Mental health ‘clearly’ a factor in Maine mass shootings, official says

globalnews.ca:

killing eight people and wounding 13 others in two separate shootings in Maine, was likely experiencing a mental health crisis and did not expect to be found alive following his rampage.In a press conference Saturday, Maine Department of Public Safety Commissioner Mike Sauschuck said there were still questions around the motive of Card’s Lewiston shootings.“Clearly, there’s a mental health component to this,” Sauschuck said.“There’s a piece of that where there’s paranoia, there is some conspiracy theorists piece that, I think that what I’ve read and what I’ve seen is that the individual felt like people were talking about him.”The discovery of Card’s body Friday brought an end to an extensive manhunt just over 48 hours after it began.

Hundreds of officers had been combing Lewiston and the surrounding area, which lies three-and-a-half hours from the Canadian border, putting residents on lockdown and on edge.Authorities had scoured the woods and hundreds of acres of family-owned property, sent dive teams with sonar to the bottom of a river and scrutinized a note in Card’s residence, which included a passcode to his phone and bank information.Sauschuck addressed the note Saturday, saying he wouldn’t describe it “as an explicit suicide note, but the tone and tenor was that the individual was not going to be around and wanted to make sure that this loved one had access to his phone and whatever was in his phone.”He added: “Just because there appears to be a mental health nexus to this scenario, the vast, vast, vast majority of people… with a mental health diagnosis will never hurt anybody.”Police found Card deceased by a “self-inflicted gunshot wound” in a trailer at the Maine Recycling Corporation, he said, along with “a