What we know about Robin Westman, the Minneapolis Catholic school shooter

There’s a new murderer to add to the long list of school shootings in the United States. Details are trickling in about the identity of the individual who killed two children and injured 17 other people in an attack on a Catholic school in Minneapolis. FBI Director Kash Patel has confirmed that the suspect is Robin Westman, 23, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after the shooting.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara claims Westman had an arsenal of weapons. The attack involved a high-powered rifle, a shotgun and a nine-millimeter pistol. All of these were purchased legally. Westman approached Annunciation Catholic School around 8:30 a.m. and fired shots at the window of the church, which was filled with children celebrating daily Mass. This is the first week of classes at the school, founded in 1923 and attended by nearly 400 students.

Westman, according to O’Hara, did not have an extensive criminal record, and according to initial investigations, is believed to have acted alone. CNN reported having seen a yearbook that shows the assailant graduated from this school in 2017. “It is pure cruelty and cowardice to shoot at a church full of children. It is simply incomprehensible,” the police chief stated when asked by the press about Westman’s identity and motivations.

FBI director Patel assured that the crime will be treated as an act of domestic terrorism and a hate crime against Catholics. In a message on X, he wrote: “The shooter has been identified as Robin Westman, a male born as Robert Westman.” ABC News reported that driver’s license information describes Westman as a female born on June 17, 2002. This outlet said that a name change application for a minor born on the same date was approved by a district court in Minnesota in 2020, changing the name of a Robert Westman to Robin Westman.

Authorities are reviewing a series of videos that Westman posted to YouTube this morning and have already been taken down at the request of the police. One of them shows the arsenal the suspect allegedly used to carry out the shooting. The high-powered rifle bears various extremist and hateful inscriptions that call for the assassination of Donald Trump, supremacist and anti-Semitic messages, and also anti-Catholic messages. Other messages praise perpetrators of other mass shootings. One of them reads: “Where is your God?” “For the children,” reads another inscription.

In the eleven minutes of footage, Westman shows notebooks with pages filled with scribbles and nonsensical writing. On a handful of pages, the killer revealed a glimpse of a troubled mind. The suspect claimed to have lung cancer due to a vaping addiction. Westman also claimed to be depressed and angry and confessed to have been plotting the attack for five years.

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