20 April 23
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Sagadahoc County Sheriff Joel Merry said the department was notified of a shooting inside the home at 1459 Augusta Road, which also is known as Route 201, around 9:20 a.m. A relative of the victims discovered the four bodies and notified another relative, who then notified authorities. The state medical examiner in Augusta will perform autopsies to determine the manner and cause of death. Shortly after police discovered the bodies in Bowdoin, three people were wounded when several cars were shot at on I-295 south near mile marker 17 and Exit 15 in Yarmouth, police said.
That, you must admit, is a full morning. A 34-year old guy named Joseph Eaton already is in custody.
Eaton is currently the lone suspect in both the Bowdoin and Yarmouth shootings, police said. Officials have not identified any of the victims. Ian Halsey of Bowdoinham said two of the Yarmouth victims, both adults, were his cousins, but he declined to identify them. “My cousin is in critical condition and my other cousin is stable. There is no connection between the victims. It was random that my family was shot at,” Halsey said.
There's always something hinky about the early hours after one of these episodes, but a suspect in a quadruple murder stopping in flight to allegedly take potshots at random motorists on the highway seems like a genuinely weird development. But the fact that the following sentence is at the moment boilerplate in the account of any mass shooting is profoundly disturbing.
The killings come on the heels of a series of mass shootings around the country, including at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, and at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, that have left communities nationwide on edge.
They also come on the heels of the teenager in Missouri who was shot for knocking on the door while Black, and the two cheerleaders in Texas who were shot for getting into the wrong car, the woman in New York who was shot because her friend turned briefly into the wrong driveway, and the four people who were killed at a Sweet 16 party in Dadeville, Alabama.
This country's insane attraction to its firearms was bound to manifest itself in different ways. And, while the mass shootings grab the headlines, somehow, we are now in a "spate," as they say, of lost people coming into contact with scared people who have imbibed too much of the "good guy with a gun/stand your ground" propaganda pumped out by the NRA and gun-happy politicians, and ending up wounded or dead. Add race to the mix, as it surely was in the shooting of Ralph Yarl in Kansas City, and everything gets turned up to 11. But, fundamentally, if we had decent background checks and red flag laws, America never would be allowed to buy a gun.
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