In June 2024, four people from Maine’s Deaf community traveled to Rochester, New York, to stand in front of a room full of policymakers, emergency responders, fire officials, EMS representatives, and law enforcement — and tell them exactly what happened to Deaf people on the night of the Lewiston shooting.

Matt Webster, Executive Director of MeAD. MJ Grant, ASL interpreter and agency owner. Liz Seal, wife of Joshua Seal, one of the four Deaf men killed. Kevin Bohlin, Early Intervention Provider and advisor to the Maine State Commission on Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

They were invited to speak at the Greater Rochester Deaf and Hard of Hearing Emergency Preparedness and Response Services Summit, hosted by the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The summit was convened by NTID President Gerard Buckley and attended by deaf advocates, elected officials, and representatives from emergency services across the region.

Rochester calls itself “The Signing City” — home to more deaf and hard of hearing residents per capita than almost anywhere in the country. If gaps existed there, they existed everywhere. The Maine panel was there to show what those gaps look like when they cost lives.

What They Told the Room

The night of October 25, 2023, the Deaf community in Lewiston was left to piece together what was happening largely on its own.

Liz Seal learned about the shooting from a friend. An hour and fifteen minutes after the event, she received an active shooter alert. She spent the entire night searching for her husband Joshua with her mother-in-law — going from hospital to hospital, to the survivor shelter, to the family reunification center — and found that none of them had ASL interpreters. Not that night. In some cases, not for days into the ongoing manhunt.

First responders arriving on scene had no idea Deaf people were involved. There were no interpreters to help administer life-saving aid or to take law enforcement statements from Deaf survivors and witnesses.

When interpreters who were already known to hospital staff — volunteers who had helped during previous emergencies like car crashes — tried to enter, they were turned away because the lockdown protocols did not account for them.

What remained were Video Remote Interpreting systems — VRIs — that depend on a stable internet connection and familiarity with regional ASL. At the hospital, the VRIs shared WiFi with the rest of the building. The slowdowns were severe. Communication broke down.

Kevin Bohlin called VRIs “a Band-Aid at best.” MJ Grant was more direct: with the interruptions that night, she said, they were “worthless.”

“VRIs are not a viable strategy,” Grant said. “Survivors have already gone through a traumatic experience and now they have no way of communicating because there is no interpreting. Natural language is a comfort.”

“Deaf people’s first language is not English, it’s ASL,” Seal said. “My mother-in-law was also grieving for her son, knowing that he may have passed. What was already a traumatic experience was made even worse having to relay that information to me.”

Why Rochester

The Rochester summit was an opportunity to take the lessons of Lewiston — hard-won and devastating — and make them useful to a major Deaf hub city that had its own gaps to address.

The summit brought together best practices from across the country, including from Donna Platt, the Emergency Preparedness Coordinator for North Carolina’s Division of Services for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, who described practical training methods for helping emergency workers understand what Deaf people experience every day.

The message from the Maine panel was clear: planning cannot treat Deaf people as an afterthought. Interpreters need pre-authorization to enter emergency sites. VRIs cannot be the primary strategy. Alert systems must reach Deaf people in real time, not an hour later. And Deaf community members must be at the table when emergency protocols are written — not called in after the fact.

Covered by the Rochester Beacon

The summit was covered by the Rochester Beacon in a June 5, 2024 article, “Crisis Preparedness for All,” by Jacob Schermerhorn. The full article is available at rochesterbeacon.com.

The Work Continues

MeAD continues to apply the lessons of Lewiston to systemic reform in Maine — through our partnership with the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, our advocacy for FCC ASL emergency alert adoption, and our ongoing work to ensure that what happened to Maine’s Deaf community on October 25, 2023, never happens again anywhere.

Contact MeAD → if you are an emergency management professional who wants to learn more about Deaf-accessible emergency preparedness.

Maine Association of the Deaf (MeAD) is Maine’s only Deaf-led advocacy organization. Est. 1877. Learn more at deafmaine.org.