Grieving and angry, Maine residents demand change after mass killing

By Danielle Paquette, The Washington PostNancy Pettegrow walks her dog in Lewiston, Maine, where last week a gunman fatally shot 18 people in the deadliest mass killing in the state's history.

They’re calling for accessible mental health care, restrictions on firearms and more aggressive law enforcement action when a person with access to weapons is exhibiting psychosis. They’re angry that this city of 38,000 has become yet another place devastated by bullets in a country suffering an unrelenting wave of killings. They want to see change - real change, and quickly.

From his yard in rural Bowdoin — a 25-minute drive southeast from Lewiston — he could see the dairy farm where, as a boy, Card stayed busy with chores before moving into his own trailer down the narrow country road. Her daughter, a psychiatric nurse in New Hampshire, works late shifts helping people who have sometimes lost touch with reality and tried to attack her. She earns barely enough to pay the rent and waits tables on the side.

Jenny Coffey, manager of 207THC in downtown Lewiston, was troubled after learning the gunman had been released after a two-week stay this summer in a mental health facility. The 32-year-old substitute teacher, a fifth-generation resident, had meant Lewiston’s lackluster tax base, among other issues. Now he struggled to find the right words ahead of the election Tuesday.

“If we can figure out how to make the changes we need here,” he said, “then maybe we can fix America.”“There are bad eggs in town,” the retired real estate investor, 69, told another patron, “and what are you going to do?”

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