A 10-year-old acted like a human shield to protect a younger schoolmate. An eighth-grader prayed while hiding under a pew. A frightened 11-year-old asked her father to lock the doors and draw the curtains when she arrived home.
These were just a handful of stories of courage and fear that have emerged a day after Wednesday’s horrific shooting at a Minneapolis church during a Mass for Catholic school children.
One of the students at Annunciation Catholic Church during the deadly morning attack took a shotgun blast to his back after putting his body in the line of fire trying to protect another child, county health officials said.
“There’s a lot of maybe unrecognized heroes in this event, along with the children that were protecting other children,” said Martin Scheerer, a director at Hennepin Emergency Medical Services. “The teachers were getting shot at. They were protecting the kids.”
The shooter killed two children and wounded 18 teachers and children, including a child taken to hospital in critical condition. The shooter was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and the FBI is investigating the attack as domestic terrorism.
In the U.S., deadly gun violence has grown more common at schools, churches and other settings once considered safe, despite efforts to beef up security and identify potential perpetrators before they can act.
The shooter, armed with a rifle, a pistol and a shotgun, fired through the stained glass windows at students from Annunciation Catholic School at a service to celebrate the new school year.
Chloe Francoual, 11, was among the students who were terrified and traumatized by the flying bullets and shattered glass.
“She thought she was going to die with her friends,” her father, Vincent Francoual, said in an interview.
After father and daughter were reunited in the school gym after the attack, the pair burst into tears, he said. Later, Chloe wanted all the doors in the house locked and the curtains drawn, and implored her father not to walk the dog for fear of dangers outside.
“She’s just a little girl,” her father said. “She’s feeling all this guilt that she is OK, but her friends aren’t.”
Young survivors and witnesses of such violence often experience a range of symptoms in the first few weeks after the event, according to Dr. Gail Saltz, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College.
As part of an “acute stress reaction” they may have separation anxiety, trouble sleeping or experience a temporary regression of developmental steps such as a return to bed-wetting, Saltz said.
The shooter, identified as Robin Westman, 23, shared a suicide note in a video posted to YouTube. Westman described struggles with anger and depression and a belief that death was near because of a vaping habit. Westman also made reference to other deadly U.S. school shootings.
Debate over access to guns and mental healthcare
State and federal authorities said the shooter was driven by hatred, a fascination with U.S. mass shootings and a desire for notoriety.
Shooting reported at church in Minneapolis; suspect ‘contained’
“The shooter was obsessed with the idea of killing children,” said Joe Thompson, acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, who cited writings the shooter left behind. “The shooter wanted to watch children suffer.”
In a country that has grown accustomed to mass shootings, each new attack stirs a long-running national debate over the causes: easy access to guns versus treatment of mental illness in a country with expensive, privatized healthcare.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. said his agency was investigating whether antidepressants and other drugs prescribed to some transgender people were a factor in the sort of deadly violence seen at the Annunciation Church.
The vast majority of U.S. mass shootings are done by teenage boys and young men. Westman was a transgender woman, according to court records marking her name change as a teenager.
FBI Director Kash Patel said agents had evidence the shooting was an “act of domestic terrorism motivated by a hate-filled ideology.” Westman’s writings included anti-Catholic prejudice and a call for the killing of U.S. President Donald Trump, a Republican, Patel said.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, was joined by several gun-control advocacy groups to call for a ban on certain high-capacity semi-automatic rifles, sometimes called assault weapons. A 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling reaffirmed the right of individual Americans to own guns.
The mayor took issue with the view of many conservatives who say the prevalence of gun violence in the U.S. is a mental health issue, unrelated to access to firearms.
“People who say, ‘This is not about guns,’ you gotta be kidding me: this is about guns,” Frey said on Thursday in an interview with ABC News.
“A 10-year-old boy had more courage hiding in a church pew while his friend shielded him with his body than I have seen from far too many lawmakers more beholden to a gun lobby than a child,” said Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of Moms Demand Action, a gun violence prevention group.
Vincent Francoual, who works as a chef, said his daughter Chloe wants to move to her father’s native France now. In Europe, he noted, you can get a gun for hunting, but “you can’t just walk into a store and get these weapons.”
“We have crazy people all over the world, but not these weapons,” he said.
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