Global Courant 2023-04-19 17:35:18
BOWDOIN, Maine (AP) — A Maine man killed four people in a home and then randomly shot three others on a busy highway, state police said.
The shootings in Maine began in the small town of Bowdoin, where four people were killed Tuesday. A chaotic scene then developed that saw shooting at vehicles on a highway more than 20 miles away in the community of Yarmouth, police said. Three people were shot there and one remained in critical condition on Wednesday.
“This is an active investigation with a lot of moving parts,” state police spokesman Shannon Moss said Wednesday.
The shooter, identified as Joseph Eaton, 34, of Bowdoin, was charged with four murders but was not immediately charged in the highway shootings, she said. He was jailed pending trial.
The names of the victims were not released and state police did not discuss a possible motive. The four bodies were taken to the state physician’s office in Augusta for positive identification and autopsies.
The seven people shot on Tuesday were the most recent victims of mass shootings in the US, including targets a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee; a bank in Louisville, Kentuckyand a Sweet Sixteen party a small town in Alabama.
In Bowdoin, yellow crime tape where the shootings took place hung in a house flanked by woods at the end of a long gravel driveway. Detectives and evidence technicians stayed at the house late Tuesday to collect evidence, long after the hearses left the driveway.
At one point, a woman spoke to police outside the house, then fell to her knees and sobbed.
In Yarmouth on Wednesday, traffic was flowing normally on Interstate 295, where a day before the three people in cars were gunned down and the gunman was apprehended.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills tweeted her concern for the “families, friends and loved ones of those affected by this tragedy.” She said she was praying for the wounded.
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“Like people all over Maine, I am shocked and deeply saddened. Acts of violence such as we have witnessed today are shaking our state and our communities to the core,” she said.
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Sharp reported from Portland.
