Shooter fired 116 rounds from a rifle into a Minneapolis church, police chief says.
MINNEAPOLIS — While a motive in the Annunciation Catholic School mass shooting remains under investigation, police said they’ve confirmed that Robin Westman, the 23-year-old suspect, had attended the school, and Westman’s mother previously worked in the parish.
Police determined that Westman “harbored a whole lot of hate towards a wide variety of people and groups of people,” and also “had a deranged obsession with previous mass shooters,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told ABC News Live on Thursday.
“Ultimately, this person, you know, committed this act with the intention of causing as much terror, as much trauma, as much carnage as possible for their own personal notoriety,” O’Hara said. “Unfortunately, this is a pattern we’ve seen far too many times.”
“The shooter expressed hate towards almost every group,” Joe Thompson, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota, said at a news conference on Thursday. “The shooter expressed hate towards Black people, the shooter expressed hate towards Mexican people, the shooter expressed hate towards Christian people, the shooter expressed hate towards Jewish people. In short, the shooter appeared to hate all of us.”
The shooter also “expressed hate” toward President Donald Trump, he said.
SEE ALSO: What we know about Minnesota school shooting suspect
“There appears to be only one group that the shooter didn’t hate, one group of people who the shooter admired — the group were the school shooters and mass murderers that are notorious in this country,” Thompson said.
“More than anything, the shooter wanted to kill children, defenseless children. … The shooter wanted to watch children suffer,” Thompson said.
An 8-year-old and a 10-year-old were killed and 18 people — including 15 kids — were injured when the shooter opened fire through the windows of the Minneapolis school’s church on Wednesday morning.
The family of 8-year-old Fletcher Merkle spoke Thursday of the boy’s love for fishing and the outdoors.
The boy’s two siblings were not injured in the shooting, a family spokesperson said.
Harper Moyski, 10, was also killed, her family said.
“Our hearts are broken not only as parents, but also for Harper’s sister, who adored her big sister and is grieving an unimaginable loss. As a family, we are shattered, and words cannot capture the depth of our pain,” parents Michael Moyski and Jackie Flavin said.
All injured victims are expected to survive, police said.
Westman never entered the church building, but could have entered after shooting out a door-sized window, O’Hara told ABC News.
“These children were slaughtered by someone who could not see them,” O’Hara said.
Westman acted alone, police said.
The doors to the church were locked when the services began, a move the school officially typically did for safety reasons, the chief said. The shooter had barricaded the doors from the outside to try to prevent people from escaping, O’Hara said.
Three shotgun shells and 116 rifle rounds were recovered, police said. One live round was recovered from a handgun that appeared to malfunction, leaving the bullet stuck in the chamber, the chief said.
Westman died at the scene from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.
Driver’s license information reviewed by ABC News described Westman as a female, born on June 17, 2002. A name change application for a minor born on the same date, June 17, 2002, was approved by a district court in Minnesota in 2020, changing the name of a Robert Westman to Robin Westman, explaining the minor child “identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”
Investigators are reviewing hundreds of pages of documents, videos and other evidence as they look for a motive, O’Hara said.
Part of the investigation now is if the shooter scouted the school in the days before the shooting.
Officials are investigating a series of videos posted to YouTube believed to be associated with the suspect, according to law enforcement sources familiar with the matter. Two videos, posted Wednesday morning and since removed by YouTube, show someone flipping through dozens of pages of notes dated over the course of several months, which include what appears to be doodles of weapons, middle fingers and expletives, as well as repeated references to killing.
Writings in notebooks and on the guns indicate a series of grievances, anger and ideations of harm to self and to others. The writings also appear to show overt references to other high-profile school shootings and shooters.
Officers recovered three guns — one rifle, one shotgun and one handgun — at the scene, all of which are believed to have been fired in the attack, police said.
All of the guns were purchased legally by Westman, police said, and authorities believe they were purchased recently in Minnesota.
As Minneapolis mourns, Mayor Jacob Frey is stressing the need for gun control, telling ABC News’ “Good Morning America,” “How many times have you heard politicians talk of an ‘unspeakable tragedy’? And yet this kind of thing happens again and again.”
“Prayers, thoughts, they are certainly welcomed, but they are not enough,” Frey said. “There needs to be change so that we don’t have another mayor, in another month-and-a half, talking about a tragedy that happened in their city.”
Danielle Gunter, whose son, an eighth grader, was shot and wounded, said in a statement to Minneapolis ABC affiliate KSTP, “We feel the pain, the anger, the confusion, and the searing reality that our lives will never be the same. Yet we still have our child.”
“We grieve and we pray: for the others who were shot, for their families, and for those who lost loved ones,” she said.
There has been an incredible outpouring of support at the church Thursday.
Families are returning to the site of the shooting with their children, processing the pain.
There is a growing memorial, as well.
One father, whose 10-year-old daughter was shot in the chapel, spoke with ABC Chicago affiliate WLS’ I-Team.
“Two bullets whiz by. But one bullet hit her here. But like this way, I mean, we’re talking about millimeters here, another bullet. This is what the doctor told me. Another bullet whizzed here, and she has just a small abrasion here. And then she has another bullet fragment embedded into her skull,” Brock Safe said.
Safe says it is truly through the grace of God his daughter wasn’t killed.
“We are beyond lucky, lucky, lucky. This is a one in a several billion that think about this like, but we also feel bad because I get survivor’s remorse because other people weren’t as lucky, and it’s awful,” Safe said.
He said something must change.
“We have this analog society when it comes to gun control, and it’s infuriating. That person should never, ever have the opportunity to do what he did,” Safe said.
Darby Voeks is a youth leader who went to Annunciation K through 8.
“We’re learning from our kids. I think they haven’t been corrupted by some of the brokenness in our world, and they’re so pure and so innocent and sweet, which is why this is so hard. And I think they also set the model for like how we’re supposed to live,” Voeks said.
Gov. Tim Walz deployed state law enforcement to increase public safety at schools and churches Thursday.
ABC News’ Alex Perez, Alyssa Acquavella, Mariama Jalloh, Pierre Thomas, Jack Date, Luke Barr, Aaron Katersky and Sasha Pezenik and WLS’ Mark Rivera contributed to this report.
