Dressed in a flak jacket, Chris Harper Mercer brought six guns to Umpqua Community College in Roseburg and opened fire on Thursday morning.
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Stacy Boylan, the father of an 18-year-old student who was wounded but survived by playing dead, told CNN that his daughter recalled seeing her professor being shot point blank as the assailant stormed into the classroom.
Officials conducting searches at the school, shooter’s residence and vehicle have also seized documents and digital media, Hanlin said.
“How is it so easy to get all these guns?” the father told CNN. Hanlin said during a press conference Saturday afternoon that he was authorized to release the cause of Harper-Mercer’s death determined by Oregon’s medical examiner.
“I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. I don’t know if she’s wounded”, Chandler said.
Oregon’s top federal prosecutor said Mercer used a handgun when he opened fire on classmates and stashed a rifle in another room but did not fire it.
The shooter also appeared obsessed with guns and religion and had leanings toward white supremacy.
“He told him “you’re going to be the lucky one” and gave him an envelope”, Cheyenne Fitzgerald’s mother told reporters.
“I heard about it and I called her and I was yelling at the phone while it was still ringing”, Kuntz said.
Sheriff’s deputies man a roadblock on the road leading to Umpqua Community College Saturday, October 3, 2015, in Roseburg, Ore.
Mercer graduated from the Switzer Learning Center in Torrance, California in 2009, according to a graduation listing in the Daily Breeze newspaper.
Two minutes after that, they reported, the shooter was down.
Police investigating the massacre, believed to be the second deadliest in the USA in the last two years, said 14 weapons had been discovered.
Mercer’s neighbors have described him as withdrawn and quiet, but passionate when it came to guns.
“We talk about gun laws”.
Many say that repeating the shooter’s name is feeding into his goal: notoriety.
On Thursday, the shooting prompted a visibly frustrated President Obama to renew his calls for more gun regulation.
According to data compiled by Mass Shooting Tracker, a watchdog group, there have been 142 school shootings in the United States since 20 elementary school students and six adults were killed by gunman Adam Lanza in Connecticut in 2012.
On Friday, the sheriff’s office released the names of Mercer’s victims.
The chief, who oversees a 120-person agency, said he had no idea at the time that the dead included the son of one of his firefighters and the niece of a paramedic. Another rescuer lost his niece.
Chilling details are emerging about the horrific scene inside an Oregon community college classroom as gunman Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer shot and killed his victims. Recruits also must score highly enough on a multiple-choice test covering science, math, reading comprehension and other topics.
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Relatives of Lucas Eibel, 18, said: “We have been trying to figure out how to tell everyone how awesome Lucas was, but that would take 18 years”.
