New details are providing more insight into the shooting at a Minnesota church as police continue to probe the motive behind Robert Westman’s attack that was designed to “terrorize as many people as possible.”
“The shooter saw the attack as a way to target our most vulnerable among us while they were at their most vulnerable at school and at church,” U.S. Acting Attorney General for Minnesota Joseph Thompson said.
Westman, 23, dressed all in black and armed with a rifle, a shotgun and a pistol, fired through the stained-glass windows of a church adjacent to the Annunciation Catholic School just after 8:30 a.m., as children and teachers gathered for the first Mass of the year.
While a motive for the attack remained unclear Thursday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told MSNBC that there was “some degree of planning” that went into the shooting.
Two children, aged 8 and 10, were shot dead in the pews of the church while 15 children aged 6 to 15 and three parishioners in their 80s were injured, police said. The suspect died by a self-inflicted gunshot as law enforcement rushed to the scene.
The victims were later identified by their families as 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel and 10-year-old Harper Moyski.
The FBI is investigating the attack as an act of domestic terrorism and a hate crime against Catholics, while President Donald Trump offered his condolences to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and ordered flags to half-staff.
Here is what we know about Wednesday’s shooting:
Who was the shooter?
Robin Westman, formerly Robert, legally went through a name change in 2020 after identifying as a woman, according to court documents. The suspect doesn’t have a criminal history.
The suspect’s mother, Mary Westman, retired from her job as a secretary at the Annunciation church in 2021 after five years, according to social media postings. She was also on the honor roll of school donors for having given up to $5,000, according to the Washington Post.
Westman’s maternal uncle, Robert Heleringer, a former Republican representative in the Kentucky General Assembly, described their family’s strictly Catholic upbringing in multiple op-eds published in the 2010s.
The youngest of three growing up in Hastings, Minnesota, the shooter’s father took the family to church, according to The Post. Westman was a previous member of Annunciation Church and a former student at the school.
Westman spent the next few years jumping from school to school, with an official with Minnesota Transitions Charter School confirming to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that the suspect attended one of its schools for just three months, leaving in October 2017. Westman graduated from Southwest High School in Minneapolis in 2021, records show.
The suspect had worked at a Rise medical cannabis dispensary, reportedly until August 16. A co-worker told the newspaper that Westman had been disciplined for lateness and skipping work.
A neighbor described watching Westman’s parents being led from their house in the hours after the shooting.
“My attitude was, ‘Oh my God, what has happened?’” Jim White told The Independent. “Just, ‘What in the world happened here?’”
O’Hara said the Westman’s weapons — a rifle, shotgun and a pistol — used at Wednesday’s attack were all lawfully purchased.
Officials found 120 shell casings, of which there were 116 rifle rounds, three shotgun rounds and one live bullet that was trapped inside a handgun after it apparently jammed the chamber.
What was the motive?
The motive behind the tragedy remains under investigation as police continue to determine what led the shooter to attack. But, authorities have said that Westman targeted children.
Authorities said the shooter had been to the church within the past three months and likely intended to get inside during the attack, but ultimately could not because the church’s doors were locked. That is a standard safety practice by the church.
"What's particularly heinous and cowardly about this is these children were slaughtered by a gunman who could not see them," O’Hara said. “It is very clear that this shooter had the intention to terrorize those innocent children.”
Investigators continue to comb through the suspect’s writings and online videos to determine a motive. In them, Westman appears to describe hatred toward several groups and an obsession with other mass killers. The shooter also showed off the weapons for the attack with various phrases and references to other mass killings.
Thompson said videos and writings Westman left behind show that the shooter "expressed hate towards almost every group imaginable.”
The only group Westman did not hate was “mass murderers,” Thompson said. “In short, the shooter appeared to hate all of us.”
While police previously described the writings as a “manifesto,” a close review by CNN found that the hand-written entries appeared to be more of a jumbled, stream-of-consciousness than any coherent plan or declaration of purpose.
“This is not a church or religion attack, that is not the message,” Westman wrote. “The message is there is no message.”
The shooter added: “I really just want a place to put my thoughts... I can’t talk to a therapist or family cause I will immediately be reported and put on a watchlist!”Westman had suffered from depression, as well as suicidal and homicidal thoughts for years, per CNN.
What does social media show?
Police say that before Wednesday’s attack, Westman timed a series of YouTube videos to be posted to coincide with the attack.
The videos, which were pulled from the platform, show weapons etched with racial slurs and a death threat against Trump. They included “psycho killer” and “suck on this!” and “6 million wasn’t enough,” an apparent reference to the number of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust.
Westman also shared a reverence for six mass shooters, including Adam Lanza, who killed 26 people at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.
The names also included Robert Bowers, the gunman in the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and “Rupnow,” an apparent reference to Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow who opened fire at Wisconsin’s Abundant Life Christian School in 2024.
“Breivik” is also mentioned, seemingly referencing Anders Behring Breivik, a neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011.
In another 20-minute video, Westman flipped through the pages of a journal filled with text that appears to be English written using Cyrillic script. In that video, the suspect can be heard saying: “I love my family” and “I can’t deal with this anymore.”
One page was titled “Annuciation from memory” in Cyrillic, according to a translation by BBC Verify. It includes a sketch of the layout of a church, which the person in the video stabs with a knife.
“Sick f*** sick f*** murderer,” read in massive all-caps letters on another page. The last page shown in the video reads: “The end. I’m so sorry.” It’s signed “Robin” with a heart drawn next to it.
In another clip, a knife stabs the center of a page depicting the layout of a church, complete with drawings of the doorways, the pews, a cross and even a compass to show which direction it faces.
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