1 week Ago
LEWISTON — Almost a year ago, Ben Dyer went to Schemengees Bar & Grille to play cornhole. A happy crowd ate, drank, laughed and chatted all around him that Wednesday evening until Dyer suddenly heard gunfire and fell bleeding as the first of five bullets ripped into him. He woke up two days later at Central Maine Medical Center and stayed there nearly three weeks as doctors patched him up.
Dyer, an Auburn resident who can no longer use his right arm or hand for much, is still recovering, increasingly determined to hang on to hope in spite of what he experienced. That’s one reason he’s planning to marry his longtime girlfriend, Keela Smith of Ellsworth , on Oct. 25, 2025 — exactly two years after a killer walked into Schmengees and Just-In-Time Recreation bowling alley to gun down 18 innocents.
“We’re taking a bad day and making it a good day,” Dyer said recently. “We’re taking it back as something to be positive, not something we look at for the rest of our lives as a negative.” Ben Dyer and Keela Smith observe a moment of silence for shooting victims before a cornhole tournament in Lewiston last winter.
Andree Kehn/Sun Journal His determination perhaps encapsulates the spirit of the #LewistonStrong hashtag and slogan that became ubiquitous in the Lewiston-Auburn community in the days after the worst crime in the history of Maine. “Lewiston Strong is who we are and who we will continue to be,” Lewiston City Councilor Tim Gallant said. “We didn’t just throw up our hands in despair.
We took this tragedy on and made a better Lewiston for everyone.” Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline offered a broad take on what has transpired in the past year. “Here is what I know: the light always follows darkness,” Sheline said.
“Lewiston has endured its darkest night and the dawn is breaking for us.” “While the path to healing is not linear and looks different for everyone, we are stronger as a community,” he said. “Lewiston was a strong city before the shooting and we are emerging as a more resilient, more close-knit community.
The people of Lewiston have always cared about their neighbors and now more so than ever.” State Sen. Peggy Rotundo, a Lewiston Democrat, said that “over the past year, the people of Lewiston have demonstrated the resiliency of our community in the face of terrible tragedy and our ability to move forward even as we continue to grieve.
” “Amid this pain, I find hope in the overwhelming love and support from our community,” Fowsia Musse, executive director of Maine Community Integration, said. She said the compassion she sees “serves as a powerful reminder that, although the past may be dark, we possess the strength to move forward together.” For many, though, life has continued apace, as if the shootings never happened.
Scott Harriman, president of Lewiston’s City Council, said many people “have mostly continued doing what they were doing before.” “The people who were interested in building community before the shooting are still doing that good work, often with a renewed sense of purpose,” Harriman said. “Unfortunately, the people who would rather criticize and tear people down while doing nothing to help are still just as loud and negative, if not more so.
” But Harriman’s views, which are widely held, may miss something. NEW LIFE FOR SHOOTING SITES Though most mass shooting sites around the country have been demolished , from the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, to the Pulse nightclub in Florida, Lewiston is seeking ways to bring life to the two venues where people perished. “Not Lewiston,” Gallant said.
“We didn’t give up or throw in the towel.” “Tragic events like the shooting last October can divide communities and sever relationships as was seen in similar tragedies in the past,” Gallant said. “However, Lewiston learned quickly to build community connections that were pivotal to easing pain and promoting responsiveness.
” The Mollison Way bowling alley where the shooter first opened fire has been restored, upgraded and turned once again into a thriving recreational spot . The building that housed Schemengees, where Dyer barely survived, will soon become a warming shelter for some of the people struggling most in Lewiston. “We didn’t lie down and quit,” Gallant said.
“Sure, we got knocked down. We cried. We mourned, and still do, and asked for answers,” he said.
“Then we got up on one knee, then we stood up with the help of each other and our community to forge forward to creating a better Lewiston.” Linda Scott, right, gives her daughter, Barrett Scott, a tour of the Lewiston Winter Warming Center last week in the former Schemengees Bar & Grille Restaurant on Lincoln Street. It replaces the warming center at Calvary United Methodist Church.
It will be open from Nov. 15 through the end of April from 8 p.m.
to 8 a.m. seven days a week.
The nonprofit Kaydenz Kitchen will operate the warming shelter as well as the community resource center, which will help those in need of clothing and food. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal Megan Parks, who is part of a team working on the shelter project, said its members see it as “an opportunity to turn the location of such a great tragedy into something positive for our community. Lives will be saved in the same location lives were needlessly lost.
” “Some have said it is in poor taste to open a shelter here,” Parks said, but several family members of victims “have already reached out to us to volunteer, make donations and support the work we are doing in other ways.” “The feedback from families has all been positive,” said Parks, who chairs the Lewiston School Committee. “We are honored and humbled to be able to work with the survivors in this way, and to recognize those lost in such a positive manner,” she said.
Parks added that the project, slated to open Nov. 15, is likely to include “a dedication wall in remembrance of those lost” and to honor the memory of those who died in other ways, too, including possibly “the naming of the permanent shelter” and the “dedication of individual rooms” to honor those slain. That focus on the future — and determination not to wallow in the grief of what was lost — has been a constant since the initial shock began wearing off.
Within days, former Lewiston Mayor James Howaniec, predicted the “hardworking, no-nonsense community” he’s seen his whole life would “try as best we can to move on with our lives.” The shooting is “forever going to be a part of our history,” Howaniec said, but it doesn’t define Lewiston or the nearby towns and cities also slammed by the shooting. The messy reality is that the horrible crime brought a measure of unity to a shattered community.
Musse said she sees a community that is stronger in the wake of so much pain. “The tragic events have forged bonds among us, revealing a remarkable resilience and a commitment to uplift one another,” Musse said. “Our shared experiences and mutual support testify to our strength, illustrating how adversity can deepen our connections,” she said.
“While the weight of loss and trauma can feel insurmountable, healing is achievable — both individually and as a community,” Musse said. ONE WAY TO LOOK AT RECOVERY For Musse, slogans like “Lewiston Strong” carry “profound significance.” She said they symbolize “the unity and support we’ve extended to the survivors and families affected by the mass shooting.
” The Lewiston Strong phrase, Musse said, “encapsulates our collective resolve to not merely endure but to flourish together in the aftermath of tragedy.” Stephanie Kelley-Romano, a Bates College professor. Submitted photo Stephanie Kelley-Romano, a rhetoric professor at Bates College, has been thinking about these sorts of issues for years.
She said that “in times of emotional upheaval and uncertainty, humans have a desire for stability, safety and certainty,” especially since social media and “the constant possibility of ‘new’ information” keeps people “in a very heightened, information-seeking, anxious state as events unfold.” “So, it doesn’t surprise me then that as people begin to seek a sense of normalcy — to work through the grief, fear, anger and the like,” that they recognize the need for connection, Kelley-Romano said. “One of the ways we can get that connection is through shared language and community.
” “When I wear my Lewiston Strong T-shirt, it signals that I was part of a shared experience and I am supporting my community,” she said. “It gives me some measure of agency in a time when despair seems a viable option,” she added. “I think of it as part of the healing.
” People are resilient, she said, “and need to be reminded of that because the inevitability of the grief and fear repeatedly encroaching on our lives.” Kelly-Romano said that though she hasn’t been directly impacted by the “shelter in place” orders she’s been given three times in as many years, including the mass shooting, the violence behind the orders loomed large because “it could be me or, worse yet, my children, my students, the people I love.” The hashtags and slogans that follow are a way to defy that experience, she said, to face the pain and “literally senseless violence.
” For Kelley-Romano, “I do believe ‘Love wins.’” “I also think it’s harder with the whole country/world looking at us — we invariably feel judged and examined — so the uniting together” is important “to reinforce the feelings of normalcy and basic safety and stability,” she said. Even so, she said, “we’ll never go back to the old normal.
” STRONG AND BEAUTIFUL REPAIRS Kelley-Romano said the ancient Japanese art of bowl repair, called kintsugi, is a helpful viewpoint. In kintsugi, cracks in a damaged bowl are mended with gold mixed into a lacquer to join broken pieces back together. Author Jay Wolf said this style of pottery “may be the most perfect embodiment of all our trauma-shattered lives.
” The repaired bowl “doesn’t pretend it hasn’t been broken,” Wolf said, “but honors the breaking — and more so, the surviving — by highlighting those repaired seams.” In the end, the “reinforced, golden scars” leave something dignified and stronger, he said. Kelly-Romano said the hashtags, T-shirts, signs and slogans she’s seen in the wake of the mass shooting “are all ways we pour gold into the cracks of our community — and rather than hide them, show that we can repair them beautifully.
” But, as Kelly-Romano recognizes, something will always remain broken. Dyer said that for the families who lost a loved one, the only thing left is to remember them. “They’re not coming back,” he said, which is one reason he’s glad to see efforts to name athletic fields after some and memorialize each of them.
Dyer said it’s important their memories remain dear both for loved ones today and for family members yet unborn. Their legacies ought to be remembered, he said, and the cruelty of that awful night never forgotten. KINDNESS MEANS A LOT For Dyer, too, it’s impossible to escape what happened.
“I mean, I wake up to it every day. I go to bed with it every day,” he said. “I’m still on a bunch of medications.
I’m still not at work. My hand and my arm probably will never function or work.” And yet, he said, “I’ve had to just move forward and take my life back.
” Poland Spring employee Ben Dyer of Auburn, who was shot five times in the Oct. 25, 2023, mass shooting at Schemengee’s Bar and Grille restaurant in Lewiston, recently hailed the decision of his employer to donate $150,000 for bulletproof vests for firefighters. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal Dyer said his best option is to “live my life with the cards I’ve been dealt.
” He said he planned to go bird hunting this month with buddies because he couldn’t do it last year. He said he purchased a new shotgun he can handle with his one good hand — and he’s getting a new rifle as well for deer hunting. Dyer said it’s going to be good “to get out in the woods again.
” Despite all the pain, all the sorrow, Dyer said there is a lesson to take away from what occurred a year ago. He said he’s come away from the experience more convinced than ever of the need to look out for one another. “People need to remember to be kind to everyone, especially those who are struggling,” Harriman said.
“We all move forward as a community when we lift each other up,” Harriman said. “ We should be asking ‘how can I help?’ not ‘who can I hurt?’” “Be kind,” Dyer said. “Be sincere.
Be there for each other. And stop going against each other.” “You never know that standing in line at the grocery store and telling somebody they look nice or you like their shirt or their tie” might mean more than you can imagine, he said.
“They could be going through things; they could have lost a parent or a sibling or something,” Dyer said. “And your simple act of kindness can give them something hopeful to see.” The bottom line, many said, is that while hope isn’t what anyone expects to emerge from a sickening crime, perhaps it takes darkness for us to see the light.
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