The shooting Thursday at Umpqua (UHMP’-kwah) Community College also wounded seven.
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“I carry to protect myself – the exact same reason this happened”, said Casey Runyan, referring to the Thursday’s shooting. Boylan told her father that the gunman told the students to stand up and asked if they were Christians.
“Our thoughts and prayers are not enough”.
“When we exited the building, officers made us put our hands on our head and go in a single-file line”, he added.
Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said at a Thursday news conference that offers exchanged gunfire with the shooter and that “he is deceased”.
“You’re going to see God in … one second'”. Survivors claimed that the gunman at one point forced cowering students to stand up and state their religion before shooting them one by one.
News reports said the shooter may have posted a message online before the shooting.
“He always seemed anxious”, 51-year-old Rosario Lucumi, who remembers frequently riding the same bus as him, told the New York Times.
Mercer lived in a nearby apartment complex, the AP reports. “He did not want anything to do with anyone”. “Focus your attention on the victims and their families and helping them recover”.
Andrea Zielinski, spokeswoman for Douglas County sheriff’s office, says the threat to the school has subsided. More than 20 other people were injured.
Armed with multiple guns, a 26-year-old man walked into a morning writing class at the community college in this rural Oregon town and opened fire, hitting a few students with multiple gunshots.
“Typically I would say, ‘Good afternoon, ‘” Hanlin said to reporters before detailing what was known of the tragedy that struck his community.
“He was a little odd, like sensitive to things”, said Rebecca Miles, who took a theater class with Mercer.
In a blog post linked to Harper-Mercer, he said he relished the headlines garnered by Vester Flanagan, who was largely unknown before he shot dead two TV journalists during a live broadcast in Virginia in August and then killed himself.
“We all kind of froze and bolted out the door”, Winder said.
“Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out – we need more guns, they’ll argue. It was fight or flight”.
The gunman also died during a shootout with police. He met the shooter at the door and said to calm down. “I will not give him the credit that he probably sought prior to this horrific and cowardly act”, the sheriff said.
She says they heard footsteps outside, and a man’s voice call out to them, “Come on out, come on out”. The reporting is routine. Investigators believe he may have been a student at the college because a receipt found at the scene showed he purchased textbooks from the campus bookstore two days before the shooting, the ATF said.
The massacre in the Oregon college is the latest in a series of mass shootings at USA schools, movie theatres, military bases and churches in recent years.
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Excluding the latest incident, the Mass Shooting Tracker website, a crowd-sourced database run by anti-gun activists that notes such events, has listed 293 mass shootings so far this year.
