The person who the police say opened fire on a Catholic school in Minneapolis on Wednesday appears to have known the school well.
Robin W Westman, who officials said strafed the church through the stained glass windows, killing two children, was believed to have once attended the school at Annunciation Catholic Church, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation.
Her mother, Mary Grace Westman, worked in the business office of the church for five years before retiring in 2021. And in a video posted on social media, the suspect showed a hand-drawn rendering of the Annunciation interior.
And Westman, armed with three weapons, seemed to choose the time carefully. She barricaded the doors during the first all-school mass of the academic year, the police said.
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But it is hard to fathom what drove Westman to attack before killing herself, despite the dark and violent writings and videos she left behind.
The attack killed an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old in the pews and injured 17 others, according to the Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara. The three weapons were purchased legally, police officials said.
Westman (23) lived in a three-story brick building in a complex in Richfield, a suburb just south of the church. She worked at a local cannabis dispensary for several months this year.
As a 17-year-old, she filed a court document to change her first name, to Robin from Robert. It was also signed by her mother. The document noted that Westman “identified as female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”
On social media, some conservative activists have seized on the shooter’s gender identity to broadly portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill. The police did not provide any motive for the attack, but Westman’s extensive social media history was a contradictory catalog of anger and grievance.
In seemingly stream-of-consciousness videos that she posted, she fixated on guns, violence and school shooters. She displayed her own cache of weapons, bullets and what appear to be explosive devices, scrawled with antisemitic and racist language and threats against US president Donald Trump.
The videos also show pages from a diary, with long entries describing self hatred, violence against children, and a desire to inflict harm on herself. The diary entries are almost entirely written in English, but using Cyrillic letters. A sticker in the diary displays LGBTQ and transgender flags with a gun and the slogan “Defend Equality.”
Police said that the videos have been taken offline.
The right-wing uproar over Westman’s gender identity echoed the politicised reaction to a 2023 mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, which was carried out by a former student whom the police said was transgender.
In a news conference, Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, a Democrat, urged the public to avoid scapegoating transgender people in the wake of the tragedy.
“I’ve heard a whole lot of hate directed at our trans community,” he said. “Anybody that is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community — or any other community out there — has lost their sense of common humanity.”
“We should not be operating out of a place of hate for anyone — we should be operating out of a place of love for our kids,” he added. “Kids died today. This needs to be about them.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
