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2015 Umpqua Community College shooting

American mass shooting event in 2015

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 3, 2026
Entity authorityQ21036673 ↗
Source-derived summary

On October 1, 2015, a school shooting occurred at the Umpqua Community College campus near Roseburg, Oregon, United States. Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer, a 26-year-old who was enrolled at the school, fatally shot an assistant professor and eight students in a classroom, and injured eight others. Roseburg police detectives responded to the incident and engaged Harper-Mercer in a brief shootout. After being wounded, he died by suicide, shooting himself in the head. The school shooting is the deadliest in Oregon's history, surpassing the 1998 Thurston High School shooting.

Shooting

At 10:38 a.m. PDT, the first 9-1-1 call was made from Snyder Hall on the school campus reporting gunfire. Students reported that the shooting began in Classroom 15, where English and writing classes are conducted.

Harper-Mercer, who was a student in the writing class, entered the hallway and fired a warning shot. Some witnesses said he then forced fellow students to the center of the classroom.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “2015 Umpqua Community College shooting” is american mass shooting event in 2015. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Umpqua, Community and College, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewMost valuable as an event-and-institution map that identifies actors, dates and record creators for deeper historical inquiry. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2015, 1998—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Umpqua, Community and College is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american mass shooting event in 2015” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21036673. Authority coordinates are 43.291, -123.335. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2015 and 1998.

Critical limits

Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “2015 Umpqua Community College shooting”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow 2015 Umpqua Community College shooting primary sources, 2015 Umpqua Community College shooting archive and Umpqua research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “2015 Umpqua Community College shooting”?
  2. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
  3. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “2015 Umpqua Community College shooting” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.