Two children were killed and 17 people were injured during a church service to mark the beginning of the new school year at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. It’s the first school shooting of the new academic year, with the highest number of victims since the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022.
The shooting occurred shortly before 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. The pre-K-8 school’s first day of classes was Monday, according to a post on the school’s Instagram page.
The shooter has been identified as 23-year-old Robin Westman. He shot through the church windows during the service, as dozens of children sat in the pews, injuring 17 people, and killing an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said during a press conference. Fourteen of the people injured were children, O’Hara said, and two of the children are in critical condition.
O’Hara said the shooter, who barricaded two doors on the side of the building that he shot through, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The shooter was armed with a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol, and fired all three, O’Hara said.
“The sheer cruelty and cowardice of firing into a church full of children is absolutely incomprehensible,” O’Hara said.
Annunciation Catholic School, located in southwest Minneapolis, enrolls students in preschool through 8th grade. All students are schooled together on one campus, according to the website. The school is located on the same campus as Annunciation Catholic Church, where the shooting took place.
The 8-year-old who died is the youngest victim killed in a shooting that occurred on school grounds since 2021, when gunfire erupted after a football game at Academy Park High School in Sharon Hill, Pa., and killed an 8-year-old, according to Education Week’s analysis.
President Donald Trump said that he had been fully briefed on the shooting.
“The White House will continue to monitor this terrible situation,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Please join me in praying for everyone involved!”
Prior to Wednesday’s shooting at Annunciation Catholic School, there had been seven school shootings this year that resulted in injuries or deaths, according to an Education Week analysis.
Including the Annunciation school shooting, there have been 229 school shootings since 2018. There were 39 school shootings with injuries or deaths last year. There were 38 in 2023, 51 in 2022, 35 in 2021, 10 in 2020, and 24 each in 2019 and 2018.
Before Wednesday, the last school shooting of 2025 occurred on May 7 at Thurston High School in Redford, Michigan, where a 15-year-old student accidentally shot and injured another student on a school bus.
The Annunciation school shooting is the first to result in a death since March 4, when a 16-year-old was shot and killed after being chased onto school property at Lansdowne High School in Baltimore. It is the deadliest school shooting since three students and three adults were shot and killed at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 27, 2024.
This story will be updated with new details as they become available.
-by Caitlynn Peetz & Brooke Schultz
© 2025 Education Week (Bethesda, Md.). Visit www.edweek.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
