Oregon college shooting This article is more than 8 years oldOregon college gunman killed himself as police approached, sheriff says
This article is more than 8 years old- Chris Harper-Mercer shot dead nine at Umpqua Community College
- Grandmother of wounded student: gunman gave package for authorities
The gunman responsible for Oregon’s worst mass shooting killed himself as police closed in, it has emerged.
Chris Harper-Mercer took his own life after being “neutralised” by officers who responded to the massacre scene in Roseburg on Thursday, Sheriff John Hanlin told a news conference on Saturday afternoon. The medical examiner had determined “suicide” as the cause of death, Hanlin said, without elaborating.
It was initially thought the 26-year-old died from police bullets after murdering nine classmates and wounding nine others at Umpqua community college, where he was enrolled in a writing course.
Hanlin said the deputies’ intervention saved dozens of lives by incapacitating the shooter, who wore body armour and carried enough firepower – three handguns and a rifle, plus lots of ammunition – for a potential siege.
Police found another eight guns – it was initially reported to be seven – at the family home, bringing the total in the killer’s possession to 14, said the sheriff.
The latest details came after Blackhawk helicopters ferried victims’ bodies back to Roseburg for burial, as the town prepared for funerals which it hopes will shift attention from the killer to his victims.
The Oregon national guard airlifted the nine corpses from Portland, where autopsies were conducted, back to a hometown shrouded in mourning.
The two helicopters broke a quiet, sunlit autumnal morning to land at the logging community’s small airport. The bodies were taken in a small fleet of vehicles to funeral homes to be prepared for burial.
The victims were: Luero Alcaraz, 19; Treven Anspach, 20; Larry Levine, 67; Kim Dietz, 59; Quinn Glen Cooper, 18; Rebecka Ann Carnes, 18; Jason Johnson, 34; and Sarena Dawn Moore, 44.
It was reported that Harper-Mercer passed a small box or envelope to a male student whom he spared, prompting speculation it held a note or a digital device containing a document detailing alienation and grievances, including the killer’s hostility to organised religion and his inability to find a girlfriend.
Stacy Boylan, whose daughter Anastasia was injured in the shooting, said she told him the gunman “gave somebody a box, somebody who lived, and said, ‘You gotta deliver this.’” Another version of events said it was an envelope.
The family of Cheyeanne Fitzgerald, a 16-year-old nursing student who was wounded and is believed to be the youngest casualty in the attack, told reporters at Mercy Medical Center that a bullet entered her back, clipped a lung and lodged in a kidney, which surgeons removed.
“Her recovery will be long but she’ll get there,” said her mother, Bonnie.
Bonnie Fitzgerald said her daughter saw the killer give an envelope to a student whom he ordered into a corner, “because obviously he was the one who was going to be telling the story”.
The mother paraphrased a message Cheyeanne texted from the scene: “Fucker shot me in the back.”
The family has set up a fundraising site to help pay medical bills.
A failed soldier with apparent mental illness who lived with his mother, Harper-Mercer appeared to crave the infamy of other mass murderers.
Roseburg, however, resolved to shift attention to his victims, a group ranging in age from 18 to 67, among them a basketball player, an outdoorsman, a student nurse and an animal lover, who had all signed up to a writing course at the campus where Harper-Mercer was also enrolled.
“In remembrance”, said a banner headline of the local News-Review newspaper, accompanied by the names and images of the nine dead but no mention of their killer. People queuing to donate blood at a mobile clinic in the centre of town reflected the sentiment, saying the town, and the national blaze of publicity, should focus on victims.
“This is hard. We’re very tight-knit here,” said Joleen Conner, 36, her arm patched after donating blood. She graduated from UCC three years ago and knew people caught up in the rampage. “I had pins and needles waiting to hear from everyone.”
Flags flew at at half-staff and fast-food restaurants joined churches in posting invocations to pray for this community of 22,000 people.
With media crews fanning around Roseburg to investigate and report details of Harper-Mercer’s troubled life, numbness turned to resentment as the town sensed this was what he intended: an atrocity to claim notoriety and add Roseburg to Charleston, Newtown, Aurora, Columbine – other towns hit by mass shootings.
On a website called Kickass Torrents, a user believed to be Harper-Mercer noted that a disgruntled ex-television network employee in Virginia got his “face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet” after murdering former colleagues live on air last month.
“So many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows,” the user wrote.
Sheriff Hanlin has vowed to not name the shooter.
“I will not give him the credit he probably sought prior to this horrific and cowardly act,” he said.
The Oregonian newspaper, however, criticised that stance in an editorial, saying Hanlin’s hostility to gun control was clouding investigation into what caused Harper-Mercer’s homicidal spree.
“Did mental illness play a part?” the newspaper asked. “How did he get his weapons? These are relevant, uncomfortable questions that, in Hanlin’s mind, may glorify the act, but in truth they only expose the complexity of the problems we face.”
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