Category: Oregon

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

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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, “[email protected]”, 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.

 

Gunman Kills 10 in Shooting Spree at Community College in Oregon

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A gunman has reportedly killed 10 people and wounded at least 20 more on the campus of Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.

UPDATE 3:05 p.m. ET: According to KOMO-TV in Seattle, the shooting began at Snyder Hall on the UCC campus. The number of killed and wounded is not yet certain. It has been reported that police have either killed or arrested the gunman.

UPDATE 4:10 p.m. ET: The shooting began about 10:30 a.m. local time (1:30 p.m. ET), and NBC News reports that Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum confirms 13 fatalities in the incident. The gunman is reportedly dead. More reporting at CNN and KOIN-TV in Portland.

UPDATE 4:55 p.m. ET: The sheriff just held a press conference describing the police response to the shooting. The Oregonian reports emergency dispatch communications:

From the 911 dispatch, seven minutes after the initial call: “Code 4, suspect is down.” At eight minutes after the call, “He’s not breathing, is in Snyder Hall.” At nine minutes after the call, “Suspect is down, we’ve got multiple gunshot wounds were going to need multiple ambulances on scene.”

So the incident ended within 10 minutes of the first report to 911. The deceased shooter, reportedly a 20-year-old male, has not yet been identified and his motive is unknown.

UPDATE 6:50 p.m. ET: The latest:

UPDATE 10:45 p.m. ET: The death toll has been changed to 10.

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

 

A Sordid Scandal in Oregon

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By the time she was 30, Cylvia Hayes had already been married and divorced twice. She then reportedly was paid to be the “green card wife” of an Ethiopian immigrant. At some point, she became involved in Democrat Party politics in Oregon, running unsuccessfully for the state legislature in 2002. A year later, she began dating John Kitzhaber, a recently divorced Democrat state senator. When Kitzhaber was elected governor of Oregon in 2010, he said his girlfriend Cylvia would serve as the state’s first lady. The idea of the governor shacking up with his girlfriend apparently didn’t bother many Oregonians. It’s a liberal state where Obama got 54% of the vote there in 2012 and where 57% of voters in 2014 approved a measure to legalize recreational marijuana.

Fornication in the governor’s mansion? Who cares?

The general shabbiness of Cylvia Hayes’ character was exposed in 2014 by her ex-boyfriend, and that was before revelations about conflicts of interests involving Hayes’ consulting business. Kitzhaber’s office reportedly attempted to destroy evidence of the governor’s corrupt dealings and, at last, even Democrats in liberal Oregon have had enough:

Senate President Peter Courtney and House Speaker Tina Kotek met with Gov. John Kitzhaber on Thursday morning and told him it was time to resign.
At a 1 p.m. press conference to discuss the meeting, Courtney said the discussion with Kitzhaber was difficult.
“He was upset,” Courtney said. “He was defiant. He was struggling.” . . .
Courtney said that he and Kotek have been trying to get security for Secretary of State Kate Brown, who would become governor if Kitzhaber were to step down.
Courtney said that he had received a note from the governor’s staff earlier in the day saying that Kitzhaber was attempting to reach the secretary of state to “set up the transition.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Courtney said.
Kotek said later that the governor has been consumed by all the legal investigations and media inquiries.
“The work of the state has to go on,” she said, “and he’s not able to focus on that right now.”
“It has become clear to both of us that the ongoing investigations surrounding the governor and Cylvia Hayes have resulted in the loss of the people’s trust,” Kotek said.

It takes an awful lot of corruption to become “too corrupt” to be an Oregon Democrat, but somehow Kitzhaber’s done it!

 

SHOOTING AT OREGON MALL UPDATE: Eyewitness Tells TV Station Shooter Was Teen in Hockey Mask

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There are reportedly at least two people dead — including the shooter — after a gunman opened fire at Clackamas Town Center Mall near Portland.

UPDATE: The Oregonian reports:

The Clackamas Town Center shooter has been “neutralized,” a spokesman for the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office confirmed shortly before 5 p.m. [Pacific Time]
Lt. James Rhodes, a sheriff’s office spokesman, declined to say whether “neutralized” meant a suspect was dead, immobilized or in custody. Unconfirmed reports suggested that the assailant may have taken his own life after shooting multiple people at the mall. Two are confirmed dead with more injured.

UPDATE II: The Oregonian has interviews with witnesses. Still waiting for ID of shooter and other information.

UPDATE III: OK, we now have it confirmed that the shooter is dead. Two others are dead, and at least one other person “seriously injured.”

UPDATE IV: The sheriff’s department is apparently waiting to name the gunman and, without a name, it is impossible to know the motive except (speculatively) he was a homocidal psychotic. A local resident informs me via Twitter that the mall is officially a “gun-free zone,” with signs at every entrance declaring “Firearms Prohibited.”

Homicidal psychotics aren’t real big on obeying signs like that.

UPDATE V: The Associated Press is reporting that the gunman shot himself.

UPDATE VI: The search for political scapegoats has become one of the unseemly yet predictable aspects of tragedies like this. Twitchy reports a rather unusual twist in the Oregon shooting:

Details of the mall shooting are still forthcoming, but many on Twitter reported that the shooter was wearing a white mask. Some called it a hockey mask, while others cited an emergency dispatcher referring to a Guy Fawkes mask — the mask made famous by the movie “V for Vendetta” and now associated with Anonymous. Concern for the shooting victims was put on hold in favor of speculation over a mask crackdown.

Let’s not jump to conclusions either way. If the shooter had been a Tea Party activist, I’m sure Brian Ross would have told us about it by now, but I’m not going to commit Ross-ism in reverse by speculating on a possible left-wing motive without any clear evidence. Homocidal psychotics don’t necessarily fall into clear political categories.

Meanwhile (a) we still don’t even have the name of the shooter, so it’s impossible to speculate on his motive, and (b) the Oregonian updates to report that one of the victims — wounded in the chest, but not killed — is a 15-year-old girl.

UPDATE VII: Fire Andrea Mitchell: “The fact that the media has been so silent on the description of the shooter makes me suspicious.”

Well, yeah: If the guy had been wearing a Gadsden Flag T-shirt, MSNBC would have a reporter on the scene doing round-the-clock coverage.

The fact that liberals aren’t yet claiming a right-wing motive may tend to make us supect the shooter was associated with the Left, but we can’t substitute mere suspicion for actual facts.

UPDATE VIII: KATU-TV has an interview with an eyewitness who says (a) the shooter was wearing a hockey goalie’s mask, and (b) the shooter appeared to be a teenager. So the Occupy/Anonymous anarchists apparently can relax about the Guy Fawkes mask angle.

Hat-tip: Seattle Six on Twitter.

Webfoot Art Robinson For Congress!

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by Smitty

While I live in the shadow of Mount Vernon, I actually hail from the left coast. Coos Bay, smack in the heart of Oregon’s 4th Congressional District, in fact. Looking at the Wikipedia page, it looks like they’ve been electing the same leftist tool there for longer than ‘Gentleman’ Jim Moran has besmirched the memory of George Washington. Which is bizarre; my kin in Oregon really aren’t granola heads. I blame California for this sorry situation.
Dr. Art Robinson sounds like what the webfeet need:

Dr. Art Robinson is an internationally respected scientist and educator, successful businessman, skilled public speaker, and expert on energy, medicine and emergency preparedness. He worked on medical and defense issues during the Reagan administration and on energy issues during the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Art gathered the signatures of more than 31,000 American scientists on a petition urging the U.S. government not to take action on the scientifically invalid claim that human activities warm the earth.
Art graduated from CalTech and, after receiving his PhD in chemistry from the University of California at San Diego, was immediately appointed to the faculty there.

What is the point of having a blog if you can’t toot the horn for genuine Americans?

Art Robinson For Congress!

Aside: Oregonians know that ‘webfoot’ is an acceptable demonym. The Oregon football team is the ducks, and ducks have webbed feet. Just so that those who’ve been whipped to a hyper-sensitive froth by the Left don’t think there is something strange going on.

Democrat Sex Scandal: Teen Accuses Oregon Congressman David Wu

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Several of Democrat Rep. David Wu’s staffers quit his re-election campaign last year amid reports that the Oregon congressman was behaving erratically. Now a teenage girl — a recent high-school graduate who is the daughter of one of the congressman’s friends — has reportedly said the 56-year-old Wu molested her last year:

A distraught young woman called U.S. Rep. David Wu’s Portland office this spring, accusing him of an unwanted sexual encounter, according to multiple sources.
When confronted, the Oregon Democrat acknowledged a sexual encounter to his senior aides but insisted it was consensual, the sources said.
The woman is the daughter of a longtime friend and campaign donor. She apparently did not contact police at the time.
One person who heard the voice mail described the woman as upset, breathing heavily and “distraught.”
In the voice mail, the young woman accused Wu of aggressive and unwanted sexual behavior, according to sources with direct knowledge of the message and its contents.
Reporters could not verify the young woman’s age. Notes on Facebook over the past 18 months indicate she graduated from high school in 2010. . . .

Read the whole thing at the Portland Oregonian. Wu’s 1st District is heavily Democrat. He won re-election last year with nearly 55% of the vote, even after his campaign practically shut down in the week before Election Day. However, re-districting this year has slightly reduced the partisan tilt of the district — from a D+8 to D+5 according to the Cook Report — and if Wu was brought down by a sex scandal, Republicans might have a shot at winning a special election.

(Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin:

When last I wrote about the bizarre behavior of Democrat Rep. David Wu of Oregon, it was February of this year.
I said he needed a Democrat leadership intervention after he freaked out his staff . . . and engaged in other inexplicable antics. As I noted, Wu’s behavior has caused Capitol Hill concern dating back to 2003. But none of the swamp-draining Democrat leaders bothered to do anything about it. And Wu went on a national media tour asserting he can continue to hold office.

We can blame this on the failure of national media to regard Wu’s mental illness — he is both liberal and insane, if you’ll pardon the redundancy — as a serious issue. Every “gaffe” by Michele Bachmann or Allen West instantly becomes Big News, thanks to what Andrew Breitbart calls the “Democrat-Media Complex,” while here we have a Democratic congressman having a quite public nervous breakdown and the media have almost completely ignored it for months, if not indeed for years.

Dan Collins at The Conservatory says Wu “should be in a mental institution, but Congress will have to do for now.”

Don Surber links and calls me “the relentlessly interesting Robert Stacy McCain,” although I hasten to add that I’m not “interesting” in a Wu-like way.

Crazy, yes, but not that kind of crazy.

Well, OK, there was that unfortunate psilocybin-induced freakout incident when I was a sophomore in college. but (a) it was the ’70s, man, and (b) I was a Democrat then.

Just Say No, kids.


He’s a Liberal, and Also Crazy

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Excuse me if that seems redundant, but it appears that one Democrat in Congress was even more crazy than the rest:

Three days before the Nov. 2 election, U.S. Rep. David Wu’s most loyal and senior staffers were so alarmed by his erratic behavior that they demanded he enter a hospital for psychiatric treatment.
Their concern had been spiking for weeks in tandem with the Oregon Democrat’s increasingly unpredictable performance on the campaign trail and in private. He was loud and sometimes angry, some of them told The Oregonian. He said kooky things to staff and — more worrisome with a tough election fast approaching — around potential voters and donors. . . .
Several staff members confronted Wu for the final time on Oct. 30. Wu’s psychiatrist was brought into that meeting . . . The meeting was held after four consecutive days of troubling behavior that led the staff to agree that Wu needed a higher level of medical care . . .
“This is way beyond acceptable levels and the charade needs to end NOW,” wrote Lisa Grove, a senior and long-serving campaign pollster, in an e-mail to colleagues that day. “No enabling by any potential enablers, he needs help and you need to be protected. Nothing else matters right now. Nothing else.” . . .
Faced with a stalemate, the campaign essentially shut down at the very time when most other candidates were at their most frenzied. No public announcement was made, but campaign staff withdrew and Wu did not hold another formal campaign event until he emerged on Tuesday night after winning a seventh term.
Last month, The Oregonian reported that at least a half-dozen members of Wu’s staff had resigned after he won re-election in November. That group included his longtime chief of staff and his spokeswoman. In addition, he lost his campaign pollster and his fundraiser. . . .
For some staffers, the beginning of the end was Wednesday, Oct. 27, when Wu delivered a belligerent and rambling 19-minute monologue to Washington County Democrats that some in the audience said was inappropriate for the friendly crowd. His behavior left staff members aghast. . . .
In the early morning of Saturday, several odd messages written from Wu’s private House of Representatives e-mail address were sent to some staffers, all female, with still others copied on them. . . .
At that point, staff knew something was terribly wrong with their candidate. That Saturday, Oct. 30, they checked for available hospital beds and consulted with his psychiatrist. Veteran pollster Grove sent staffers the e-mail that signaled the end. She declined to comment for this story but earlier told The Oregonian that she would never work for Wu again.
There was no doubt Wu was having a rough 2010. He had separated from his wife, and he faced a credible opponent — Republican Rob Cornilles — in a difficult year for all Democrats. He told people he had stopped drinking in July.
But staffers and others who encountered Wu say his behavior that fall was not an ordinary response to stress. As the campaign wore on, they said, Wu became unpredictable and sometimes loopy, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and often not making sense. Nor would he own up to their concerns. . . .
He made few campaign appearances and near the end of the campaign was even placed under what one campaign official characterized as “house arrest.” . . .
Wu had shown signs of erratic behavior before. In 2007, he accused the Bush White House of acting like fake Klingons. In 2003, he appeared to go catatonic before a crucial vote on Medicare.
Sources reported that over the years Wu would have normal periods, followed by times when he seemed disturbed. Each episode seemed more erratic, they said. But just before the election, they said, was the worst they had seen.
As Election Day approached, the prevailing mood, according to one person, “was that the only thing worse than losing the campaign would be winning it.”

Those are merely highlights — or rather, lowlights — or a much longer article. All in all, it sounds like Wu was exhibiting bipolar tendencies, probably aggravated by the stress of separating from his wife.

In other words, a midlife crisis.

What’s interesting is that his loyal Democratic staff kept all this quiet, so the crazy Congressman could get re-elected.

UPDATE: Suggested TV commercial for David Wu’s 2012 re-election campaign.

Religion of Peace Update

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No sooner had I compiled an extensive report on the rape jihad in England than we have this headline:

Somali-American accused of plotting
to bomb Oregon tree-lighting event

Sven Olsen Mohamed Mohamud had gotten in touch with an “unindicted associate” in Sweden Pakistan and expressed an interest in anti-abortion activism “violent jihad.” So the feds arranged a sting and supplied the fanatical Lutheran Muslim with a van rigged up with phony explosives:

Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was arrested at 5:40 p.m. just after he dialed a cell phone that he thought would blow up a van laden with explosives but instead brought federal agents and Portland police swooping in to take him into custody.
Mohamud yelled “Allahu Akhbar” and tried to kick agents and police as the arrest came, according to prosecutors.

Of course, if Mohamed Mohamud and Sven Olsen were both boarding a plane in Portland, the decision of whether Mohamed or Sven got an enhanced TSA screening would have to be as random as a coin-flip. Or else the ACLU would say “Allahu Akhbar” “see you in court.”

More at Memeorandum.

UPDATE: We now have a photo of the suspect, and a report from the New York Times, which includes this stunning paragraph:

The arrest marks another episode in which Somalian-Americans are accused of radicalism. In 2009, after a sweeping federal investigation of more than 20 young Americans believed to have joined a militant Islamist group in Somalia, authorities charged two of the men with providing material support for terrorism. In 2008, another man under investigation blew himself up in an attack in Somalia, becoming the first known American suicide bomber.

Did you see that? They said “militant Islamist”! The New York Times actually referred to the Religion of Peace™ by name! That’s Change We Can Believe In.

Meanwhile, the FBI’s press release about the arrest is online.

UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin posts photos of the “broad strata of society” implicated in jihadi terrorism.

UPDATE III: The word for this is “pathetic”:

I’m not aware that any “right wing blogs” tried to “turn this into a defeat for the Obama administration” and I certainly didn’t make any partisan political references.

Michelle Malkin does make an important point when she says, “Violent jihad. Two words the current occupant of the White House won’t say together and about which he remains in stubborn denial.”

But then again, Malkin also often excoriated the previous occupant of the White House — that would be the Republican, President Bush — when he rhetorically obscured the specific nature of the jihadist danger.