Gunman asked people 'are you Christian?' before he shot and killed them

The gunman who opened fire on students at Umpqua Community College has been identified as 26-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer according to law enforcement sources.

The gunman in Thursday's mass shooting at an Oregon community college specifically targeted Christians, three witnesses said, while online accounts linked to the shooter expressed disdain for organized religion.

Authorities say Christopher Harper Mercer killed at least nine people and wounded at least seven others at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg before he was killed in an exchange of gunfire with police.

'He appears to be an angry young man who was very filled with hate,' one source told The New York Times.

"[He started] asking people one by one what their religion was. ‘Are you a Christian?’ he would ask them, and if you’re a Christian stand up. And they would stand up and he said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you are going to see God in just about one second.’ And then he shot and killed them,” Stacy Boylen, whose daughter was wounded at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., told CNN.

A twitter user named @bodhilooney,” who said her grandmother was at the scene of the carnage, tweeted that if victims said they were Christian “then they were shot in the head. If they said no, or didn’t answer, they were shot in the legs.”

According to his profile on a dating site Harper-Mercer is 'mixed race,' a 'conservative Republican,' 'not religious' and lives with his mother - and appears to have been born in Britain.

The shooter's British father Ian Mercer, who lives in California, said today: 'I'm just as shocked as everybody at what happened today. I've just been talking to the police and the FBI. That's all the details I have right now, is what you know already.'

He added: 'Obviously, it's been a devastating day. Devastating for me and my family'.

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