Reports: Oregon Community College Shooter Identified as Chris Harper Mercer
The gunman who killed 10 people at Umpqua Community College, in Roseburg, Oregon, today has been identified as 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer, CBS News reports, citing law enforcement sources.
NBC News is reporting the same name, and clarifies further that Mercer is not a student. “He appears to be an angry young man who was very filled with hate,” one law enforcement official told the New York Times. Officials said Mercer lived in the Roseburg area.
a "Chris Harper Mercer" Myspace photo with a gun https://t.co/7YdVYHowYW #UCCShooting pic.twitter.com/NqxY87VlDU
— Cassandra Fairbanks (@CassandraRules) October 2, 2015
On a dating website, a man who CBS identifies as Mercer describes himself as “Not Religious, but Spiritual.”
In one post from a blog kept on a torrent-uploading website, a user who would seem to be Mercer meditates on the actions of Vester Flanagan, the deranged man who filmed himself fatally shooting two former co-workers this summer:
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. A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more your’re in the limelight.
The most recent torrent uploaded by the account (username “lithium_love,” which is associated with an email address Mercer is known to have used) is a documentary about the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting.
Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.