The Church Bells Still Ring

A little more than a century before a hail of gunfire rained down on the congregation, parishioners of the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis held their parish’s first mass. It fell on the feast day of St. Remigius, whose miracles included such wonders as saving the infant son of a Frankish king. 

Remigius’s commitment to God was unquestioned. The assailant on Aug. 27, 2025, did not share that religious certainty but instead worshiped twisted deities, murdering children as a way of depraved tribute to the Columbine mass shooters and others like them. Many of the children targeted acted, much like their canonized fifth-century saint, to protect the youngest among them. 

In all, 26 children and three of their elders were wounded while trying to escape or, in some cases, shield each other. Two of the youngest pupils, Fletcher Merkel, an 8-year-old, and Harper Moyski, a 10-year-old, did not escape the violent fury of a person who saw nothing of value in this world or the next. 

The children were there to pray. The shooter, Robin Westman, was not. 

The students and teachers inside the chapel read from the holy book, filled with stories and parables passed down for generations about the disciples and their savior. Tucked in the back of every Catholic church pew is the missalette, a book that provides recommended songs, scripture, and the order of the Mass. Those texts are the same in every church St. Peter helped build around the world, binding 1.4 billion to a unified set of beliefs. At a school liturgy, it’s typical to see younger congregants use the missalette to follow along with a Mass that can sometimes feel at both times comforting in its repetition and confusing in its symbolism. 

Much of the media reporting accepts the shooting as simply another predestined outcome of an online culture that increasingly fixates on death and happily welcomes nihilism in its most violent form. Undoubtedly, that was part of it. Westman’s manifesto, however, also indicates the amorphous concept of nihilistic violent extremism may have been too generous. It was more about notoriety with a nod to nihilism. It wasn’t for any single ideology, religion, philosophy, or some other tangible or coherent belief: The goal was to create as much suffering as possible in the shortest amount of time. Violent trolling, by its very nature, diametrically opposes sacred traditions such as those routinely performed at Annunciation. 

In court records, the FBI defines nihilistic extremism as an ideology, arguing the purpose underlying its adherents’ violent acts is to sow enough chaos for society’s collapse. But Westman was no anarchist, and giving the attack a simplistic ideological gloss to fit neatly in our preexisting political frameworks credits Westman and other young, detached mass shooters too much. 

The gospel reading from that day was from Matthew, chapter 23 verses 27 through 32 (“So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”), where the apostle rails against the hypocrisy of the Pharisees who appear to value sanctimony in public but live their own lives divorced from the teachings of their faith. It’s a heady and dense reading for any believer, let alone those recently christened into the church. The shooting began before the part of the liturgy when the disciples’ words could be spoken out loud. But in the days that follow, Matthew’s warnings about public proclamations of support but private indifference to suffering would take on even greater meaning. 

The 23-year-old Westman followed a different set of disciples. Most mass shooting manifestos borrow from the previous ones, in an endless chain of copycat violence dating back to Columbine. Today, an entire online ecosystem glorifies the killers as “saints,” tallying their victims up in TikTok edits like scores in a video game. The group’s members—predominantly teens and adolescents—call themselves the true crime community. They adopt the aesthetics—the dress, ideology, type of weapon, memes, pictures, and symbols—of killers, and they push each other to kill. 

No U.S. government countermessaging campaign or well-funded outside civil society groups exist to push back against this vitriol. There are no dissenting voices to steer children toward a healthier vision of a more positive world. As such, the online echo chamber continues to transform kids and teens into violent shells of their former innocent selves. 

Four Dominican nuns founded Annunciation Catholic School in 1923. For the school’s first year, 72 pupils enrolled; by 2025, the school had grown to 340 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. The young pupils wore navy and green uniforms—the school’s colors, almost like Notre Dame, without the gold.

“Fuck those kids,” Westman, a former student, said over a recording. The online video is a journey. Westman starts singing “skibidi” before showing off the preparations for the attack, methodically holding up to the camera every gun and cartridge, which had a variety of racist slurs and antisemitic tropes, phrases like “Kill Donald Trump,” and the names of past mass shooters etched in chalk. In the chamber of a Glock, Westman inscribed, “There is no message.” Westman wanted a reaction from everyone, about everything, anything, or perhaps nothing at all. Not only to be whispered about in polite society, but to live on loudly in infamy in the manifestos of the mass killers that come after.

At some point, the camera points downward at Westman’s feet for a minute. A then-anonymous school shooter, in white socks and brown cargo pants, clutches a vape. A possible callout to other school shooters from the months before—Samantha Rupnow and Solomon Henderson—who bizarrely dedicated one of their final moments to taking pictures of their footwear. Shortly after, there is a poor rendition of Annie’s “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow.” Westman laughs in an unsettling way—in part, because viewers can tell Westman wanted them to be unsettled. 

The students’ uniforms blended into the landscape of a Minnesota August, with its elm-lined streets and deep green grass blanketing the school’s baseball diamond, just to the left beside its chapel. In June, the Minnesota Twins announced they would renovate the field to “create space for healing, play & hope.”

At Columbine High School in 1999, the shooters wore trench coats on top of their black T-shirts, which read “Wrath” and “Natural Selection.” At Abundant Life Christian School in December 2024, Rupnow, a 15-year-old, wore a black shirt emblazoned with a bull’s-eye and black-laced boots; Rupnow took a picture of the boots in the minutes before the attack, the camera pointed down in a bathroom stall, as the shooter held up three fingers. 

In the United Kingdom, an admittedly imperfect but occasionally successful program called Channel seeks to guide troubled individuals off the path to radicalization. More than half of the program’s referrals last year were for children. Strategies to identify and intervene early on with people exposed to these levels of hate are not a silver bullet for violence prevention, merely one of many that must be implemented. But at least it’s one part of the puzzle to stopping the next mass attack. There is no equivalent initiative in the United States. Efforts to build one were forever stalled in the previous administrations and fully abandoned in this one.  

A month later, another shooter—this time, Henderson, a 17-year-old—retreated to the bathroom to take pictures holding up the same three-finger symbol at Antioch High School. And in September 2025, several days before Desmond Holly, a 16-year-old, opened fire inside Evergreen High School, he posted a TikTok wearing a black T-shirt with red letters. “Wrath” had been painted on it. 

The Annunciation school mass began at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 27, 2025. It is hard to explain the importance of the first school-wide mass to a layperson. For many young believers, it is a moment of innocent joy. A time to bring together children of all ages from kindergarten to eighth grade under a unifying set of Catholic beliefs. Beliefs that are far too often subject to ridicule and misunderstanding. Many young people sit under the steeple and question those beliefs but attend the ritual nonetheless because the act of attempting to believe is one of the last few noble endeavors left in the world. There is something powerful about looking over the sea of church pews filled with people struggling with their faith and their own tribulations and knowing you are not alone in an ever-changing world. The first call to 911 came in at 8:27 a.m. 

The bottom left corner of the massive stained-glass window in the back of the church shows a man with his hands over his face. It’s Adam in the Garden of Eden, ashamed for disappointing God. In the closing credits, Westman’s manifesto video asked subscribers to like and share its content. When bullets burst through a stained-glass pane, it would have been reasonable to assume it was a first week of school prank, probably firecrackers by mischievous eighth graders. Then more followed. The principal yells for the hundreds of kids and teachers to take cover.

“Bigger kids were able to quickly help little ones in the church because many of them had been paired together in a buddy system,” one parent of five children who attend the Catholic school told NPR. The early teenagers pushed younger students down out of the line of fire. One middle schooler was shot in the back, shielding a younger student.

Most parochial schools have a buddy system; younger students partner with older ones for the occasional recess hang-out or sitting together during school functions. Sometimes they’ll pray the rosary together. It starts with a sign of the cross, then the Apostles’ Creed, a prayer that concludes with an unflinching belief in everlasting life. The buddy system helps put the younger kids at ease knowing someone bigger than them is looking out for them, and it teaches the older kids the responsibility of protecting and mentoring the younger ones. It builds a sense of community. To an outside observer, pairing younger kids up with older ones may seem like a harmless yet antiquated tradition, but it saved lives on that August day.

No one was with Westman on West Diamond Lake Road when the shots began. The assailants at Abundant Life Christian, Antioch, and Evergreen high schools, among others, appeared to be lone wolves, too. If you have trouble recalling all those specific mass shootings, it's because we, as a society, have become accustomed to such depravity. But their future accomplices remember, raised on memes venerating violence and videos desensitizing gore, all online. 

When Westman fired a rifle into the suburban Minneapolis chapel in August 2025, the FBI had dozens of investigations into nihilistic violent extremism, mostly targeting online terror networks such as the true crime community and 764, an insidious group that coerces other young people into committing unspeakable acts of self-harm and abuse. To this subset of nihilists, killing children is not immoral or anything really; it just is. 

Today, the FBI has more than 250 active investigations into an increasingly prevalent online culture of death. Looking at social media, this trend shows no signs of slowing down. Its participants are younger and even more desensitized. Most mainstream platforms have largely ceded their corporate and moral responsibility for policing content on their public squares, in favor of bottom lines and a veneer of protecting free expression that rings hollow upon closer inspection. The more fringe sites, where people on the radicalization path, such as Westman, flock to access more violent content, intervene even less. 

Westman was never arrested. A self-inflicted gunshot to the head prevented that. Henderson, Rupnow, and Holly shared the same fate. According to the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha, there have been more than 30 nihilistic violent extremism-related prosecutions in recent years. Faced with a reality that many of the words and actions taken by these shooters before their attacks never cross a legal threshold of criminal charges, a patchwork of states have begun to lean more fully into the concept of behavioral threat assessment management. Such teams seek to create central reporting mechanisms to identify individuals and behaviors of concern with the goal of crafting intervention strategies that decrease risks of violence. Interviews with members of those teams reveal a recurring theme. Despite their promising early results, they are overworked and woefully underresourced.

“Jesus wept.” It’s the shortest verse in the New Testament, but arguably its most powerful. The Bible has moments when Jesus, whom believers trust exists as the son of God and the son of man simultaneously, allows his human side to take precedence. His anger at the merchants in the temple, his incredulity toward his parents’ concern about his whereabouts after the Festival of Passover, and, in Bethany, a small town in the West Bank, where he mourned the passing of his dear friend Lazarus. 

For some theologians, it’s hard to comprehend their savior’s grief with the knowledge that he can and will resurrect Lazarus. But the Catholic faith allows for grief, albeit for short, fleeting moments. Eventually, we’re told, it is supposed to be replaced with a calming belief that it is but a temporary loss before you see your loved one again in eternity. It’s hard to feel that comfort when the coffins are child-sized.

Today, true crime community members—kids and teens, really—post dozens of 30-second clips on TikTok every day, drawing hundreds of likes and comments within several hours. In one video, a child, who can’t be over the age of 13, dances wearing fatigues, a bulletproof vest, a tactical helmet, and a skull mask, with a holster holding a pistol around his waist. A teen girl, who looks like any other, except for the skull mask covering her lower face, does the same dance trend. The dance videos are captioned “#sinister,” “#larp,” “#tccdance,” and “#truecringecommunity.”

The teen girl’s other, nondancing posts are montages of Randy Stair, who killed three of his co-workers at a supermarket in Pennsylvania before killing himself in 2017. Another user posts an artificial intelligence-generated video of the Parkland high school shooter dancing in front of images of the school as a ticker in the left-hand corner rises from one to 17—the death toll. The bio for one account reads “forget me, I’ll be gone.” 

TikTok removes some of the posts and accounts after a day or two, but not all. A montage that flashes pictures of Westman and the guns used in the attack, with their chalked words, as a song with the lyrics “I hate to see you cry. My love is dying inside” plays, has been on the platform for months.

How can a society prevent more tiny coffins? It requires, as an initial first step, a sober assessment of who we are and what we do to support the minds of our future generations. You can’t look away from the preteens dancing in tactical vests on TikTok or the school shooter simulators on Roblox. Even if they possessed the political will, social media companies can’t address 764 and the true crime community with a one-size-fits-all moderation strategy; they’re networks of participants who are adept at flouting algorithmic detection and creating end runs around remedial measures. It requires a sustained focus, something we’ve lost in a world of algorithms that train us to value attention only for 30-second intervals.

And law enforcement agencies from the federal level all the way down to local school resource officers can’t assume these young people are simply troubled outliers and that their acts of violence are the unfortunate, unavoidable cost of troubled minds. These are impressionable, vulnerable, and often isolated teens and adolescents who have been radicalized by peers, who have fooled each other and themselves into feeling a sense of belonging in a violent, cruel community. Many entered their adolescence trapped inside and online as a global pandemic raged outside their windows. Opportunities for typical social interactions were limited, to say the least. For far too many, the worst versions of ourselves that we as a society produced—collectively in our stoic indifference—offered some of the few opportunities to feel connected. 

Westman wasn’t born idolizing mass shooters. Something terrible is happening to our kids, and we seem unwilling to act beyond a passing surface-level self-reflection. One has to sit for a moment with that awful truth. We have to reckon with that if we want to stop others from following their idols to the grave. There is good to be found and fostered in today’s youth, as demonstrated in stark contrast by the moments of sacrifice shielding other children during the attack in that church. But that contrast immediately conjures up a question. How do we raise more kids who don’t trade their navy and green elementary school uniforms for fake army fatigues? 

On Aug. 25, Minneapolis law enforcement released 2,648 pages of evidence from that day and the investigation that followed. The report includes crime scene photos such as a picture of a bullet hole in a statue of Mary and Joseph, wrapped in police caution tape. It also contains hundreds of close-ups of Westman’s gun and their chalk markings next to an evidence number. But the release of thousands of pages of public records is no true after-action report. Instead, it reads like a document dump from any run-of-the-mill criminal case, with little effort to make sense of the reasons behind Westman’s actions or to take tangible steps that could prevent the next “saint.” 

There are 42 words in the Hail Mary, a favored prayer for young congregants for its simplicity and soothing cadence. A seasoned believer can pray to the matriarch of the church in under 12 seconds. The shooting lasted two minutes, with 119 bullets fired. The chapel’s pews are standard fare for any Catholic church, solid wood with a slight slant on the back. A golden crucifix hangs in front of wood paneling at the front. Children duck and run toward the exit, past the large baptismal font that washed away a century of parishioners’ original sins. 

Shortly following the attack, hundreds of students, teachers, and community members quietly gathered outside the Hennepin County Medical Center, one of the places where dozens of the injured and the deceased were brought after the sounds of the shooting stopped. An impromptu candlelight vigil included a moment of silence. In the 11-minute video post prior to the suicide and shortly before the attack, Westman noted that “got my new headphones so I don’t hear them scream.” At 8:26 a.m. today, churches around the Twin Cities will loudly ring their bells to remember the victims. The sound will be deafening and haunting, as solemn remembrances must be, regardless of anyone’s attempts to drown it out. 

Carved in the stone of the Annunciation Catholic Church are the words “This is the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.” One year ago today, two children entered through the house and were brought to the gates of heaven too soon by a murderer who believed in nothing. 

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