Maine State Police said they've identified areas for improvement following the search for the man responsible for the mass shootings in Lewiston last October.
Robert Card was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a trailer in an overflow lot at the Maine Recycling Corporation in Lisbon. He was found two days after the shooting, even though police searched the business twice before.
Speaking Friday to the commission investigating the shootings, Sergeant Greg Roy said that he didn't discover there was an overflow lot until someone asked him whether it had been searched.
"To get that answer took some phone calls," he said. "I had to make some phone calls, send some maps with circles, 'Was this searched, was this searched, was this searched?' I couldn't just pull up an application on my tablet and say, 'Yes it was, because I can see they went there.'"
Roy said they're looking for better tools to keep track of search areas and assist with manhunts, including using blood hounds.
"This is relatively new for us here in Maine," Roy said. "It's certainly not going to be an overnight solution and certainly it's going to be a lot of work to see how we can take a resource that is typically used to track special needs or elderly folks that have wandered away maybe with medical issues and apply that to a high risk combative suspect."
Law enforcement faced continued scrutiny from the commission for not initially searching the overflow lot at the recycling center. Maine State Police Colonel William Ross was asked whether information from Card's family was given more weight. The family was among those who suggested searching the recycling center. Ross said they have to be guarded about information from family members.
"A lot of times in the past, offenders families help that individual. In manhunt's we've done in the past, we've been sent on wild goose chases, you find a bag of peanut butter sandwiches in the woods. That type of stuff happens and it happens very frequently," he said.
He added that law enforcement received 750 tips over two days about Card's whereabouts.
The commission also asked about law enforcement's internal communications. The questions came amid allegations that some off duty law enforcement who responded to the shootings may have been intoxicated and nearly crashed their vehicle into other officers.
"Was self dispatch enough of a problem that policies need to be in place to fix it?" asked commission member Ellen Gorman.
"I would never want to discourage any type of response or someone to be sitting in parking lot saying, I'm not going to go to that active shooter," responded Ross. "I would be very cautious about how a policy like that would be written and certainly the training associated with it."
Ross also shared with the commission the challenges police faced during the manhunt for the shooter, including leaked internal communications that threatened to hamper the search as well as future criminal prosecution.
