The Other McCain

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Reports: Chris Harper Mercer, 26, Identified as #UCCShooting Gunman

Posted on | October 1, 2015 | 55 Comments

Citing law enforcement sources, CBS News was the first to identify the Umpqua Community College gunman as 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer. The New York Times reports that it has independently confirmed Harper as the gunman who was killed by officers responding to the massacre at the campus in Roseburg, Oregon.

At least ten people were killed in the shooting, and nothing has been confirmed about Mercer’s background or motives. It has been reported by the Oregonian and by the New York Post that Mercer targeted Christians in the attack, and that he was originally from Torrance, California. Several other claims from various sources about Mercer’s possible motives cannot be confirmed yet.

UPDATE: Badger Pundit reports that Mercer had this on his profile at a dating site for Wiccans and other “spiritual” types:

Hobbies & Interests include “killing zombies, movies, music.”
Ethnicity: “Mixed Race.”
Have Kids: “no — do not want kids”
I currently live “with parents”
Religious: “Not Religious”
Music: “Industrial, Punk, Rock”
Hair Style: “shaved head, short hair”
Groups: “Doesn’t Like Organized Religious; Left-hand Path; Magick and Occult”

UPDATE II: The gunman was an immigrant, born in England. The UK Guardian describes more of Mercer’s apparent online activity:

Harper-Mercer was the son of Ian Mercer and Laurel Margaret Harper. Mercer and Harper filed for divorce on 6 June 2006. He appears to have left an online footprint that hints at interest in mass shootings as well as apparent support for the IRA.
He also appears to have been a prolific user of the file-sharing system Bittorrent.
An email address, “ironcross45@gmail.com”, was found to be associated with a Chris Harper Mercer of Winchester, Oregon, via a public records search. That address is linked to an account on the torrent upload site kat-ph.proxy-x.com, which bears the username “Lithium_Love”.
The final video uploaded by Lithium_Love to the torrent site, just three days ago, was a BBC documentary called Surviving Sandy Hook about the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.
Other uploads include PDFs of the occult magazine Phenomena, conspiracy-themed documentaries including Lost Secrets of the Illuminati, and assorted soft pornography.
There is also a blog attached to the upload account. The first entry was posted on 6 July 2015 and is titled “The material world is a lie.” It says: “Most people will spend hours standing in front of stores just to buy a new iphone … I used to be like that, always concerned about what clothes I had, rather than whether or not I was happy. But not anymore.
“Since then I have learned the truth that such attachments are falsehoods and will only bring misery. This is my first blog post, there will be more to come.”
Other blogposts complain about the uploading habits of other users. Another bemoans the death of horror filmmaker Wes Craven.
A Myspace page bearing Mercer’s name is filled with pictures of masked gunmen and references to the IRA, including a picture of the front page of a the Irish republican newspaper An Phoblacht, bearing the headline “British Army Could Not Defeat IRA”. Another photo to the page carries the words “IRA undefeated army”.

Mercer formerly lived in Torrance, and the Daily Breeze reports indications that Mercer had a history of behavioral problems:

Records show Harper-Mercer, 26, lived in a ground-floor apartment on Arlington Avenue at 230th Street in Torrance with his mother, Laurel Harper, from 2011 to 2013. . . .
Lists of South Bay graduates from 2009 published in the Daily Breeze showed Harper Mercer graduated from the Switzer Learning Center in Torrance with four other students. Switzer teaches students with learning disabilities and emotional issues.
A former behavioral aide at Switzer, who did not want her name used, said the majority of the students at the school are from foster, low-income and single-parent homes. Some of these students were expelled from other schools or had been in trouble with the law.
The school is divided among special needs students and those with behavioral problems.
Records showed Harper Mercer and his mother moved to Winchester, Ore., in 2013. In addition to Torrance, Harper showed previous addresses in Lomita, Harbor Gateway and Lomita.

 

Category: Crime, Oregon

Comments

55 Responses to “Reports: Chris Harper Mercer, 26, Identified as #UCCShooting Gunman”

  1. Matt_SE
    October 4th, 2015 @ 1:31 am

    Dude! I lived in Albany from 2008 to 2012.

  2. Matt_SE
    October 4th, 2015 @ 1:33 am

    Yeah, but that’s PDX so no wonder.

  3. Daniel Freeman
    October 4th, 2015 @ 3:28 am

    The U.K., reportedly.

  4. Quartermaster
    October 4th, 2015 @ 6:51 am

    My father was stationed at Adair Air Force Station at the time. That was back when the SAGE system was in operation and Adair was a Sage site. It’s now Adair Village and I recently looked at the place on Google Earth and all of the buildings I remember are still there.

  5. Daniel Freeman
    October 4th, 2015 @ 7:19 am

    But I think that was Clackamas County, not Multnomah County. It’s an example of how we outside of there need to take charge, since it was the State of Oregon that imposed that on them.

    I’ve been doing my best with talking to people to persuade them my way, but I’m only one man. We’ll see what happens.