The day after a mass shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic School that left two children dead and 18 people injured, including 15 other kids and three elderly parishioners, local residents continue trying to come to grips with the horrific event.
“I would say I was thunderstruck,” said Jim White, who lives across the street from 23-year-old shooter Robin Westman.
White, 57, told The Independent that he often crossed paths with the suspect’s dad and stepmom, and that the news of the horrific act caught him entirely by surprise.
“We would always say hello to each other in passing and maybe chat a little bit,” White said on Thursday. “They actually gave me a bunch of landscaping rock to use in my yard, and so [they were] good neighbors and all the rest of that. I’d see their kids coming and going pretty frequently, and the father would always be out working on cars or motorcycles and stuff with the kids, so this was not a family you would have thought this kind of thing would happen to.”
Westman was the youngest of three siblings, who were regularly taken to church by their father, according to news reports. Officials confirmed the shooter was a member of the church and attended the school for a brief time. While the exact motive remains unknown, Westman had a desire to hurt children.
If there were any signs of trouble, they were well-hidden, according to White.
“I never saw anything that would have suggested that anything like this would have even been possible,” he said. “It is extremely surreal.”
Westman opened fire through the stained-glass windows of the church adjacent to Annunciation Catholic School around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday as students attended their first Mass of the academic year, according to police. When officers arrived on the scene, they found Westman in the school’s parking lot, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Cops were soon searching for clues at the Westman home in the nearby suburb of Richland, where White – still oblivious to what had occurred – quickly realized that something had obviously gone terribly wrong.
“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 said. “I watched the father and stepmother come out, they were taken down the street a little bit away from their house… It was pretty chaotic for about five or six hours.”
White later found out the details of that morning’s deadly rampage, calling the senseless murders “just crazy.”
“My attitude was, ‘Oh my God, what has happened?’” White recalled. “Just, ‘What in the world happened here?’”
Investigators are now analyzing writings thought to have belonged to Westman, in order to develop a possible motive, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said. The journal contained writings in English and Cyrillic, expressing, among other things, a desire to gun down “a big assembly on the first day of school.”
Other entries in the notebook described feeling a sense of self-hatred and wanting to die, as well as being “morbidly obsessed” with past school shooters. On one page, ““I’m so sorry” is written in large letters. A diagram of the Annunciation Church’s floor plan was included in the diary, which also expressed a virulent antisemitic and racist outlook.
However, the author insisted the shooting was not inspired by any one particular ideal.
“In regards to my motivation behind the attack I can’t really put my finger on a specific purpose,” the passage read. “It definitely wouldn’t be for racism or white supremacy,” the notebook reads. “I don’t want to do it to spread a message. I do it to please myself. I do it because I am sick.”
Police have also been reviewing a series of now-removed YouTube videos posted under Westman’s name, which appear to provide further clues. In the footage, a person believed to be Westman trained the camera on an array of firearms spread out on a bed. The weapons were covered in handwritten messages expressing hatred for Jews and Israel, as well as President Donald Trump.
On one of the guns, the name Robert Bowers could be seen. Bowers was convicted of fatally shooting 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.
According to NBC News, which cited an interview with a former Annunciation employee, Westman had often been disciplined for being disruptive while a student there. The suspect was a loner and did not appear to have any friends at the school, according to the employee, who spoke to the outlet on the condition of anonymity.
Westman’s mother, who now lives out-of-state, previously worked as a secretary at Annunciation Catholic Church, and was worried about her child’s anti-social attitude, the ex-employee said.
The rifle, shotgun and pistol used in Wednesday’s bloodshed were all purchased legally, according to police.
The FBI is investigating the attack as an act of domestic terrorism.
