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 At Garden Valley Church, about 250 congregants stood at their
seats as vocalists sang the Christian ballad "We Shall Not Be
Shaken," then watched a slide show about the victims after the
minister asked children in the sanctuary to be excused.
"For Roseburg, this was 9/11," Pastor Craig Schlesinger said from
the pulpit, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Worshipers stood with hands raised, some wiping tears from their
faces and embracing each other.
Across town at the tiny Umpqua Unitarian Universalist Church,
congregants cried openly, hugged and held hands as they sang the
civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome."
"Who are you now that this has happened?" the Rev. Annie Holmes
asked the 60 congregants. "Of course there's anger and fear and
sadness and grief beyond description."
The outpouring of emotion came amid new disclosures about Thursday's
carnage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, the deadliest U.S.
mass shooting in two years and the bloodiest in Oregon's modern
history.
 Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said on Saturday that medical
examiners had determined the gunman had taken his own life after
opening fire on fellow students in his writing class and exchanging
shots with police. Authorities originally had suggested he had been
shot dead by two officers who first confronted him.
The gunman, who has been identified as Christopher Harper-Mercer,
26, stormed into the classroom, shot his professor at point-blank
range, then began picking off cowering classmates one at a time as
he questioned each about their religion and whether they were
Christians, according to survivors' accounts.
Besides the nine people who died, nine others were wounded, three of
them critically.
SPARED TO BE 'TELLING THE STORY'
The mother of a teenage girl who was among the wounded revealed that
the gunman had handed an envelope to one of the male students in the
class, whose life the suspect deliberately spared.
"He (Harper-Mercer) told everybody else to go to the middle of the
room and lay down," Bonnie Schaan told reporters outside a local
hospital where her daughter was being treated. "He called the one
guy, gave him the envelope and told him to go to the corner of the
classroom because obviously he was going to be the one that was
going to be telling the story."
CNN reported on Sunday that the envelope contained a computer flash
drive that the surviving student, identified by the TV network as
18-year-old Matthew Smith, turned over to authorities immediately
afterward.
His mother, Summer Smith, told CNN her son was forced to stand by
and watch the gunman shoot each of his classmates, afraid that "if
he did anything to make the shooter notice him, that he would be
shot."
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Citing the account of another student who was shot in the hand but
survived by playing dead, CNN reported the killer told his victims
he would be quick, that he would try to make it painless and that he
would be "joining" them in a minute or two.
That student, who declined to give her name, said the gunman shot
one woman as she was trying to climb back into her wheelchair from
the floor as he demanded.
As for the gunman's questioning of his victims' religious faith, she
added: "I honestly don't think he was targeting anybody. He just
wanted to do it for fun, because he still shot every single one that
he asked."
A pastor who was among a group of local clergy offering counseling
to victims and their families related to Reuters the victims' sense
that the assailant was deliberate and methodical.
"This gunman had really controlled the environment very well. He had
people hit the ground. He was speaking very calmly as he was
committing the act," the pastor said, speaking on condition of
anonymity.
Bonnie Schaan's 16-year-old daughter, Cheyeanne Fitzgerald, was shot
in the back but survived. Her condition was upgraded from critical
to fair on Sunday, her family said.
Sheriff Hanlin revealed on Saturday that an eighth gun had been
recovered from the apartment Harper-Mercer shared with his mother a
short distance from Roseburg, a former timber town about 180 miles
(290 km) south of Portland.
The gunman was previously known to have carried six firearms,
ammunition and body armor with him to campus the day of the
killings.
Authorities have revealed little of what they may know about his
motives. Asked about media reports that he left behind racist
writings, a Federal Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman declined to
comment.
(Additional reporting by Courtney Sherwood and Jane Ross in
Roseburg, Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles, and Barbara Goldberg and
Katie Reilly in New York; Writing by Steve Gorman and Daniel Wallis;
Editing by Dina Kyriakidou and Jonathan Oatis)
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