Investigators say Mercer walked into a writing class at Umpqua Community College in Roseberg, OR Thursday.
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On an online dating profile, Chris identified himself as “mixed race”. “You take a few deep breaths and you just try to get through it”.
On his Myspace account he shared pro-IRA posters and newspaper front pages and a video showing IRA fighters holding guns and wearing balaclavas. Neighbors there recalled him as uncommunicative.
“All of Oregon stand with Umpqua Community College and the city of Roseburg“, Governor Kate Brown said at the beginning of remarks over what she termed a “horrific crisis”.
Two more weapons, also handguns, were located near the shooting scene and law enforcement was trying to determine if those too were associated with the shooter.
Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said the shooting is still under investigation, and did not say whether the gunman committed suicide or was killed by police gunfire.
‘So far we have recovered 13 weapons.
Police were not saying whether they knew of any motive. “When Chris hit the ground, he told him it was our son’s birthday yesterday”.
Students in a classroom next door heard several shots, one right after the next, and their teacher told them to leave. “But today is not the day”, she said. It surpassed the nine killed in a gun battle between motorcycle gangs in Waco, Texas, in May, and the nine who died in the rampage at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June. “I didn’t know what to think, what to do”, she said.
Authorities investigating the massacre said they had found a number of firearms at the 26-year-old’s apartment, as well as a cache he had on him as he carried out the killings.
The father of one of the victims spoke to his daughter, Anastasia Boylan, before she went into surgery.
Of the four remaining patients, one was discharged late Thursday and one will leave Friday.
Chris Mintz told his classmates to take cover before announcing, “You’re not getting by me”.
Seven people were hospitalized, three of them listed as critical. Umpqua Community College has about 3,000 students.
Student Hannah Miles said: “We began to run”. I don’t remember – I was so young – if she was going to school there or if she was helping out there, but my brothers and I used to go swimming there at the swimming pool that you can see in those aerial photos.
Friends of Dr Levine told Reuters that he was teaching in his classroom when the shooting occurred. He did not name the victim but said she was the great-granddaughter of his first cousin.
The rural town of Roseburg lies west of the Cascade Mountains in an area where the timber industry has struggled.
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The sheriff sent a 2013 letter to Vice President Joe Biden after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that “gun control is NOT the answer to preventing heinous crimes like school shootings”.
