Keith Weikum, a set builder and special effects operator for theater productions at Umpqua Community College, already had a skeptical expression when he opened his front door.

The reporter standing outside asked him if he knew a particular UCC student who had signed up to be a production assistant on a play with Weikum.

Weikum’s lips winched into a scowl. He did know that student. Not well. But he had seen the student’s face splashed all over the TV news. Weikum shook his head as he spoke slowly and directly.

“I don’t know that name. I don’t use that name,” said Weikum, who had a specific suggestion instead. “Say: ‘the shooter.'”

To the bewildered and angered residents of Roseburg, the shooter who gunned down nine people at the community college Thursday is a man with no name. The shooter, a newcomer to Oregon, forged an almost totally anonymous life in a town — population 21,968 — where it can be hard to keep secrets.

“For us, he was another guy who worked on a set,” said Weikum’s wife, Wendy Weikum, a local actress and a UCC trustee, who — following a community campaign not to focus on the shooter — challenged a reporter to write a story that didn’t mention the shooter’s name.

So, here’s that story: The shooter’s neighbors at his tan-colored apartment building rarely saw him, and some had to be shown his photo by reporters for identification. Downstairs neighbor Eli Loomas just remembered the shooter as a guy with baggy pants who walked goofy.

Few students knew the shooter, either, and those who did said he was low-key.

For a survivor who had been in the classroom next door to where the shooter opened fire, junior Kendra Godon, it wasn’t just that she had never seen the shooter before: She couldn’t even remember whether she had seen him before.

Jane Ortiz, who met him when he attended the Switzer Learning Center in Torrance, Calif., recalled him as an awkward boy who was slow to respond when someone said “hi.” The center teaches students with special needs, learning disabilities and emotional issues.

“He really didn’t have a personality that was memorable,” she said.

Not much is known about what the shooter was doing in Oregon since he moved from the Los Angeles area with his mother in 2013, and that’s fine with many Roseburg residents. They don’t know him, and they don’t want to know him.

“Let’s heal, and move forward, and not focus on this guy,” said Keith Weikum.

In recent years, several communities and officials around the nation have called for similar bans on using mass shooters’ names in public, or at least restraint.

The argument holds that attention on gunmen only takes away from attention on the victims and possibly encourages other future gunmen to commit massacres in hopes of elevating their lives out of anonymity.

After another gunman killed two Virginia journalists on live TV a few weeks ago, the soon-to-be UCC shooter wrote in an online post linked to him: “I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are.”

“A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day.”

The shooter apparently got his wish after the worst school shooting in Oregon history.

The Roseburg News-Review published his name and a modest one-inch photo of his face on Friday’s front page, below a large photo of the community at a vigil and the headline “UNITED IN GRIEF.”

News outlets across the nation had also featured the gunman. But the News-Review met a furious backlash on the newspaper’s Facebook page.

“Way to slap your community in the face!” wrote a Facebook user, Val Kammeyer.

Another user, Josh McDonald, added, “Since the news review (sic) decided to post the pic and the name we should refrain from buying their paper.”

The next day, the News-Review resumed its coverage but this time the shooter’s name did not appear. Publisher Jeff Ackerman said on Saturday that the omission was unintentional and that the shooter’s name would return to its pages in the future.

Roseburg’s anonymity campaign has been driven in part by Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin, who told reporters, “you will never hear me say his name.”

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