Residents of a quiet Oregon town struggled to comprehend the carnage left by the latest US mass shooting as investigators puzzled over what drove a young gunman to kill nine people in a college classroom before he died in an exchange of gunfire with police.
The Thursday late-morning shooting rampage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, a former timber town of 20,000 on the western edge of the Cascade Mountains, ranked as the deadliest mass killing this year in the United States.
After the incident, US President Barack Obama angrily said on Thursday that America had made a “political choice” to allow mass shootings like the one in Oregon to occur and blasted the National Rifle Association (NRA) lobby group for blocking reform of US gun regulations.
‘Are you a Christian?’
Accounts from survivors were chilling. According to them, the gunman stormed into a classroom in Snyder Hall on campus, shot a professor at point-blank range, then ordered cowering students to stand up and state their religion before he shot them one by one.
Stacy Boylan, the father of an 18-year-old student who was wounded but survived by playing dead, told CNN his daughter recalled seeing her professor being shot point blank as the assailant stormed into the classroom.
“He was able to stand there and start asking people one by one what their religion was,” Boylan said, relating the ordeal as described by his daughter. “’Are you a Christian?’ he would ask them...’If you’re a Christian, stand up. Good. Because you’re a Christian, you’re going to see God in just about one second,’ and he shot and killed them. And he kept going down the line, doing this to people.”
Seven people were hospitalised, three of them listed as critical.
The killer died after exchanging gunfire with two police officers who confronted him.
A law enforcement source confirmed media reports naming the suspect as 26-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer. In a photo posted on what was believed to be his MySpace profile, a young man with a shaved head and dark-rimmed eyeglasses stares into the camera while holding a rifle.
Residents at an apartment house a short distance from campus where the suspect lived recognised him from photos.
A man identifying himself as Ian Mercer, the gunman’s father, spoke briefly to a throng of reporters and camera crews outside his home in Los Angeles on Thursday night.
“It’s been a devastating day, devastating for me and my family,” he said, according to a transcript provided by KNBC-TV.
Authorities offered no motive for the shooting. Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said an investigation was underway by homicide detectives and federal agents.
The violence in Roseburg was the latest in a flurry of mass killings in recent years across the United States and the deadliest so far in 2015. Not counting Thursday’s incident, 293 mass shootings have been reported this year.
“We’ve become numb”
At the White House, a visibly angry Obama challenged Americans across the political spectrum to press their elected leaders to enact tougher firearms-safety laws if they wanted to prevent such tragedies from happening again.
“Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here, at this podium, ends up being routine,” he said. “We’ve become numb to this.”
“This is a political choice that we make, to allow this to happen every few months in America,” Obama told reporters.