A shooting in Colorado Springs on Saturday resulted in four people dead, including the gunman himself, according to a previous report by HNGN. The shooter's identity has just been released. Thirty-three-year-old Noah Jacob Harpham is a recovering alcoholic whose identity was confirmed by an anonymous source, since the details of the ongoing investigation are not publicly available, according to CBS News.
Colorado Springs gunman was Noah Harpham, 33. Landlord calls him "a nice guy." https://t.co/4p1rYYcxfm by @xroederx pic.twitter.com/KqI8g66zaC
— Michelle Karas (@MichelleKarasCO) November 2, 2015
Around 9 a.m. on Saturday, Harpham opened fire with a rifle in one hand and a revolver in the other. "I looked out my kitchen window and I saw a man in a green jacket firing an AR-15...waited a few seconds, went out of my house, looked to my left and saw a man down the street, probably 50 feet," according to witness, Matt Abshire, Inquisitr reported. "I started following him and I called the cops." Harpham then shot a cyclist who died immediately. "Still following him, he's heading left on Platte towards Palmer High School... probably a hundred yards past El Paso Street he stops, turns to his left, fires four shots, shoots two ladies, one in the jaw, one in the chest, if I'm not mistaken," Abshire added. The two women were immediately killed. Harpham was then killed during a shootout with the police near a Wendy's restaurant. The victims were identified as 35-year-old Andrew Alan Myers, 42-year-old Jennifer Michelle Vasquez and 34-year-old Rose Baccus-Gallela, according to The New York Times.
Two days before the incident, Harpham posted a video online talking about how he asked his father, a man who follows a religious leader for about ten years, to review a religious sermon which will help him create the content of the blog he is starting.
"I am attempting to present a case that shows the leader of this prestigious institution along with a select group of [sic] "rulers" are using mind-control techniques to poison and confuse legions of useful idiots that slave away to keep the institution humming along and that this man, Pastor Bill Johnson, and his ruling caste are using mind-control to keep people imbalanced and ignorant, in a state of perpetual waiting for the material world to be defied, while THEY THEMSELVES ARE PROFITING [sic] IMMENSLY IN THIS MATERIAL WORLD," he stated on his only post, "Is my Dad in a Cult? Even Worse, Is It Satanic?!," found on his blog, Sun, Water, Movement, Food, and Sleep.
It is still not identified whether his stand against the religious institution is related to the shootings.
Harpman's mother, Heather Kopp, is a writer based in New York City. In her book, Sober Mercies: How Love Caught Up with a Christian Drunk, she describes how her son struggled with alcoholism and how she dealt with it as well.
"Noah loved and hated all of us in equal measure," Kopp writes in her book, according to the Guardian. "In Noah's mind, he was the loser child, the burnt piece of toast in the bunch."
