LEWISTON, Maine — More than two years after Maine’s deadliest mass shooting, the central outrage has not changed: while victims, survivors, and grieving families were still struggling to rebuild their lives, $1.9 million raised in the aftermath was distributed to nonprofits instead of remaining fully centered on those most directly harmed. Public reporting has put the overall fundraising at roughly $6.6 million to $6.8 million, with about $4.7 million going to victims and families and the remaining $1.9 million split evenly among 29 nonprofits.
That split is the heart of the controversy, and for many families, it always has been.
The criticism is not just that the money was divided. It is that the nonprofits should never have received it at all. Donors gave in the immediate aftermath of the October 25, 2023 massacre believing they were helping the dead, the wounded, and the families shattered by the murders. Instead, a large share was routed into what Maine Community Foundation called its “Broad Recovery Fund,” sending equal checks of about $65,522 to 29 organizations. Maine Community Foundation has defended the structure by saying there were two separate funds, that donors chose where to give, and that the nonprofit fund was intended to support broader trauma recovery in the Lewiston-Auburn community.
But that explanation has done little to calm critics who see the process as ethically broken even if it was structured to survive legal scrutiny.
VictimsFirst’s Anita Busch, a longtime mass-casualty advocate, has blasted the handling of the fund, arguing that a grieving family member uncovered a process in which steering committee members were tied to organizations that later received money and in which many of the nonprofits that got paid were not directly helping the families of the murdered or the injured. Busch has called MaineCF’s response an attempt to distract from what she views as a fundamentally flawed process.
Amy Sussman, the aunt of murdered victim Maxx Hathaway, has become the most visible public face of that fight. The backlash over the fund has escalated again in City Hall, in Augusta, and on national television, including NewsNation and Fox News, with Sussman helping drive the issue beyond Lewiston and into the national spotlight.
That is what makes Lewiston’s response so politically damaging.
For months, and really for far longer than families believe is acceptable, the city largely stayed on the sidelines while the anger grew. Only after the backlash became impossible to ignore did City Hall begin responding in any serious public way. The city’s own public timeline stressed that Maine Community Foundation’s Broad Recovery Fund operated under its own guidelines and grantmaking committee, and that neither city staff nor city council members participated in, influenced, or oversaw decisions related to that fund. That may be the city’s defense. It is not the same thing as leadership.
Because the public anger is not really about whether Lewiston can technically distance itself from MaineCF’s paperwork. The anger is about the deeper reality that families were still struggling while institutions got paid, and that city leaders appeared content to say little until the heat became politically unavoidable.
That anger has only intensified inside council chambers. During the February council showdown over survivors’ unmet needs, survivor Benjamin Dyer, who said he was shot five times, confronted the council directly and demanded accountability. Dyer told councilors he was excluded from fundraising help while he was still in a hospital bed fighting for his life.
The confrontation became even more explosive because of the way some city leaders responded. Dyer asked Councilor Scott Harriman to look at him while he was speaking, after residents complained Harriman had been looking down and avoiding eye contact during public comment. Critics saw that moment as a wounded survivor asking for the most basic respect and not getting it.
Then came the fallout involving Council President David Chittim. The Maine Wire has reported that after the meeting, Chittim sent a note to fellow councilors complaining about the emotional tone of public comment, saying councilors are often subjected to “unwarranted criticism” and framing the chamber as a place where officials absorb attacks they cannot answer in real time. Public posts tied to that reporting say Chittim also argued Dyer should have been ruled out of order for telling Harriman to look at him.
That response landed badly because it reinforced exactly what families and survivors have been saying: City Hall seemed more offended by the tone of a survivor than by the fact that victims are still begging for accountability.
Longchamps’ push is what forced the issue back into the open. Councilor Susan Longchamps moved to assess the financial and personal needs still facing survivors and victims’ families, saying many are still living with lasting emotional, physical, and financial effects. The council ultimately voted 7-0 to table the matter to the next meeting after legal questions were raised.
The city’s next City Council Agenda/Info Packet for Tuesday March 3, 2026 is posted, confirming the issue is back before council.
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The city attorney has become a central figure in Lewiston’s delayed response, serving less as a force for action than as the legal brake on what comes next. After Councilor Susan Longchamps introduced a proposal to assess the financial and personal needs still facing survivors and victims’ families, the council tabled the measure and sent it to the city’s legal team for review. That review has focused on privacy, confidentiality, public-records concerns, and the limits of what the city can lawfully do if it gathers information from survivors and relatives. In effect, the city attorney’s role has been to narrow the proposal, manage legal exposure, and shape a more limited version for the council’s return, rather than to advance any broader examination of how the $1.9 million in nonprofit grants was handled.
And that, too, is part of the problem.
Even after months of outrage, after national attention, after survivors and family members kept forcing the issue back into public view, the city’s answer has still been to move cautiously, narrow the scope, and run the matter through lawyers. To many families, that does not look like urgency. It looks like indifference.
The hard truth hanging over Lewiston is simple: the nonprofits got their checks. The victims are still fighting to be heard. And only after extreme backlash did the city begin acting like any of this required a real response.
That is why this controversy will not go away.
That is why silence has become its own scandal.
And that is why, for many families, Lewiston’s posture now looks less like compassion and more like a city that waited too long to show it cared at all.
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