In the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. since January, a gunman killed 18 people and injured 13 more at a bar and a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine, on Oct. 25. Bates College, which is located in Lewiston, canceled its classes and ordered students to shelter in place from the night of Oct. 25 through Oct. 27.
The city of Lewiston and Bates Campus Safety concurrently ordered a lockdown at around 8:00 p.m. on Oct. 25, instructing students to shelter in their current locations and employees to stay at home. Many students spent the night in dining halls and libraries.
The lockdown lasted until early evening on Oct. 27, when the city’s lockdown was lifted and the college relaxed restrictions. The suspect in the shootings was found dead later that night.
On the morning of Oct. 26, the Lewiston Police Department authorized campus safety officers to escort students sheltering in the dining hall as well as academic and administrative buildings back to their rooms, where they remained until the next night.
While no members of the Bates community were killed in the shootings, one college employee was injured, and two students were in proximity of one of the scenes, Bates President Garry W. Jenkins wrote in a Thursday morning email to the campus community.
When the lockdown extended into its second day, it quickly presented logistical challenges for Bates. “We cannot staff [the dining hall] at this moment, and students are unable to go [there] for meals,” Geoffrey Swift, vice president for finance and administration, wrote in an email to the Bates community on Thursday morning. Starting with lunch later on Oct. 26, each student dormitory was assigned a time during which students could retrieve food from the dining hall.
“They put security on the paths from that dorm to the dining hall, and you filled up two boxes for two meals and then went back to your dorm to eat them,” Patrick Berbon, a Bates sophomore, told the Record.
As a result of the lockdown, Bates indefinitely postponed Jenkins’s inauguration, which was originally scheduled for Oct. 27.
After the lockdown in Lewiston was lifted on Friday, Bates relaxed its own restrictions, allowing students to move around campus and announcing that classes would resume on Oct. 30.
Although no members of the campus community at Bates were killed in the shootings, Jenkins wrote that nevertheless, their effects were felt deeply at the college. “No matter how many times something like this happens, I find myself at a loss for words,” Jenkins wrote in an all-campus email.
“For people who live in Maine, it’s definitely a shooting that hits close to home,” Berbon said to the Record on Friday, before the lockdown was lifted. “Everybody at least knows someone who knows someone who was affected by this.”
