Classmates say Minneapolis shooter gave warning signs as mother lawyers up: Live Updates

A woman who attended grade school with the Minneapolis shooter says she knew ‘something was off’ with Robin Westman even as a child.

Westman had few friends as a child and terrified his classmates with public salutes to Adolf Hitler, Josefina Sanchez recalled.

Sanchez shared a short-lived friendship with Westman – then Robert – in seventh grade, but claims that even back then the shooter had odd obsessions and demonstrated ‘erratic’ behavior.

‘Something I knew was off, but I was a kid, how would I know like what to do?’ she told KSTP.

‘He would put up his hand and praise Hitler,’ she recalled, saying that something that shocking ‘doesn’t leave your mind’.

Sanchez claimed the killer’s manifesto was ‘triggering’ and reminded her of how Westman used to write in secret codes during their school days.

‘I think that’s a spiritual battle,’ she said of the manifesto. ‘I don’t think it’s this world, it’s demonic, I’m sorry, it is. I think we need Jesus. He needed him.’

She added that she wished she ‘could have said something sooner’ but admits that as child she was powerless in the situation.

Witness Catherine Spandel, an alumni of Annunciation and active member of the parish, told NPR on Thursday said that worshippers had started the psalm ‘You have Searched Me and You Know Me Lord’ when shots rang out.

Inside the church, Spandel stretched toward the children’s pastoral minister, who was crouched beneath a pew two rows ahead.

‘She was facing me and we reached towards each other and we prayed the Hail Mary together and we were both crying. And I asked God for absolution from all my sins. I asked Him to protect my family because I was certain that I was going to die,’ Spandel said.

Tiffany Tomlin-Kurtz, a resident of south Minneapolis who lived close to the Annunication school, started her day working from home when she overheard Westman’s rain of gunfire.

She ran outside to see what was happening.

‘I’ve got an image that I will never forget, a mom running towards the school and running towards active gunfire,’ Tomlin-Kurtz told the outlet.

The Minneapolis school shooter meticulously planned the horrific attack by conducting a trial run beforehand, using her faith to gain trust and making sure parents weren’t around during to try to stop the killing.

Robin Westman, 23, targeted Annunciation Catholic School Wednesday after surveying the church in advance to see how many adults were around. Two children were killed, eight-year-old Fletcher Merkel and 10-year-old Harper Moyski.

Westman wrote chilling plans in a notebook that appeared to point to several trips to the church beforehand.

‘Both times I went to the church, I didn’t see any men under the age of 55,’ the killer’s manifesto reads.

‘I only saw old people and some mom-aged ladies, some with very young kids. Even still, these boomers could be packing.’

Westman said the school’s online schedule helped her plan the vicious and fatal attack that killed Merkel and Moyski and injured 18 others while they sat in pews and prayed.

‘The school schedule is publicly posted online so I should go through that and look for events that look promising,’ Westman wrote on July 25 in the handwritten diary she shared in a now-deleted YouTube video.

‘Oooo! Aug. 27th, that is an all-school mass!’

As the families of the two Catholic school students fatally shot while celebrating Mass at a Minneapolis church continue to wrestle with their grief, the father of the 8-year-old boy killed tearfully urged the community to remember his son for his love of family, fishing and cooking.

‘Please remember Fletcher for the person he was and not the act that ended his life,’ Jesse Merkel said Thursday.

Fletcher Merkel and 10-year-old Harper Moyski were killed and more than a dozen of their schoolmates were wounded Wednesday when a shooter, identified as 23-year-old Robin Westman, fired 116 rifle rounds through the church’s stained-glass windows.

Surveillance video captured the attack during the first week of classes at the Annunciation Catholic School and showed the shooter never entered the church and could not see the children while firing.

Harper’s parents said they want to see their daughter’s memory bring about changes when it comes to gun violence and mental health issues.

‘Change is possible, and it is necessary – so that Harper’s story does not become yet another in a long line of tragedies,’ Michael Moyski and Jackie Flavin said in a statement.

Minneapolis school shooter Robin Westman had recently split up with a ‘romantic partner’ before the Annunication massacre according to a search warrant obtained by FOX 9 Investigators.

During a search of Westman’s father’s home, investigators revealed that the shooter ‘broke up with a significant and/or romantic partner’ and had been staying with a friend shortly before Wednesday’s tragedy.

The mother of the Minneapolis school church shooter struggled with her child’s gender transition and continuous behavior issues, school employees said.

Mary Grace Westman, the mother of shooter Robin Westman, 23, was said to have confided in teachers that she was unsure how to handle it when the would-be killer came out as transgender around five years ago.

‘She said, “I don’t know how I feel about this.” I think she was struggling with her Catholic faith,’ a former school employee told NBC News.

‘She didn’t know how she felt, but it weighed heavily on her,’ they added.

Minnesota law requires a permit to purchase certain semiautomatic rifles and pistols.

Police chiefs and sheriffs can deny permits to people determined to be a danger to themselves or the public when possessing firearms.

Another Minnesota law, which took effect in 2024, lets courts grant ‘extreme risk protection orders’ to temporarily take guns from people deemed an imminent threat to others or themselves. It’s known as a ‘red flag’ law.

Lawmakers recently also tightened the state’s background check requirements.

But none of those laws prevented Minneapolis church shooter Robin Westman from legally obtaining guns.

An 11-year-old girl who survived the deadly Minneapolis school shooting has recalled the horrific moment Robin Westman opened fire on their school’s start-of-year Mass.

Chloe Francoual said Wednesday was off to a ‘good’ start and everyone was ready and ‘excited’ to be back.

‘It was supposed to be a really good day,’ Chloe told CNN. ‘The teacher was in the middle of saying our prayers, and then we heard just one shot.’

She initially thought it was a ‘firework’ – but quickly learned her school parish was under attack.

‘The second shot was just everybody covering their ears. The third shot was when everybody started ducking low and all these shots were like slow, until the fourth shot. It started getting faster and faster, and then that’s when everybody took into action.’

Chloe added: ‘I don’t feel that safe in the church anymore. You’re supposed to go to the church to feel safe. I don’t feel safe anymore in that church.’

Pictured: Chloe Francoual and her father chef Vincent Francoual

A man who lives across the street from Robin Westman’s father recalled the moment cops descended on the family’s home.

Jim White, 57, said his street became ‘pretty chaotic for about five or six hours’ as police probed James Westman and his home.

‘I became aware of what was happening when there was a police chopper over my house, and I saw six police cars with automatic rifles pointed at their front door,’ White told The Independent.

‘I watched the father and stepmother come out, they were taken down the street a little bit away from their house.’

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said police have conducted dozens of interviews with Robin Westman’s relatives, friends and associates.

O’Hara would not confirm if officers had spoken to Robin’s father James or if he was cooperating with their investigation.

Robin Westman had a deep obsession with mass shooters and was suspended after discussing school shootings with fellow classmates, the killer claims.

Westman asked a fellow classmate ‘if there was a school shooting, where would you hide?’, according to the killer’s manifesto, which reads like a rambling journal.

The shooter claims the classmate reported her to school officials, resulting in an one-week suspension.

‘I basically promised I didn’t mean anything,’ Westman wrote, adding, ‘I don’t remember ever talking to a therapist.’

Westman also revealed how she spent her entire life fantasizing about school shootings.

‘Every school I went to, I have some fantasy at some point or another of shooting up my school,’ Westman wrote. ‘Even every job.’

The manifesto also includes idolizations of other mass shooters and dark fantasies about Westman following in the footsteps of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey sparked backlash from religious groups after attacking those offering ‘prayers’ for the victims of Wednesday’s mass shooting in his city.

Minnesota Bishop Robert Barron condemned Frey’s response and branded it ‘completely asinine’ after the tragedy where two children were shot inside a Catholic school church.

‘Catholics don’t think that prayer magically protects them from all suffering. After all, Jesus prayed fervently from the cross on which he was dying,’ Barron told Fox News.

Frey divided opinions with his impassioned remarks at a press conference after the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School.

‘Children are dead, there are families that have a deceased child. You cannot put into words the gravity, tragedy or absolute pain of the situation,’ the Democrat mayor said.

‘Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now, these kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school, they were in a church.’

Barron, who leads the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, argued that critics misunderstand the role of prayer, and said that ‘prayer is the raising of the mind and heart to God, which strikes me as altogether appropriate precisely at times of great pain.’

Robin Westman was the 23-year-old self-identified transgender woman who is accused of opening fire through the stained-glass windows of the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning during a celebratory back-to-school mass packed with children.

Westman’s victims all attended the Annunciation Catholic School, where the shooter was once a pupil.

And the connection with these school shooters sometimes goes further than having been a pupil at the establishment they target.

Nancy Lanza once worked at Sandy Hook, the Connecticut elementary school where her 20-year-old son, Adam, a former pupil there, shot and killed 26 people in 2012.

So Westman’s mother had previously been an administrative assistant at the school whose church service the shooter devastated on Wednesday morning.

In fact, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Westman admitted to having a particular admiration for the monstrous Lanza – who’d been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome aged 13 and, according to his father, suffered from undiagnosed schizophrenia.

Vice President JD Vance said America is battling a ‘mental health crisis’ and is urging experts to seek out the ‘root causes’ of violence.

‘We really do have, I think, a mental health crisis in the United States of America,’ Vance said at a Thursday event in Wisconsin.

Making his first remarks on the mass shooting in Minneapolis, the Vice President added: ‘We take way more psychiatric medication than any other nation on Earth, and I think it’s time for us to start asking some very hard questions about the root causes of this violence.’

Vance’s push to combat the mental health crisis comes after he branded Minnesota shooter Robin Westman as a ‘mentally deranged human being’.

Pictured: JD Vance speaking in La Crosse, Wisconsin on Thursday

Vance’s remarks came after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered a probe into Westman’s potential use of gender-affirming care drugs.

RFK Jr. told Fox & Friends an investigation would be launched to determine whether drugs Robin Westman may have used to transition to a woman played ‘a role’ in the mass shooting.

‘We are doing those kind of studies now,’ he said.

‘We are launching studies into their potential contribution.’

‘Some of the SSRI drugs and some other psychiatric drugs might be contributing to violence,’ the health secretary added referring to Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs)

‘Many of them have black-box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation. So we can’t exclude those as a culprit, and those are the kind of studies we are doing.’

It is unclear if Westman had taken any gender-affirming medications.

Gun rights influencer Brandon Herrera called the Minneapolis school shooter a ‘demon’ in response to a video the shooter posted that praised Herrera and claimed the two met at a firearms conference.

‘Yeah, I met Brandon Herrera at SHOT Show last year and he and I had a conversation, a brief conversation, we agreed on a lot of things, so y’all should vote for Brandon Herrera for president,’ Westman said, before adding ‘f*** those kids.’

Equipped with non-lethal pepper spray, powder pellets, and live video feeds, the drones launch from secure charging stations, six per school, when gunfire is detected.

Developed by Campus Guardian Angel, the system has already completed trials in Texas and was recently demonstrated in three Florida schools.

Permanent installations are scheduled this fall, with full deployment expected by January.

A man who lives across the street from Robin Westman said he was ‘thunderstruck’ to learn the 23-year-old had carried out a mass shooting.

Jim White, 57, claims the Westman family were ‘good neighbors’ and never suspected Robin would be a murderer.

‘I never saw anything that would have suggested that anything like this would have even been possible,’ White told The Independent. ‘It is extremely surreal.’

White said he would often cross path with Robin’s father and stepmother, noting how they would ‘always say hello to each other’ and even have a quick chat.

He shared how his neighbors extended friendly courtesies, like sharing landscaping rocks with him, and claimed the Westman children frequented the house regularly.

An ABC reporter is facing calls to be fired for misleadingly linking Minneapolis shooter to Donald Trump.

Chief Investigative Reporter Aaron Katersky was reporting on the events inside the Annunciation Catholic School on Wednesday where Robin Westman killed two kids.

Katersky mentioned the transgender gunman having left a video manifesto in which she revealed a twisted obsession with school shooters, along with a dislike of President Trump, and made a mockery of the Church.

His failure to mention the shooter’s disdain for Trump while mentioning the commander-in-chief has caused an outcry online, with the President’s son even making comment.

Robin Westman wrote a detailed manifesto that revealed how the killer spent months planning the attack on Annunciation Church.

The killer, 23, explicitly stated having a desire to gun down ‘a big assembly on the first day of school’ and admitted to being ‘morbidly obsessed’ with school shooters.

Police are investigating possible motives for Wednesday’s massacre and the FBI is treating it as a hate crime and act of domestic terror.

But Westman’s manifesto suggests that killer did not have one singular motive or trigger for the deadly shooting.

‘In regards to my motivation behind the attack I can’t really put my finger on a specific purpose,’ Westman wrote.

‘It definitely wouldn’t be for racism or white supremacy. I don’t want to do it to spread a message. I do it to please myself. I do it because I am sick.’

Robin Westman, a transgender woman, changed her name from Robert in 2019.

Mary Grace Westman was a signatory to the killer’s name change application, court documents show.

In the filing, Mary Grace wrote that the move was to reflect that her child was ‘[identifying] as a woman’.

But, according to a former employee at Annunciation Catholic School, she struggled with her child’s transition.

She had confided in the employee that Westman was transgender and identified as a girl and admitted: ‘I don’t know how I feel about this.’

‘I think she was struggling with her Catholic faith… She didn’t know how she felt, but it weighed heavily on her,’ the employee said.

Over the years, Mary had also reportedly voiced concerns over Westman’s behavior at school and social issues.

Westman didn’t have any friends in eighth grade and was disruptive in class, often being sent to the principal’s office, the employee said.

Only one child remains hospitalized at the Children’ Minnesota hospital in Minneapolis, hospital officials said last night.

The child’s condition remains unclear but six other patients were treated and discharged following the deadly shooting, according to CNN.

Hennepin Healthcare Clinic and Specialty Center had earlier said it was treating nine patients, including one child in critical condition.

Among the school shooters Robin Westman, 23, was reportedly inspired by was transgender gunman Audrey Hale, who opened fire at The Covenant School on March 27, 2023.

At the time of the shooting, Hale used male pronouns and went by the name ‘Aiden.’

‘I like the shooters who know what they’re doing,’ Westman wrote in her manifesto, according to KARE.

‘Shooters who plan for violence and mass death. Adam Lanza, Nikolaz Cruz, Erik, and Aiden…“ Westman wrote, referring also to the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shooters.

She went on to name other school shooters in Norway and Crimea.

The Westman family has had officers called to their home in Hastings, Minnesota at least twice before Wednesday’s horrific mass shooting.

In January 2018, a police officer in Eagan, Minnesota was dispatched to the family’s home over a mental health issue, according to a heavily-redacted police report obtained by NBC News.

The officer notes in the report that he ‘assisted Mendota Heights with a check welfare on a juvenile.’

The name of that juvenile and what exactly prompted police to be summoned to the three-bedroom home were redacted.

Police were also dispatched to the Westman’s home two years prior when they responded to a report of a ‘criminal offense.’

But the report blacks out all of the details describing the event.

Still, O’Hara said authorities did not have any information indicating that the school shooter suffered from any type of mental illness that would preclude her from obtaining pistols or semiautomatic weapons under Minnesota’s red flag law.

‘There is nothing in the investigation so far that would lead us to believe that anything was missed,’ he said, noting that beyond a traffic ticket Westman did not have a police record.

The school shooter was the youngest of three children born to Mary Grace and her now ex-husband, Jim, before they got divorced in 2013.

Pictured: The youngest of three Westman children whose parents divorced in 2013, Robin Westman (seen front right with her family) lived in Hastings, Minnesota, before Mary and Jim split (second from left)

Mary Grace Westman has retained an attorney after the deadly Minneapolis school shooting.

‘She is completely distraught about the situation and has no culpability but is seeking an attorney to deal with calls like this,’ Attorney Ryan Garry told Fox News.

Garry was hired by NFL star Colin Kaepernick and his Know Your Rights Campaign to represent protesters after George Floryd’s death in May 2020.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said at a news conference on Thursday that dozens of interviews have been conducted with Robin Westman’s relatives, friends and associates.

But officers ‘have not been successful in talking to the shooter’s mother’, he said.

It is unclear why Mary Grace is not cooperating with investigators.

She had worked at the Annunciation Church School up until her retirement in 2021, and Robin – who previously went by Robert until changing names in 2019 to reflect ‘identifying as a woman’ – graduated from the school in 2017.

Pictured: Criminal defense attorney Ryan Garry

Federal agents descended on a Florida condo belonging to the mother of transgender school shooter Robin Westman after she refused to cooperate with authorities investigating the deadly attack.

Plainclothes FBI agents could be seen in video footage arriving at Mary Grace Westman’s Naples, Florida condominium and banging on the door as the windows and shades were shuttered.

When they received no answer at the front door, the agents scurried to the backdoor – but had no success there either, WINK News reports.

The feds were apparently not the only ones looking to speak with Westman on Thursday. Deputy vehicles from the local Collier County Sheriff’s Office were seen circling the Berkshire Lakes condominium complex.

The other victim who died in Wednesday’s shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church has been identified by her parents as 10-year-old Harper Moyski.

‘We are devastated to share that our beloved daughter, Harper Moyski, was tragically killed in the recent school shooting,’ Michael Moyski and Jackie Flavin said in a statement.

They described their daughter as a ‘bright, joyful and deeply-loved 10 year old whose laughter, kindness and spirit touched everyone who knew her.

‘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,’ they continued, noting that they are ‘shattered and words cannot capture the depth of our pain.’

The grieving parents then called for action on gun control, saying they ‘believe it is important that [Harper’s] memory fuels action.

‘We urge our leaders and communities to take meaningful steps to address gun violence and the mental health crisis in this country,’ they said.

‘Change is possible and it is necessary – so that Harper’s story does not become yet another in a long line of tragedies.’

Moyski and Flavin also said they are ‘deeply grateful for the outpouring of love, prayers and support.

‘Harper’s light will always shine though us and we hope her memory inspires others to work toward a safer, more compassionate world.’

The eight-year-old who was killed in Wednesday’s mass shooting was identified by his parents as Fletcher Merkel.

‘Yesterday, a coward decided to take our eight-year-old son Fletcher away from us,’ his grieving father Jesse said at a news conference.

‘Because of their actions,we will never be allowed to hold him, talk to him, play with him and watch him grow into the wonderful young man he was on the path to becoming.’

Jesse then asked the public ‘for sympathy and not your empathy as our family and the Annunciation community grieve and try to make sense of such a senseless act of violence.’

‘Please remember Fletcher for the person he was and not the act that ended his life,’ he continued, as he urged parents to ‘give your kids an extra hug and kiss today.’

‘We love you Fletcher, you will always be with us,’ Jesse concluded.