Here’s How The Oregon Shooter Described Himself

Details emerge of the man who shot and killed at least nine people at an Oregon community college.

Editor’s note: NCRM will not help glorify the shooter, and we will not name him in our headlines and will not publish his photo.

Chris Harper Mercer is the man believed to have shot and killed at least nine people and wounded seven others at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon Thursday morning. 26 years old, Mercer, now dead after exchanging gunfire with police, was born in England but came to the U.S. as a young child. He lived with his mother.

Perhaps the most revealing sources of what we know come from a blog he kept, interviews with a handful of people who knew him, and an online dating profile.

In that profile, at Spiritual Passions, Mercer used the name IRONCROSS45. The Iron Cross is known as a Nazi symbol.

Mercer’s dating profile also lists his interests as “internet, killing zombies, movies, music, reading,” movies as “sci-fi, drama, horror, romantic comedy, comedy,” his orientation as “straight,” and says he had brown eyes, dark brown hair, and his ethnicity he listed as “Mixed Race.”

Under Political Views he listed “conservative, republican,” under Religious Views he listed “Not Religious, Not Religious, but Spiritual.”

Mercer said he was a “lover, conservative, professional, intellectual, introvert,” did not smoke or drink, and belonged to a group on the dating site, “Doesn’t Like Organized Religion.”

That fact became horrifically clear during Thursday’s massacre.

Anastasia Boylan, 18, is one of Mercer’s wounded. She underwent spinal surgery yesterday. Her father spoke to CNN Thursday night. He says Mercer, CNN writes, “ordered the students to stand up and asked if they were Christians.”

“And they would stand up and he said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you’re going to see God in just about one second,'” Boylan’s father, Stacy, told CNN, relaying her account. 

“And then he shot and killed them.”

Mercer’s blog was filled with seemingly-admiring references to the man who shot and killed two journalists on live television just weeks ago, writing that that killer was relatively unknown but was “known by everyone” after the killings, the Daily Mail reports.

CNN spoke with several people who knew Mercer.

“He was a little odd, like sensitive to things,” Rebecca Miles said. A neighbor said he would “sit by himself in the dark in the balcony with this little light.”

Another neighbor, Steven Fisher described him as “skittish,” and said, “I got a bad vibe from him.”

 

Image via Wikimedia