Umpqua Community College freshman Alicia Sparks held a candle and clutched her partner close as she recalled the horrifying ordeal that unfolded just hours earlier.
“I was in the science hall which is right next to Snyder … and everybody heard something, but wasn’t sure what it was,” Sparks told the Guardian. “And then we got an email that there was a possible shooter on campus.”
The 18-year-old student was speaking at a vigil just a few miles away from the site of the horrific mass shooting inside the small community college in Roseburg, Oregon, which took place on Thursday morning.
Sparks and her classmates had waited in the center of the windowless hall, next to the Snyder building where at least nine were killed and seven injured. The campus was placed on lockdown.
UCC physics major Mark Hamill was in the gym during the shooting.
“I went over to the office to ask the officials there: ‘Is this for real? Is there really an active shooter?’ Then, when I walked out … I heard three, four, five shots. Sounds like firecrackers,” Hamill said.
Hamill stayed hidden in the gym with his classmates, in the dark, behind closed doors.
Eventually both Sparks and Hamill were found by police and escorted from campus to safety. They were among the lucky ones.
Insider the Snyder building, home to a mix of English and science classes at the mostly adult learning college that has just a few hundred full-time students, it was a scene of chaos and carnage.
Twenty-six-year-old Chris Harper Mercer had entered a morning writing class, carrying a number of firearms, including a rifle.
He shot some students using multiple gunshots, and according to witness accounts demanded students declare their religion before opening fire.
Eighteen-year-old Kortney Moore was inside the building as Mercer entered. She told local news that she lay on the classroom floor and watched as her teacher was shot in the head. Other eyewitnesses recalled playing dead to survive the onslaught.
The first call to 911 came in at 10.38am. “Active shooter. UCC. Umpqua College Road,” a dispatcher calmly intoned on the police scanner.
But as the horror began to unfold, the approximate death toll rose, and Douglas County sheriff’s deputies engaged in a firefight with the lone gunman, the radio traffic became increasingly frantic.
“We’re exchanging shots with him. He’s in a classroom, on the south-east side of Snyder Hall,” a breathless officer radioed in. “Unconfirmed report he’s got a long gun.”
Two minutes later it was confirmed “suspect is down” following “multiple gunshot wounds”. At 10.49am the suspect was confirmed as dead.
Details of the killer and his potential motives have gradually begun to emerge. He was born in England and moved to the US at a young age, first to California and then to Oregon. At the time of the shooting he lived with his mother in a small, nondescript street, in a leafy outer suburb of Roseburg.
By Thursday afternoon police had sealed the building off as plainclothes officers and police dogs patrolled outside. But Mercer left small insights into his beliefs online. A dating profile lists identified his views as “conservative republican” and listed “organised religion” as one of the things he disliked. He used a MySpace page to post pictures of himself holding rifles and images of the IRA. Neighbours described him as a recluse who wore military clothing on a regular basis.
“He always seemed anxious,” said 51-year-old Rosario Lucumi, a neighbour interviewed by the New York Times. “He always had earphones in, listening to music.”
She added: “He and his mother were really close. They were always together.”
At a press conference later on Thursday, Sheriff John Hanlin of Douglas County refused to utter Mercer’s name. “I will not give him the credit he probably sought with this horrific and cowardly act,” the sheriff said. “You will never hear me mention his name.”
But Hanlin himself has come under scrutiny as gun ownership reform groups point to the fact that the UCC shooting marks the 45th school in the US this year, and the 142nd since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut in 2012, where 20 children and six adults were murdered in cold blood. This is the second campus shooting in Roseburg, a city of just 22,000 people, in the past decade. In 2006 a 14-year-old boy shot and wounded a fellow student at Roseburg high school.
Almost as soon as Hanlin delivered his first public remarks, the internet was awash with reminders of a letter he had written to Vice-President Joe Biden in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, describing gun control efforts pushed by the White House as an “indisputable insult to the American people”.
In an interview on Friday morning, Hanlin said he stood by his remarks.
As evening set in on Thursday Barack Obama addressed the nation, at least the 15th time he has done so in the wake of a mass shooting during his tenure. His exasperation was just as palpable as his grief.
“Somehow this has become routine,” he said. “The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium is routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We’ve become numb to this.”
Obama offered his prayers to victims and their families, describing them as “young men and women studying hard, dreaming of what they could make of their lives.”
“I hope and pray that I don’t have to come out again during my tenure as president to offer my condolences … based on my experiences as president I can’t guarantee that, and that’s a terrible thing to say.”
Back at the vigil in Stewart Park, Roseburg mourners raised their candles in unison as Taps, the US military funeral piece, was played by a lone trumpeter on stage, followed by a bagpipe. Chants of “UCC, I am ICC, We are ICC,” rang out from the crowd.
Sourced from theguardian.com
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