The family of the Oregon college massacre suspect said they shocked and deeply saddened by the slaughter that left 10 dead including the gunman, according to a brief statement released on their behalf on Saturday by Oregon state police.
Advertisement
Gunman Christopher Sean Harper Mercer later killed himself as officers arrived, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said Saturday.
Armed with multiple weapons, Chris Harper-Mercer, 26, walked into a classroom at the college Thursday and opened fire, killing several and wounding others.
Harper-Mercer was officially identified on Friday as the assailant who survivors said stormed into the classroom of his introductory writing class on Thursday and shot the professor at point-blank range, before picking off other victims one at a time as he questioned each about their religion and whether they were Christians.
The contents of the document were not revealed, but described as an effort to leave a message for law enforcement.
Clearly, people who take up weapons and kill those around them are not operating on the same wavelength that most of us are, but identifying and treating them early may be more hard than we imagine.
The gunman, his background and his motive for the shooting are under investigation, Hanlin said.
He said: “And they would stand up and he said, “Good, because you’re a Christian, you’re going to see God in just about one second”. “All the students were like, ‘Is he dead?”
“If you had a couple of the teachers or someone with guns in that room, you would have been a hell of a lot better off”, Trump said on the stump Saturday in Franklin, Tennessee, news reports said. “I’m not trying to say that’s to blame for what happened, but had Chris not been able to get ahold of 13 guns, it wouldn’t have happened”.
Harper-Mercer fled and then shot himself, and he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Two of them were specifically about recent shootings – one about Vester Flanagan, who killed two local news reporters in Virginia, and one about an officer slain near Houston in August.
Bonnie Schaan, the mother of 16-year-old Cheyeanne Fitzgerald, said she was told by her daughter that the gunman gave someone an envelope.
Oregon’s top federal prosecutor said the shooter used a handgun when he opened fire.
A portrait has emerged of the suspect in the Oregon community college shooting as a troubled young man who suffered from mental health problems and who was obsessed with the IRA, Nazism and who was opposed to organised religion.
For now, what we don’t know about Chris Harper Mercer far outweighs what we do.
Mercer wore a flak jacket and brought at least six guns and five ammunition magazines when he went to the campus that morning.
As the gunman moved toward an adjoining classroom, Mr Mintz tried to stop him, according to Jamie Skinner, Mr Mintz’s former girlfriend and the mother of their six-year-old son.
Advertisement
He enlisted in the army in 2008, but was discharged after less than a month in basic training, for reasons unknown.
