BOWDOIN, MAINE (AP) – A man confessed to killing four people, including his parents, and then firing on motorists on a busy interstate highway in the united States (US), just days after being released from prison, police said on Wednesday.
Commissioner of the Maine Department of Public Safety Mike Sauschuck, called the shootings of four people at a home in Bowdoin and then three more people on Interstate 295 to the south in Yarmouth “an attack on the soul of our state” that shook neighbours, law enforcement and the state at large.
“It’s a shock to everybody,” he told reporters in Augusta. “You want to naturally say, ‘That can’t be happening here in Maine”. But the reality is these senseless acts can and do happen everywhere.”
The seven people shot in Maine were the latest victims of mass shootings in the US, whose targets included a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee; a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, and a Sweet Sixteen party in a small city in Alabama.
The gunman, Joseph Eaton, 34, had been released on April 14 from the Maine Correctional Centre in Windham, where he was picked up by his mother after completing a sentence for aggravated assault, police said.
That crime was serious enough to prevent him from possessing a gun in Maine. Over the past decade he has been charged with more than a half-dozen crimes.
