NIGHTMARE IN OREGON
Shooter goes on deadly rampage
Kortney Moore was in a writing class at Umpqua Community College in sleepy Roseburg, Ore., at about 10: 30 a. m. on Thursday when a shot came through a window.
A gunman entered her classroom and told people to get on the ground. Moore, 18, told the Roseburg News-Review the man started asking people to stand up and state their religion, and then opened fire.
In the chaotic scene that followed at least 10 students were killed and seven injured.
U. S. President Barack Obama, speaking from the White House, was blunt in his assessment.
“There is a gun for roughly every man, woman and child in America. So how can you make the argument with a straight face that more guns will make us safer?
“Somehow this has become routine,” Obama said. “The reporting is routine, my response here at this podium ends up being routine. … We’ve become numb to this.”
For those at the college, there was nothing but terror.
Brady Winder, a 23- year- old student who had arrived just weeks ago from Portland, 300 kilometres away, was in an adjoining classroom when he heard “at least nine shots,” he told the New York Times.
“There’s a door connecting our classroom to that classroom, and my teacher was going to knock on the door,” Winder said, “but she called out, ‘ Is everybody OK?’ and then we heard a bunch more shots. We all froze for about half a second.
“We heard people screaming next door,” he said. “And then everybody took off. People were hopping over desks, knocking things over.”
Winder said the building is unusual in that all classrooms open to the outdoors without hallways, and “as we were running away, I think there were more shots, but my brain was kind of ( in) panic mode, just focused on running as fast as I could.”
Winder said he even saw one young woman swim across a creek to escape.
Jasmyne Davis, 19, was in class when the gunfire began. She said she heard one shot, followed by a 30- second pause, before she heard an argument and eight more gunshots from the classroom next door.
Two students ran out the door of her classroom, but a female student who tried to run out was shot in the right arm, Davis said. “Close the door!” the student yelled as she fell back into the classroom.
Danny Medak, 20, a basketball player at Umpqua, said he heard a loud noise, a pause and then a round of gunshots.
Kenneth Ungerman, 25, a navy veteran and student at the college, was just outside of Snyder Hall when the shooting started. Ungerman said he and a National Guard recruiter heard the pop of gunshots.
“We’re both veterans. We know what a gunshot sounds like,” Ungerman said.
He added that the shooter was walking toward Snyder Hall on the left side of the building. “It looked like a male. I saw him with a handgun. He was shooting outside at the windows of Snyder Hall,” Ungerman recounted. According to Ungerman, the man was wearing a dark shirt and jeans.
As 15 to 20 shots rang out, students began running out of the right side of the hall, yelling: “There’s a shooter! Run, run! Get out of there!”
“We got underneath my jeep, rolled on top, and took off,” Ungerman said. They stopped at the entrance to the campus to stop traffic.
“We all in the classroom got down beneath the tables,” student Cassandra Welding, who wasn’t in the classroom where most of the shootings occurred, told CNN.
A student opened the door, and the gunman shot her, Welding said.
“So we locked the door and shut off the lights,” she said. She called her mother, thinking “this was the last time I was going to speak with her.”
She told CNN she and her classmates put their backpacks and chairs in front of themselves “in case he came in.”
Then a police officer came into the classroom “and said the shooter is dead.”
Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said the shooter, a 26- yearold man, died at the scene after a gun battle with authorities, but Hanlin didn’t say whether the man killed himself or was shot by police.
A spokeswoman for the governor of Oregon said the gunman was a student at the school. CBS News said two law enforcement officials identified the shooter as Chris Harper Mercer.