Police in Minneapolis say they have not been able to speak to the mother of church shooting suspect Robin Westman, as investigations into the killings continue.
The 23-year-old suspect opened fire through the stained-glass window of the church at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis at around 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday before taking their own life. Two children, named as 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel and 10-year-old Harper Moyski were killed in the attack, with 18 others wounded.
Officers are now trying to piece together what led to the tragedy, including conducting dozens of interviews with those who knew Westman best. But police said they have been unable to speak to Mary Grace Westman, the suspect’s mother, who has hired a criminal defense attorney in the wake of the shooting.
“I know we have not been successful in talking to the shooter’s mother, yet, at this time,” Minneapolis police Chief Brian O’Hara said during a news conference Thursday. “But there continue to be efforts made to get that done.”
What do we know about the suspect’s mother?
Mary Grace worked as a secretary at the Minneapolis school her child opened fire at for five years before her retirement in 2021, according to a Facebook post and a church blog. Her brother 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.
She has retained criminal defense attorney Ryan Garry following the attack. Garry is known for his work with NFL star Colin Kaepernick on representing the George Floyd protestors.
When asked on Fox News on Thursday why Mary Grace had retained an attorney, Garry said: “She is completely distraught about the situation and has no culpability but is seeking an attorney to deal with calls like this.”
The suspect, who identified as a woman, legally went through a name change in 2020, according to court documents. The 23-year-old didn’t have a criminal history.
Cops were seen searching the Westman residence in the Richmond suburb of the city shortly after the shooting. Speaking to The Independent, neighbours said they were taken completely by surprise by what had unfolded.
“I would say I was thunderstruck,” said Jim White, who lives across the street. “We would always say hello to each other in passing and maybe chat a little bit. 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.
“I never saw anything that would have suggested that anything like this would have even been possible,” he said. “It is extremely surreal.”
Police have yet to establish a motive for the shooting. They said investigators are now analyzing a journal thought to have belonged to Westman containing 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.
