Over nine people were fatally shot and killed at Umpqua Community College and the shooter is Chris Harper-mercer. Here is everything you need to know.
On October 1, 2015, a mass shooting took place at Umpqua Community College, near Roseburg, Oregon, United States. A 26-year-old male fatally shot nine people and injured seven others on the campus before being killed in a shoot out in police.
The first 9-1-1 call was made from inside the campus at 10:38 a.m. According to reports, a gunman reported walking through several campus building shootings anybody that crossed his path. However, according to a student at Umpqua, Mercer demanded to know his victims’ religion before killing them.
Most of the shooting occurred inside room 15 Snyder Hall, where an English class was being held. In fact, one woman was shot multiple times in the stomach while trying to close a classroom door.
The shooter died after a shootout with police officers that arrived on the scene. None of the police officers were injured or hurt, however, it is unclear whether the shooter killed himself or was killed by police.
Following the shooting, agents from the ATF launched a campus-wide search for explosives. A total of four weapons were recovered from the crime scene including three handguns. According to police, the shooter had body armor and “enough ammunition for a prolonged gunfight.”
Several media outlets including CNN, incorrectly identified an unrelated 23-year-old man as the shooter before later reports later clarified that the shooter’s identity was Mercer.
Excluding the gunman, nine people were killed. While, seven others were injured. Some of the survivors suffering multiple gunshot wounds. Four of the injured were treated at Mercy Medical Center, with one victim in critical condition and the other three in stable condition.
The killer and shooter was identified as Chris Harper-mercer. He was born in England on July 26, 1989 and traveled to the U.S. while he was still a kid. He lived with his mother in Torrance, California, from 2011 to 2013 and a graduate of the Swizer Learning Center, a school for teens with emotional issues and kids with learning disabilities. Mercer and his mother then moved to Winchester, Oregon. He was not a student at the community college, but a P.A. on an upcoming play there.
Mercer had several online accounts, several under the name “Iron Cross 45”, a reference to Nazi Germany. In fact, Mercer’s email address was linked to a Myspace profile with pro-Irish Republican propaganda, along with a dating profile listing him as a single “mixed race” man living with his parents, and his views as “conservative, republican”. Mercer also uploaded several conspiracy theories to a BitTorrent website and wrote articles expressing admiration for Vester Lee Flanagan, who murdered two journalists on live television.
About Flanagan, he wrote:
On an interesting note, I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are…A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.
Neighbors of Mercer found Chris Harper-Mercer as “odd” and “skittish.” One neighbor stated Mercer would “sit by himself in the dark in the balcony with this little light.” and another said “His demeanor, the way he moved, always looking around, I got a bad vibe from him.”According to The Daily Beast, Harper-Mercer’s father was Caucasian and his mother was African-American, however, the father was never in the young man’s life.
President Barack Obama said in a statement regarding the shooting, “[Thoughts and prayers] does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel, and it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted some place else in America next week or a couple months from now.”
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