Chris Mintz, seen in this undated photo sent by his aunt, Sheila Brown, was shot seven times in the Oregon shooting that left ten people dead and seven injured.
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When the gunman, Chris Harper Mercer, tried to enter the army veteran’s class, Mintz, 30, told the students in his classroom to get to a safe place and said, “you’re not getting by me”.
His brother told a news website Mintz had been stationed at both Fort Bragg and Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Early reports about Mintz’s heroic efforts have conflicted, with a few news sources reporting he had been shot seven times, while others reported five gunshots.
An unidentified nurse, who claimed to have witnessed the attack and prayed with Mr Mintz after he was wounded, said during the attack he kept repeating: “It’s my son’s birthday, it’s my son’s birthday”.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, Bourgeois who, also served in the United States Army, expressed a sense of irony and amazement that Mintz had breezed through combat overseas only to come so close to death on a generally placid college campus in Oregon.
“I suspect this is going to start a discussion across the country about how community colleges prepare themselves for events like this”, said the college’s former president, Joe Olson, to the Associated Press. Amazingly, despite being hit in the back and abdomen, he suffered no injury to his vital organs, according to his cousin Derek Bourgeois. He then reportedly got shot two more times.
As he lay wounded on the floor, he kept uttering it was his son’s sixth birthday. Thursday was Mintz’ fourth day in his second year of classes at Umpqua. “He was on the wrestling team and and he’s done cage-fighting so it does not surprise me that he would act heroically”. Bourgeois told the Daily Beast, adding that he was totally unsurprised by the casual act of heroism. Family members tell us he blocked a door to keep the gunman from coming in.
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“He walked away with his life”, another cousin, Ariana Earnhardt, told Q13Fox.
