Amanda Plummer was driving home from a restaurant in Lewiston, Maine, on Wednesday evening when the street was suddenly filled with police cars and ambulances near Schemengees Bar and Grille.

Plummer first thought there had been a bad traffic accident. But then her sister started frantically texting, telling her a mass killer was on the loose after a shooting rampage at Schemengees and a nearby bowling alley.

“I was a nervous wreck,” said Plummer, 43, a dental assistant.

It took her 90 minutes to finally reach her home in Lisbon, normally a 25-minute drive. Once there, she, her husband and their 22-year-old son loaded two AR-15s and three other guns and sat on the porch until late into the night, facing the long dirt driveway to their home on 17 acres of wooded land.

“If we heard anything, we were ready,” said Plummer, who finally went to bed at about 4 a.m.

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For more than 24 hours on Wednesday and Thursday, much of mid-coast Maine was gripped by the drama of a massive manhunt for Robert Card, a U.S. Army reservist charged in the nation’s deadliest mass killing of 2023. Authorities said 18 people had been killed and 13 were wounded.

Residents were ordered to shelter in place. Businesses, offices and schools were closed as far away as Rockland, about 70 miles to the east. Hannaford, a popular grocery chain, shut down all its stores across the state Thursday morning. Even L.L. Bean, the outdoor outfitter based 20 miles to the south of Lewiston, in Freeport, shut down on Thursday. It marked just the sixth closure since the company began operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year in 1951, company officials said.

At Bates College, one of Lewiston’s best-known institutions, classes were canceled through Friday and students were ordered to shelter in place. President Garry W. Jenkins issued a statement saying that “one college employee was present at one of the shooting locations and was injured, but is expected to make a full recovery.”

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Jenkins had been scheduled to be formally inaugurated as Bates’s first Black president on Friday; the ceremony was postponed because of the shooting.

“May we continue to seek and find strength in one another as we work through the fallout from this horrifying act of violence,” Jenkins wrote.

Classes were also canceled at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, 20 miles away.

Lewiston, Maine’s second-largest city, with a population of about 38,000, issued shelter-in-place orders, as did other communities across the region.

Downtown Lewiston was virtually empty for much of Thursday except for police from as far away as Rhode Island and New York.

Mainers interviewed said they responded as Plummer had — with a mixture of jitters and stoicism. Some were well-armed. Maine has one of the nation’s lowest crime rates, along with gun-friendly laws that allow adults to carry concealed firearms without a permit.

Near Bowdoin, a rural town where Card lived that’s 15 miles from Lewiston, school bus driver John Johnson, 60, stood outside his home Thursday morning with a loaded Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle and looked out on the quiet stretch of road that leads to his driveway.

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“It’s the most reviled weapon in America because it works,” Johnson said.

He’d just walked the perimeter of his property and found no trace of a shooter on the run.

“There’s some big pieces of woods out here,” Johnson said. “But this is all I can do. I can’t sit inside with my wife all day.”

Robert McCarthy, 66, a Lewiston City Council member who lives less than a mile from the bowling alley, said on Thursday morning that he couldn’t sleep. He locked his doors as authorities urged people to stay home, and switched on his exterior lights.

“I got my wife’s guns,” he said, “and prepared for the worst.”

Violent crime is rare in Lewiston; residents said the city had never felt as it did starting Wednesday night and throughout Thursday. Maine counted 17 firearm homicides in the entirety of 2021, according to a crime snapshot the state published in February.

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“Once the death total is settled,” McCarthy said, “it could equal what normally happens in the whole state over a year.”

Barbara McNaught works in Bowdoin and lives nearby. The excavation business where she works was open Thursday, but only for out-of-town deliveries. The suspect’s car had been found abandoned at a nearby boat launch.

“It’s a very nerve-racking day here in Bowdoin,” McNaught said. “They’re searching the area today, and it’s eerie. … His car was found seven miles from where I live. I did not sleep very well.”

McNaught said the town had not felt so empty and quiet since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic: “We all feel sort of alone, it’s so empty in town and on the roads.”

McNaught said her daughter graduated in 2001 from Mount Ararat High School in the same class as Robert Card.

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“Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who was affected,” she said. “That’s the kind of community we have, that’s what the state of Maine is. You can go deep into the woods for a vacation, and you’ll still find somebody you know.”

In Lisbon, Plummer’s parents, Bob and Aline Strout, live less than a half-mile from the boat landing on the Androscoggin River where Card’s car was found abandoned overnight.

On Thursday, police blocked off a quarter-mile of road, including where the Strouts live, as tactical teams swept cordoned-off neighborhoods and searched the river and the trails along its banks.

The Strouts, 65 and 62, locked doors, closed windows and turned off lights in the six-unit apartment building they own and manage.

“We have a young teacher upstairs, and her mother stayed with her all night just being concerned for her,” Bob Strout said. “We were all trying to take care of each other.”

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For most of Wednesday night, one of their tenants stood in the backyard with a gun, watching for the fugitive shooter. “He was locked and loaded, covering our butts,” Bob Strout said.

The manhunt reminded Strout of the police search after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. For several days, a large swath of greater Boston was locked down as police searched for two suspects in the attack, shooting one and eventually locating the second hiding in a boat stored in a suburban backyard.

Stout said on he ventured into his backyard Thursday and made a quick inspection of his garden shed and his workshop. He found nothing.

“We’re trying to be like Boston and be strong,” Strout said.

The Lewiston shootings hit close to home for Plummer and the Strouts. Plummer’s 16-year-old cousin, Gavin Robitaille, was in the Just-In-Time Recreation bowling alley with his mother and his 12-year-old brother when the shooter started firing. Gavin was hit in the arm, with bone shattering in two places.

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He was taken to the hospital and the family called the boy’s father, who happened to be playing pool at Schemengees. The father rushed to the hospital. Within minutes, the shooter entered the bar and began killing people.

“At a loss for words for how much it hurts to lose some good friends to this needless tragedy,” Gavin’s father, Jeff Robitaille, posted on Facebook on Thursday evening. “We were lucky and unlucky. Had Molly not called me … I may not be here to post this and take care of our family.”

Jeff Robitaille wrote that his own father survived the shooting by crawling under a pool table to hide. He said Gavin was undergoing reconstructive surgery on his arm.

“God was looking over their family,” Plummer said. “It’s like his son had to get shot to potentially save his father’s life. I mean, it was just unbelievable.”

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Strout said he and his neighbors decided to fly their flags at full staff on Thursday as a sign of patriotism and defiance against the shooting.

“Everybody’s praying a little harder and getting a little more patriotic,” Strout said. “We all get a little closer and put politics aside, and we kind of we look out for one another.”

Klemko reported from Lewiston and Lisbon, Maine. Danielle Paquette in Washington and Lori Rozsa in West Palm Beach, Fla., contributed to this report.

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