A screenshot of the Facebook of the Oregon shooter, taken by a colleague of mine before the site was taken down, has the following comment from the shooter: “Chris Harper Mercer, August 16: I have a pill bottle with like five types of pills mixed in. I don’t know which ones are the sleep aids, so I just took four of each.”
Once again, we have a shooter who has been through the “mental health” system and has probably been taking drugs. I was a medical expert in the cases surrounding Eric Harris (the Columbine shooters) and James Holmes (the Aurora shooter). Harris was taking the SSRI Luvox (fluvoxamine) for a year, starting before he became violent, and throughout the period of his growing manic-like violent state. He had a “therapeutic level” of the drug in his system on autopsy. Holmes was prescribed Zoloft the first day he saw his psychiatrist and told her that he had very violent feelings that he did not dare fully describe to her. Over 120 days, he became more violent on Zoloft and began elaborately planning the assault on the movie theater. He stopped taking the drug 20 days prior to the shootings, but by then he was grossly psychotic, again in a manic-like state.
