Who was the Umpqua Community College shooter, now identified as Chris Harper-Mercer, and what was in his mind?

It’s early in this story, but facts about him — along with photos — are starting to emerge.

You may have seen this on Facebook:

It’s not likely that he was a Muslim, and when I tried to check the GotNews.com site, it was down. However, there are other sources who are giving us a picture of this disturbed person, and he was not religious, much less a Muslim.

The British website express.co.uk found some interesting tidbits about Harper-Mercer. First, he was a Nazi aficionado who set up a dating profile on the website Spiritual Passions, calling himself ironcross45, probably in reference to the German military medal. He may have purchased Nazi paraphernalia, and oddly enough, was supportive of the Irish Republican Army. His MySpace account was filled with images of the IRA.

Here is how Harper-Mercer described himself at the Spiritual Passions dating website:

And this is what he was looking for in a female partner:

Harper-Mercer also expressed admiration for Vester Flanagan, the shooter who shot a cameraman and a news reporter in Roanoke, Virginia, in August. Writing at MySpace under the online identify Lithium_Love, he wrote on August 31:

“On an interesting note, I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. … A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.”

Like his notorious hero Vester Flanagan, Chris Harper-Mercer spilled a lot of blood, and now the entire nation knows who he is. And like the Nazis he admired, Harper-Mercer was an embodiment of pure evil.