A gunman opened fire on a community college classroom in southwestern Oregon on Thursday, killing at least 9 people and injuring seven more before he was killed in an exchange of fire with police, authorities said.
The number of casualties has varied throughout the day, but Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin gave what he called the best numbers he had at a televised late-afternoon news conference. Of the seven injured, three were taken to a hospital in Eugene in critical condition, Hanlin said. Four others were taken to a local hospital in Roseburg.
The identity of the shooter has yet to be released. Hanlin would not comment on a motive in the attack.
In the first frantic series of police recordings, a dispatcher can be heard saying the gunman was "outside one of the doors shooting through the doors" of a school building, with 35 people inside.
Several minutes into the recording, an officer is heard describing a gun battle with the assailant, concluding with a shout: "The suspect is down" and asking for "as many ambulances as possible."
Authorities provided no further details about the suspect or his motives for the attack at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, about 180 miles south of Portland and 70 miles south of Eugene.
Fall classes had begun Monday at the school, which has about 3,300 full- and part-time students.
"It's sad that we're now in that horrible club of schools that have had to deal with this," Douglas County Commissioner Tim Freeman said. "I hope communities around our nation will pray for us."
"It's a tragic event and we're right in the middle of it," County Commissioner Chris Boice said.
The shooting is among the worst mass school shootings over the last two decades, including the attack at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 in which 13 people were killed and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut in 2012, which claimed 28 lives.
The FBI confirmed that it is now involved in the investigation.
At the White House, a visibly distressed President Obama said the nation was being numbed by the number of mass shootings.
"We are the only advanced country on earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months," Obama said from the White House briefing room, his voice rising in frustration. "Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine.
"I hope and pray I don't have to come out again during my tenure as president," he said. "... But based on my experience as president, I can't guarantee that. And that's terrible to say."
The shooting was reported about 10:40 a.m. at the school in Roseburg, located about 180 miles south of Portland and 70 miles south of Eugene.
First report said the suspect was armed with a "long gun" when he opened fire into a crowded section of Snyder Hall.
Cassandra Welding, 20, a third-year student, studying early childhood education was in a computer lab in Snyder Hall when the shooting occurred.
Class was nearly over, and her professor left the classroom to retrieve some papers for the students, Welding said.
Just a few minutes after that, Welding said she heard a noise coming from next door.
"It sounded like a balloon popped ... and then five seconds later I heard it again," she told the Los Angeles Times. "We knew something wasn't right."
When a classmate of Welding's walked to the door and opened it to peek outside, she was shot, Welding said.
"She was halfway in the doorway, and the door was still open," Welding said. "We were screaming, 'Close the door! Close the door!'"
Another classmate dragged the woman in, locked the door, and someone else turned off the lights, Welding said.
Her classmates performed CPR on the woman, who Welding said looked like she had been shot in the torso.
"I kept hearing that noise, one after another," Welding said. "I probably heard about 40."
The students crawled along the floor, Welding said. Gathering in the back right corner of the classroom, the furthest away from the door.
"I was so terrified for my life and I was shaking," Welding recalled.
Someone called 911. Welding got on the phone with her mother. Blood covered the walls near the student who'd been shot, Welding said, and her broken glasses lay on the floor.
"Hey Mom, there's a shooting at school," she told her mother, whispering because she was afraid the shooter could come in at any minute. "I just heard other people in tears, crying, calling their loved ones and telling them, 'I love you,'" Welding said. "It was such a heart-wrenching thing."
After some time, Welding said, she could hear officers bust in next door, yelling "Get down! Get down!"
A couple more gunshots rang out, Welding said. Then, nothing.
Minutes later, Welding said, police and SWAT team members entered the classroom to tell them everything was okay and to ask for the students' statements.
Officers then escorted the students to the library, where they searched their bags and patted them down. On the way out, Welding said she saw a woman being taken away on a stretcher.
Her classmate was still breathing when the paramedics arrived, she said, but she still doesn't know the woman's fate, or her teacher's.
"The community is such a small community and everyone's either friends or family," Welding said.
McCrae Kittelman was in math class when he first heard of a shooting in the school's science building a short walk away.
He learned of it when his professor sprinted into the room.
"All of a sudden everyone was freaking out about stuff happening over in Snyder Hall, which is right next door to where my math class was behind held," Kittelman told Fox News and others while still in lockdown.
"That was one of the most strange and disquieting parts," said Kittelman, 17, "is that there were no sounds at all."
Kittelman and the rest of the the college's campus, which is accessible by a single road and sits high on a hill overlooking the Umpqua River, were evacuated by buses to the Douglas County Fairgrounds, where they remain. He described the campus as "calm" during the evacuation.
Residents of the small community of about 22,000 people struggled to understand the shooting.
Speaking to reporters late Thursday, college president Rita Calvin said the attack on her campus was both a "tragedy and an anomaly."
"I feel awful. To witness the families that were waiting for the students in the last bus and to see all of the hugs and weeping and trauma that has gone on," Calvin said. "More people were hurt than just the ones that were shot."
The campus employs at least one security officer, and several faculty members at Umpqua are retired law enforcement personnel, according to campus. But none of them are allowed to be armed, she said.
"We have a no guns on campus policy," Calvin said.
County Commissioner Freeman said that several years ago when his daughter was a freshman in high school, there was a shooting at her campus.
In 2006, Roseburg High freshman Vincent Leodoro shot student Joseph Monti four times in the back while both were in the school courtyard. Monti survived.
Leodoro was convicted of intentionally shooting Monti with a semiautomatic pistol loaded with hollow-point bullets.
On Thursday, Freeman said his 19-year-old son was on campus during the Umpqua shooting.
"Much like everybody else, we had an emergency plan," he said. "He immediately left campus, went to a friend's house, to a safe location, and called me."
"Our community has had to deal with this on some level before," Freeman said. "You can tell it's a sad day here, and you see that on people's faces."
Staff writers James Queally, Carla Rivera and Ann Simmons contributed to this report.
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