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 Some students with emotional and mental health disabilities who
attend the Switzer Learning Center in Torrance, a Los Angeles
suburb, are not even able to use the bathroom by themselves, but
require monitoring and assistance by school staff, according to an
employee. The school had no comment.
It is not known how much help the 26-year-old assailant, Christopher
Harper-Mercer, needed while at Switzer, or whether he ever received
a diagnosis of mental illness. Even so, his mother described her son
as autistic in several postings on online message boards.
When Harper-Mercer came to Roseburg in 2013, several years after his
parents divorced, there was no institution like Switzer there to
help him integrate into this tight-knit community of 22,000
residents. Instead, he slipped into an isolated, almost ghostlike
existence, appearing to be unable to form deep connections with the
outside world.
"I don't think I've ever even heard him speak," said Kevin Nordlund,
a next-door neighbor.
In this former timber town, where many residents say it is
impossible to go out without running into a familiar face, the man
who carried out the deadliest shooting in the United States in two
years appears to have made almost no deep impression.
 Harper-Mercer had a meaningful relationship with no one in the area,
according to interviews with dozens of residents, neighbors,
business owners and students at Umpqua Community College, where he
opened fire in a classroom last Thursday.
Those who were acquainted with Harper-Mercer described him as a
quiet, self-absorbed loner who never had a steady job or was seen
with a tight group of friends.
In his neighborhood, a 10-minute drive from campus, residents said
they would often see him walking alone among a cluster of apartment
buildings where he lived - at times, a gun holstered at his hip. A
bartender at a neighborhood pub said he occasionally came there to
eat, but not to drink alcohol.
MENTAL PROBLEMS
The only regular human contact he is known to have had while in
Roseburg was with his mother, Laurel Harper, with whom he shared a
love of guns. A cache of more than a dozen legally purchased
firearms was recovered at an apartment they shared. They spent time
together at target ranges in California and in the Roseburg area.
Authorities have disclosed few details about the circumstances of
the rampage itself or the gunman's motives, due in part to their
desire to deny him further notoriety. Still, loneliness appears to
be a factor in the massacre that ended with the gunman taking his
own life.
Harper-Mercer left behind a two-page diatribe that includes racist
ramblings and voices his regrets about not having a girlfriend, U.S.
media reported. Police have not commented on why he deliberately
spared one student and gave him his writings.
He appears to have avoided the many churches in this devout pocket
of Oregon, telling an online forum that he was "not religious, but
spiritual."
He also failed to find a place among the hundreds of military
veterans who study on campus, despite a brief stint in the U.S. Army
in 2008 before he was discharged for failing to meet medical,
physical, and procurement standards.
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"I don't recognize him at all," said Roseburg Mayor Larry Rich, who
is also an assistant principal at the city's namesake high school.
Harper-Mercer's father, Ian Mercer, told reporters in California
that his son must have had "some kind of issue" with his mental
health, and wondered "how on earth" he had been able to amass his
weapons cache.
In California, he also passed two uneventful years from 2010-2012 as
a student at El Camino College, also in Torrance, the school said.
Meanwhile in Oregon, Laurel Harper, the gunman's mother, told a
nurse she had hired to look after her son that the boy had "mental
problems" growing up and suffered from Asperger's Syndrome, the New
York Daily News reported.
There are hospitals and clinics in Roseburg that offer walk-in
crisis intervention programs, including a sprawling Veterans Affairs
campus, but there is no place where people who are psychotic can go
for round-the-clock care. The nearest in-patient treatment is more
than an hour's drive in Eugene or Medford.
Mercy Medical Center, which treated several victims injured during
the attack, closed its behavior health program in 2007 for financial
reasons, a spokeswoman said, and one local pediatrician, Dr. Bob
Dannenhoffer, said the city's healthcare system is "more complicated
than it needs to be."
Umpqua Community College says on its website that student counseling
services are limited to short-term, one-hour sessions. In some
cases, it urges students who need more intensive care to seek
programs off campus. The college refused to comment on whether the
gunman sought help there, and what relationship he had with those he
murdered. The school said he had no disciplinary record.
"The day before it happened, me and my son were checking the mail,
and he just came whipping around the corner (in a car), but that was
the only time I ever saw him drive," said Kaylene Rhea, 27, a
neighbor and a stay-at-home mom. "Other than that, he was walking
alone every time I saw him."
(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson and Emily Flitter; Additional
reporting by Courtney Sherwood in Roseburg, Oregon; Editing by Frank
McGurty and Lisa Shumaker)
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