooting has asked members of the Army to testify at a public hearing, but the invitation has not yet been accepted.
Card purchased the Ruger SFAR .308 caliber rifle he used in the Lewiston shooting only 10 days before the date of the video, state police said Thursday.
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