On campus of Oregon school, a day of confusion and horror.
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ROSEBURG, Ore. — They began lighting candles here last night before they knew the names of the victims they were memorializing, or even exactly how many victims there had been.
Hundreds of people gathered in a park downtown after the shooting at Umpqua Community College for the official community vigil, where they listened to the national anthem, signed a memorial book, held hands and listened to the governor speak.
Meanwhile, a much more private vigil was still in process a few miles down the road, in a small building at the county fairgrounds, where families of missing UCC students had gathered to await final confirmation about who had survived and who had died. A few dozen people remained inside the building with FBI agents and local investigators late into the evening. A sign near the exit of the building provided directions to another building nearby: “Grief counselors this way,” it read.
“It’s agonizing to be here and just wait,” said Sarah Cobb, 17, a UCC student who had survived the shooting by ducking under her desk but was still waiting to hear about some of her classmates and friends. “The longer people sit in there, the more they know it is going to be bad. But you’re just praying and hoping that it’s not.”
Every UCC student was evacuated to the fairgrounds to meet their families, and in the first hours after the shooting the buses unloaded to a parade of grateful reunions. Each student was processed through three stations: for food and water in the administrative building, for police interviews in an adjacent building and then for counseling in a place called the Floral Center.
Then by early afternoon the procession slowed, and the last bus arrived a little after 3:30 p.m. Families still at the fairgrounds were told to wait for more information. A chaplain led the group in a prayer. A UCC official said it would be hours before the school could account for everyone.
“When they made that announcement, that’s when it got really hard and overwhelming,” said Lonnie Wibberding, a pastor at Turning Point Adventist Church who came to the fairgrounds to provide counseling for grieving families. “There were probably 60 or 70 people still waiting. Some were panicked. Some were hugging. It was pretty much just total shock.”
Cobb, the survivor, had been settling into her fourth day of college when she heard a series of loud pops coming from the classroom next door in Snyder Hall. She had been in Writing 121, and the shooting was unfolding through a shared wall in Writing 115. She heard a series of pops and screams and then bolted up from her desk. “I grew up hunting, so by then I knew what it was,” she said.
She ran from the building, boarded an evacuation bus to the fairgrounds and spent hours on site helping grieving family members write down addresses and names of their missing relatives so law enforcement would have a list.
“I didn’t feel like I could leave when they were all still there,” Cobb said, so she stayed through lunch, and then through dinner, and then through the start of the downtown vigil she had been expecting to attend.
It was a vigil for a tragedy that wasn’t over, and it became a place of both grief and uncertainty.
A few hundred people walked in the dark holding lit candles, asking about friends and classmates they hadn’t yet seen. A bugler played taps. Another chaplain said a prayer.
“We don’t know why this happened,” said Oregon Gov. Kate Brown. “We don’t have even the most basic answers yet,” echoed a local state senator.
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