Retired teacher in N.L. recalls Roseburg, death threat
Promotes broader discussion of violence and possibility for prevention
Inside Philip Laurie’s home on Laurie Road in Paradise, the TV flickered Friday with CNN’s continuing coverage of a mass killing in Roseburg, Oregon.
“I felt sadness,” the now-retired teacher said, when asked about his first reaction to the news.
A man, 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer, shot and killed 10 people at Umpqua Community College Thursday. His gunfire seriously injured seven more before he was killed by police.
“People … they know about Portland and Eugene, but this is just like a little town, a little town like Botwood or Burgeo,” Laurie said. “It’s not on everyone’s radar. Most people know it because they pass through it to go to California.”
He knows the town because he lived and worked there for a time in 2000. He was a teacher at a now-shuttered private grade school called St. Joseph’s.
At the time, he ended up on a list of teachers and students, marked for death by a troubled 12-year-old.
The Telegram learned, in 2005, that list was uncovered after another child saw it and told their parents. Police confirmed the list existed and a verbal threat was made. The young man in question was sent to seek medical evaluation, rather than face criminal charges.
The shooter at Umpqua Community College this week is not Laurie’s former student, although Laurie had been worried for a time it was.
“Why (Mercer) did it, we don’t know very much about it yet. I’m just listening to what everyone else is listening to,” he said.
The situation he faced and the college shooting are night-and-day different, by age if nothing else.
However Laurie suggested his experience, added to the devastating reality of the mass shooting this week and that of additional mass shootings in North America, cry out for continued and even greater discussion of root causes of mass violence and possible preventive actions.
“That Mercy Centre (hospital) to me, it’s just as real as St. Clare’s Hospital on LeMarchant Road. I’ve been in there. I know where the doors are and I imagine all those people. … That little one that was talking last night, Brady, I taught a kid Brady,” he said, having trouble pulling away from the coverage.
“Sandy Hook, do you remember that? Little kids in kindergarten. Can you imagine the trauma that’s in that community now? Can you imagine the trauma that’s in Columbine? In Eugene, Oregon?” he said, making note of a young man who shot his parents and launched into a mass shooting at Thurston High School in Eugene in 1998. “That’s only 75 miles away from where I was to.”
The string of examples were out of the U.S., but Laurie said the same kind of violence can happen anywhere, noting the example of École Polytechnique and, again, the size of Roseburg. And, he added, plenty of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are currently living and working in the United States, where the president has called mass shootings “routine.”
It is too early to speak to any kind of motive around the events this week in Roseburg.
The Douglas County Sherriff confirmed Friday a flak jacket with steel plates was found lying next to a rifle inside Umpqua Community College following the shooting. Police recovered six weapons from the school, described as five pistols and one rifle. At the gunman’s apartment, another seven weapons were found: two pistols, four rifles and one shotgun.
“I don’t know why that kid did that yesterday,” Laurie said. “But it wasn’t a normal thing to do — go in and take four guns and start killing people with body armour on you.”
He said, as part of the ongoing coverage, he saw U.S. President Barack Obama speak on the shooting and shares the president’s clearly stated desire for added regulation of guns in the United States.