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A man confessed to killing four people, including his parents, and then firing on motorists on a busy interstate highway, just days after being released from prison, police said Wednesday.
Mike Sauschuck, commissioner of the Maine Department of Public Safety, 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 neighbors, 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 U.S., 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 April 14 from the Maine Correctional Center 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.
The shootings began in the small town of Bowdoin, where four people were killed Tuesday, with three bodies discovered in a home and one in a barn, police said. The victims in Bowdoin were identified Wednesday as Joseph Eaton’s parents, Cynthia Eaton, 62, and David Eaton, 66, along with their friends, homeowners Robert Eger, 72, and Patricia Eger, 62, police said.
After Joseph Eaton fled the home, a chaotic scene developed on a highway over 20 miles (32 kilometers) away in Yarmouth, where shots were fired at moving vehicles, police said.
