A man was arrested Tuesday morning in the shooting death of four people at a home in Bowdoin, Maine, and three drivers were wounded in a highway shooting in a nearby town, authorities said.
Maine State Police identified the suspect as 34-year-old Joseph Eaton.
Officers were called to a Bowdoin home Tuesday morning, where they found four people dead inside, state police said. Their names were not immediately released.
A short time later, at 10:30 a.m. local time, several vehicles were hit by gunfire on Interstate 295 in the town of Yarmouth, about 25 miles south of Bowdoin.
Robert F. Bucati/AP
State police later confirmed that three drivers were hospitalized with gunshot wounds and one was in critical condition.
“We just saw a bunch of smoke. And my friend in the truck was like, ‘I think it’s gunpowder, like gun smoke,'” Cassidy Voine, a witness to the highway shooting, told CBS affiliate WGME-TV.
He said he was a passenger in a pickup truck traveling southbound on I-295 when a car shot out the windshield and drove in front of them.
“It’s very strange to think that we were behind them when this happened,” Voisin said.
Eaton was later arrested and charged with murder for killing the four people found in the home, state police said. It is not clear how he was detained.
“A person of interest has been apprehended, and the events are connected,” Maine State Police Lt. Randall Kitten told reporters at a briefing before the arrests.
Authorities have not released a possible motive for the shootings, or detailed a link between the suspect and the victims. A press conference was scheduled for Wednesday.
In response to the shootings, Maine Governor Janet Mills tweeted that she was “shocked and deeply saddened – the violence we experienced today has shaken our state and our communities to the core.”
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