Outside the Windham Veterans Center on Friday afternoon, an honor guard prepared to memorialize a former Marine by firing blanks into the air from rifles in a traditional 21-gun salute.

More than 100 mourners and well-wishers joined them to send off Henry “Chuck” Whynot Jr., a veteran who had volunteered at the center for more than 15 years before his death in late July, according to building manager David Langway.

“We had just opened the door to go out into our memorial garden,” Langway said, noting it was sometime after 3 p.m. “That’s when we got a call.”

Just down the road, on the other side of the Windham Mall, a crime scene was turning into a manhunt that would trigger statewide emergency alerts and a local shelter-in-place order that lasted roughly three hours. An officer at the Windham Police Department called the center, asking that they skip the ceremonial gunshots and usher the crowd back indoors.

Langway said he understood that the sound of shots during a shelter-in-place order would “just make a bad situation worse,” but losing that moment still stung — even if they still got to hear a bugled “Taps” echo off the community center walls.

“The last 10 minutes is almost the most important part of it all,” Langway said. “Chuck kind of got robbed of that.”

Langway said his team always alerts law enforcement before they plan to fire any shots, and the two groups have a strong relationship with open communication. That came as a benefit Friday: those at the center heard about the lockdown before many others. They were already inside by the time the statewide phone alert to shelter in place was issued.

But not everyone in the area received such a clear message.

MIXED MESSAGES

As police searched for the gunman, businesses along Roosevelt Trail, the town’s central commercial strip, scrambled to lock their doors. Some workers said they received unclear or misleading information from law enforcement officials, relying instead on rumors passed from business to business.

Traci Wyman, general manager of Smitty’s Cinema in the Windham Mall, said she first heard about the incident Friday from one of her young employees, who had just gotten a call from her mother describing an active shooter at the nearby Hannaford Supermarket at about 2 p.m. That tip turned out to be false.

The movie theater is fully contained within the mall, so workers inside could not see the situation on the street, leaving them reliant on word-of-mouth and public announcements, Wyman said. About 20 people were inside, including couples and families with children.

“I immediately locked our front doors,” Wyman said on a phone call Monday afternoon. Then she called 911, where a dispatcher confirmed that there had been a shooting, but told her the situation was “contained.”

“And I said ‘We’re good?’ And he was like ‘Yeah, you’re good,’ ” Wyman said. “So I went and unlocked my doors and told everyone they could back about their day.”

Around 3:30 p.m., Wyman heard — again via social media and messages to teenage employees — that several nearby stores were locked down. She locked the doors for a second time. Her young employees called their parents, but few seemed especially fearful, Wyman said.

The official word from police came nearly an hour later, in the form of an alert to mobile phones statewide.

“Shelter indoors, lock doors,” the message read. “Stay inside.”

For more than two hours, she and her staff waited for an update. Wyman called 911 several times, but dispatchers she reached had no updates to offer.

“I think it was just the miscommunication that was the hardest part,” Wyman said. “The whole situation was scary to begin with. But probably more so after the alert came out.”

Windham Police Chief Kevin Schofield said it can be difficult for law enforcement to offer, or even know, all the details as a potentially dangerous scene unfolds. He declined to comment on the actions of dispatchers, who are not department employees, but said the department was juggling dozens of calls that each offered different details and attempting to contain an actively expanding crime scene.

Schofield said the shooting — on a busy road on a busy Friday afternoon — came as emergency crews were handling a fire elsewhere in town.

“That is an extremely logistically challenging series of events to manage,” he said. “So sometimes it may be hard to make all the verbal and/or other forms of notification that we would like to do.”

Late Friday, officials announced that the gunman had been located. The next day they said he had died of an apparent suicide.

PLANNING AHEAD

While many businesses in the lockdown zone closed early, they did not all do so at the same time.

Ronin Campbell, 24, said it took a few hours for his supervisors at Luchador Tacos to give the shut-down order. At around 4:40 p.m., having seen the police presence down the street grow for hours, Campbell and a co-worker took down the “open” sign and turned off the lights, he said.

Campbell said the restaurant did not have a clear plan for emergencies like this one, and communication with higher-ups felt disjointed as they attempted to piece together what limited information was available before the statewide alert.

“Because it was such a drastic situation, but also something that happened so quickly, it was difficult for us to get communication to go back and forth super quickly, he said. “And we needed to make sure that that happened.”

In the days since, Campbell said his supervisors reached out to discuss his experience and begin drafting a comprehensive emergency response plan.

Wyman, the manager at the theater, said she also reached out to Albert Waitt, president of operations at Smitty’s Entertainment Group, about making sure employees and management know the protocol if a similar incident comes up.

Waitt said he had already been wondering whether the company’s active shooter protocol needed an update. He said they offered training to management staff in the aftermath of the 2023 Lewiston mass shooting.

“But that was a while ago,” he said. “And I think there’s probably a need to redo that, unfortunately.”