Authorities said the suspect’s motive for the shooting was still unclear.
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The official did not reveal the contents of the document, but described it as an effort to leave a message for law enforcement.
The email address associated with Chris Harper-Mercer’s profiles on Myspace and a dating website was also connected to an account on the file-sharing site KickassTorrents.
According to survivor Anastasia Boylan, who spoke to her family before going into hospital for spinal surgery, the gunman was specifically targeting Christians. “Was there anything more to that?”, Hannity asked, attempting to ascertain if there might be any political or religious agenda linking the shooter’s actions and the pictures. “‘Do you have a God? Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight”, the post said.
According to a profile on a dating website called SpiritualPassions.com, Harper-Mercer, who killed at least nine people before dying in a shootout with police, identified himself as a “conservative Republican” and had a fascination with Nazi memorabilia.
The family of 18-year-old Quinn Glen Cooper said he had just started college and loved dancing and voice acting. “I go outside to smoke and I watch for anyone”, said neighbor Steven Fisher, who said he had never spoken with Harper-Mercer.
Nine other people were wounded in the attack in Roseburg, a rural timber town about 180 miles south of Portland.
Mercer opened fire at the community college in Roseburg, Oregon.
Harper Mercer and his mother had later moved together to Winchester, Oregon, where they shared a small flat until Thursday’s killings.
Eileen Sandlin, 40, a resident of the Los Angeles neighborhood of Tarzana where Mercer’s father Ian Mercer lives, said her husband, Bob, used to tutor Mercer in science and math when he was of middle and high school age.
In an apartment complex where Harper-Mercer and his mother lived in Southern California, neighbors remembered him as a quiet, odd young man who rode a red bike.
She said she hadn’t seen him since their parents married about one year ago. Webb said she occasionally heard him having temper tantrums in his apartment.
Other images uploaded to the profile depicted balaclava-clad fighters toting assault rifles in the Irish Republican Army, a militant group that waged a violent campaign to drive the British from Northern Ireland. In the aftermath of a mass shooting, some well-meaning person-maybe a cop, maybe a relative of one of the victims-will inevitably enjoin the media to withhold the attacker’s name, in order to prevent copycat killings and deny the shooter the notoriety that he so clearly craved.
In a social media post he wrote in August, he described his admiration for Vester Flanagan, the man who killed a cameraman and presenter live on TV.
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The U.S. Army confirmed to ABC News that the gunman was indeed enrolled in basic training in 2008.
