SASS Shooters Died in Maine Shooting

[Loophole LaRue, SASS #51438]

This is the first time I heard that SASS members were among the victims.

 

They lived together. They died together. One year after Lewiston, those left behind recall a steadfast friendship.

Jason Walker and Mike Deslauriers charged the gunman who killed eight in a bowling alley and 10 in a nearby bar. Their families still struggle with the void of their absence.

By Lewis RobinsonUpdated October 23, 2024, 3:00 a.m.

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Jason Walker, left, and Mike Deslauriers in Rangeley, Maine, in 2022.Kathleen Walker

One warm spring evening in Sabattus, Maine, in the early 1980s, Michael Deslauriers stopped to pick a few things up on his way home from work, at the Webster Rubber Company. A man walked into the grocery store where he was waiting in line and shouted, “There are kids out on the ice!” The pond was barely frozen, and Mike knew immediately that the boys in question were his son, Michael Deslauriers II, and Jason Walker.

They’d been best friends since kindergarten and were known to be a little wild. Mike Sr. went down to the shore to usher the boys in, but Jason was quick to assure him not to worry. “Mr. Deslauriers, we’ve only broken through up to our knees. If we fall in any deeper, we’ll definitely call it off.”

I’m sitting in the Walkers’ kitchen listening to Mike Sr. tell this story. He’s laughing as he recalls how polite Jason was while also brushing him off. Jason’s widow, Kathi Walker, smiles from across the counter, as does Stacy Cyr, Mike II’s partner of 10 years. Both men were shot and killed in a bowling alley in Lewiston one year ago. They died while charging and attempting to disarm the gunman.

Cub Scouts Jason Walker, left, and Mike Deslauriers, both 8, in 1980 at the Deslauriers family home. Mike's mother was the troop's den leader.Courtesy of the Delauriers family

When Jason was 10, he and Mike were on their bikes at school when Jason tried to bunny hop his BMX bike over the chain-link fence beside the playground. The fence clipped his front tire and he pitched face-first into the asphalt, breaking his nose. He returned home covered in blood, cleaned himself up, and kept the accident to himself. Several months later, his mother finally brought him to the doctor because his septum had collapsed and he was having trouble breathing.

Later, when they had jobs and extra income, they bought snowmobiles. Soon enough, the goal of every outing was to outrace or outperform the other. The more often they crashed, the better they got at straightening out their skis.

At home or in the bar, Jason and Mike told stories and argued. In the eyes of their friends, their arguing had an epic quality, and the more they kept at it, the more those around them found it hard to differentiate their positions. Their families called these arguments “loud agreements.” They razzed each other, loved sarcasm, but still showed each other respect and admiration. They presented as tough guys, but they both knew they were soft on the inside, and they felt comfortable with each other because of this.

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Over the years, their interest in self-reliance grew. They valued learning things on their own, seeking their own paths, and drawing their own conclusions. Together they tapped maple trees and built a sugar shack for Mike’s parents. They provided food for their families by growing their own vegetables, baking their own bread made from wheat they grew and milled themselves, and making their own sausages. It wasn’t uncommon for Jason to can thousands of tomatoes in a given season and dry and save seeds for the next year’s garden. Mike, who loved to make people laugh, participated in the canning mostly as a way to hang out with his best friend.

The friends appreciated and respected firearms and were members of the Single Action Shooter Society, a tribute to their interest in history and the American frontier. For this, they would dress in period costume, and they practiced their quick draws by shooting homemade wax bullets against trash can lids. Mike’s alias was “Dog Alley Deadeye” and Jason’s was “Fence Post Mortem.” Using an antique sewing machine, Jason made himself a complete head-to-toe buckskin suit.

Stacy likes to joke that Mike taught her how to garden, how to can things, how to make tomato sauce, pickles, coleslaw, and homemade mayonnaise — all so that she would feed him and he wouldn’t need to cook anymore. But Kathi suspects there was more to it for Jason. She thinks he wanted to prepare her and their children for the possibility of his early death.

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After an honorable discharge from the Army Reserve, he’d worked many years of manual labor — lugging bundles of shingles up steep ladders, driving a semi, offloading 50-pound potato sacks for the Clam Festival in Yarmouth, and carrying them up and down restaurant cellar steps in Boothbay. All this had taken a toll on his body, she says.

“Jason, all his life, . . . told me that he was going to die young,” Kathi says. “I feel like he truly believed that. How he knew that, I don’t know. But he had to learn everything, or teach everything, or try to make us know it all so that we could be OK when he wasn’t there.”

Jason Walker, left, and Mike Deslauriers enjoyed a sunny day in Rangeley, Maine, in 2022.Kathleen Walker

In his 40s and early 50s, Jason became more introverted, nervous about encounters with crowds. He didn’t even like to use the drive-through at chain restaurants. But he made an exception for bowling. He and Mike, along with Kathi and Stacy, were in their second year of participating in the handicap league at Just-in-Time Recreation, and they liked to find time to practice together. The evening of Oct. 25, 2023, was one of those times.

Once the two couples were inside the bowling alley, the manager, Thomas Conrad, stepped from behind the counter and greeted the four of them with bear hugs. He gave them an available lane, the one closest to the entrance.

As they were preparing to start their third game, they heard a popping sound. “Like a balloon, but much louder,” Stacy later recalled. At first, they wondered if someone in the kitchen had dropped something. Then they all turned to see a man standing near the entrance with a large gun. Mike and Jason recognized it as a Ruger SFAR semiautomatic rifle, which — after that first shot — had jammed. Jason yelled to Kathi and Stacy to get down. Stacy found a spot beneath their table and Kathi curled up on the far side of the ball return.

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Mike and Jason looked at each other. Without exchanging a word, they advanced on the shooter. Jason raced at the gunman from the front and tried to kick the weapon from his hands. Mike came at him from behind.

The shooter’s rifle unjammed. He shot Jason in the leg, turned and fatally shot Mike, and turned again and fatally shot Jason. While Jason and Mike engaged the gunman, many people in the bowling alley were able to escape.

Stacy could see the gunman continuing to fire, smoke and green light coming from the rifle’s muzzle. “I do not think I will ever be able to explain the fear that I felt,” Stacy says. “I was completely frozen. I sat there waiting for my turn to be shot.”

The attack lasted 45 seconds and killed eight people. Kathi and Stacy followed those who were lucky enough to flee out of the bowling alley by heading to the back of the lanes. A man leaning against the wall near the pinsetter was covered in blood but alive; someone was asking for a belt to use as a tourniquet to help save the man’s life.

As first responders swarmed into the building, Kathi and Stacy, outside, remained terrified and confused. The killer was at large. Families arrived in a nearby parking lot. One notable absence was Mike’s daughter, Abby, a first-year teacher holding parent-teacher conferences at the local school that night. Stacy called her again and again, and when Abby finally called back, Stacy gave the phone to Kathi — she just couldn’t bear to tell Abby that her dad had been shot.

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One year later, Kathi and Stacy still look out for each other, as Mike and Jason did. Together, they work through their grief, their fear, their remorse, and their anger. They are in constant touch. They attend commemorations together and respond to media requests together. Their strength and friendship have helped keep them going.

They both produced statements for the Independent Commission to Investigate the Facts of the Tragedy in Lewiston. “There were several opportunities to take firearms away from a known mentally unstable man,” Kathi wrote in her statement. “It should never have taken Mike and my husband to be the first to approach him to disarm him.”

Before I leave Kathi’s kitchen to drive home to my own family for the night, she shares some of Jason’s notebook entries with me, written in Jason’s steady hand.

“I got no low placed friends

but they can’t say the same.

You might forget my face

but you won’t forget my name.”

Lewis Robinson is an associate professor of humanities at the University of Maine Farmington. His third book, “The Islanders,” was published this fall.

 

LL

[Dantankerous]

Wow. Thanks for posting this.

[Forty Rod SASS 3935]

Makes me wonder how many other heroes are out there, just ready and waiting for the time when they will have to prove themselves.

 

God bless these guys and others like them, and God, please look out for those that they left behind.

 

 

[Cold Lake Kid, SASS # 51474]

Real heroes!

Rest in Peace boys. You did well.

[Pat Riot]

That is truly a shame. God bless them.  

Things like this is why I carry. You just never know when or why. 

A bowling alley. You would never think something like this would happen at a bowling alley. 

[Painted Mohawk SASS 77785]

Good buddies & 'True heroes ..RIP

Edited October 24 by Painted Mohawk SASS 77785

[Rye Miles #13621]

True heroes 🙏🙏🙏RIP