Bostonia: What did you see when you arrived in Lewiston on the night of October 25, 2023?

Terhune: It was really surreal. By the time I got there, the streets were almost totally empty. It was emergency vehicles, police cars going through with sirens, and news vans, but otherwise it was like a ghost town. Nobody on the sidewalks, nobody on the streets. The exception was when I drove past the hospital in Lewiston. It was like the whole city was there—emergency vehicles, news cameras, and people crowded outside. No one could get into the hospital at that point unless you were a victim, I believe. And at that point, I didn’t really know where I was going. 

Part of the story that’s been kind of forgotten here is that initially we didn’t know how many shootings there had been. There were two that actually happened, but there were also initial reports of two others, one at a restaurant in town and one at a Walmart distribution plant. And so there was a lot of confusion.

My editor initially sent me to an address we had heard about on social media, where there was [possibly] another shooting, and I got there, and it was clear that nothing at all was happening. So I got back in the car, and she sent me to city hall, where there was supposed to be a press conference, [but] there was a scrum of reporters sitting around. I was just sitting and waiting. I was getting antsy. 

There was a lot of Reddit traffic that night. You had a lot of people who were listening in on police scanners and then reporting what they were hearing. I find it interesting to go back and look at that stuff a year later and see what was right and what was wrong. 

My bosses were getting antsy, because we were watching the thread on social media as these citizen detectives were listening on the police scanners. And so it got to a point where I thought I should go check out these locations that were coming through on the police scanners.

Another reporter from the Sun Journal was also waiting for the press conference, and we worked in team mode. There was a countywide order to stay inside, and we were unsure if we would be in trouble for driving around. And the message from Steve Greenlee [then the executive editor of the Portland Press Herald, now a COM professor of the practice of journalism] was, “We will pay your bail. Go out there and check it out.”

Bostonia: That’s a good editor.

Terhune: Yeah, exactly. We wanted to get eyes on a boat launch in Lisbon [where Card’s car was ultimately found], but that did not end up happening, because by that point police were setting up perimeters and were closing off various roads along the way.

We had two separate run-ins with the police while they were setting up the perimeter. They told us to turn around. The first interaction was polite enough. We turned around and [thought] we could circle around and beat them the other way, which led to a less comfortable interaction. We ended up going down someplace where the police didn’t want us to be, sort of by mistake. We got stopped by the police, and they pulled their guns on us.

They told us, “You guys really need to be out of here. There is a shooter on the loose, and you’re causing problems.” And at that point we [realized], we are not doing any good here. If anything, we’re just distracting the police.

I probably made it about 30 percent of the way home when I got another message from my editor, saying they wanted one more thing from me. So I went back to Lisbon.

Bostonia: What time was it then?

Terhune: This was probably 12:30 or 1:00 in the morning. I went to the reunification center, where family members trying to reconnect with a loved one could go pick them up and take them home. There wasn’t a ton for me to do there, but the mayor gave a speech I recorded, and it ran with the Sun Journal story the next morning. It’s sort of my only tangible contribution of the night. 

The next day during the manhunt, I worked from home, in my pajamas in my living room. My job was researching, connecting with sources, and trying to find out who the shooter was. Flesh out his background—who is this guy? How did we get here?

The other big part of my job was tying together all the feeds we were collecting from the many, many reporters throughout our network of papers that were in the field that day. Some people were trying to get in touch with the shooter’s family. Some people were trying to learn about the victims, some people were tracking what police were up to, and [others] wrote sidebars. Meanwhile, I took key information from those pieces and looped it all together into our main, most comprehensive story, which I coauthored with Steve Collins of the Lewiston Sun Journal.

It was a long, crazy day, but crazy from my couch.

Bostonia: How did your background in crime reporting help with this reporting?

Terhune: My previous biggest piece, at that point, had been about one of the most heinous crimes in the history of the state. That spring, a man named Joseph Eaton killed his parents a few days after he was released from prison. I wrote a deep-dive piece that included conversations with his family members and people who used to know him, and it also included several conversations with the shooter himself from the jailhouse. It was a unique experience. 

And so I had experience writing about sad and uncomfortable topics and experience trying to track down information about a killer when the people who had that information were potentially not in a position to want to talk to reporters. I had experience getting doors slammed in my face. 

But to be clear, [in Lewiston], especially those first couple of days, I wasn’t doing incredible reporting. I was working really hard and not actually coming up with new or fresh information. I had never experienced anything like the amount of media saturation in Maine during those couple of days; we were competing with every major outlet in the US and Europe. We were getting scooped left and right about little things. 

At the end of the day, I’m not sure that’s what matters most in this line of work. It’s not what should matter most, but I definitely was beating myself up about it. We didn’t have the manpower to compete. So it was a lot of hard work, but it would be days, weeks, and months before big parts of the story came out.

Bostonia: I’m guessing you hung around longer than some of these other outlets though?

Terhune: Yes. And right from the very beginning, we knew that was how it was going to be, that we were going to struggle immediately to keep up with the really heavy hitters in the industry. But they would fly out in a couple of days or weeks and we would be here for the long haul, both us and the Sun Journal in Lewiston.

I’m not really good at the “do it fast” thing, and I don’t really value the “do it fast” thing, except to the extent that it’s part of my job description.

At the end of the day, I always feel that the most important thing is that we should do it the best and the deepest. And that happens when you stick around for the weeks and months afterward, and you get the reports, and you follow the government commission testimony hearings every week, and you put the story together piece by piece, and then share it with the readers who are plugged in.

Bostonia: What has the experience of reporting some of the stories alongside Maine Public and Frontline been like?

Terhune: It’s been my favorite part of the whole experience here, getting to work with the Maine Public team. I think it’s good for audiences to be able to access the story in different ways, whether you’re a podcast listener or you like films or you want to read our pieces.

There’s another thing that I think has been helpful. It’s just a sensitive topic and there are a lot of people who are reluctant to talk to us for different reasons. The hospital won’t talk to us for medical privacy reasons… Family members of the shooter are worried about public blowback, and they’ve been through so much themselves. But by having a bunch of different reporters on the project, we’ve been able to, I think, do a really good job getting a good collection of voices. I’ve been able to get at pieces of this story that I never would have if it were just me.