Mayor: 'Don't Just Say This Is About Thoughts and Prayers'

The FBI is investigating the mass shooting at a Minneapolis church as "an act of domestic terrorism and hate crime targeting Catholics," FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post on X Wednesday. He said the shooter "has been identified as Robin Westman, a male born as Robert Westman." Police say Westman died by suicide after killing two children, ages 8 and 10, by firing through the windows of Annunciation Church as children from Annunciation Catholic School were attending their first Mass of the school year. At least two of the 17 people injured—14 children and three parishioners in their 80s—are in critical condition, but all are expected to survive, the Minnesota Star Tribune reports.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey "shook his fist in sorrow and anger" as he spoke to reporters, the New York Times reports. "Don't just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now," he said. "These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church." Federal authorities have described Westman, 23, as transgender. Frey said that anybody who use the shooting "as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity," NBC News reports. A yearbook shows that Westman attended Annunciation Catholic School for at least a year, reports the Star Tribune. Records show that his mother is a former school employee.

• CNN law enforcement and intelligence analyst John Miller says a video Westman posted on YouTube shows writings with racist, antisemitic, and anti-religious messages. "A lot of it is his self-pity for how his life is going, that he has been depressed for a long time and he has been planning to do this for a long time—that he knows his friends are going to hate him for it and he's going to take his own life at the end of it," Miller says.
• Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara said content including "disturbing writings" has been removed from YouTube. "There was some sort of manifesto that was timed to come out on YouTube," he said.
• O'Hara said Westman did not have an extensive criminal history, the Washington Post reports. He said Westman, who used a plank of wood to block the church's doors before he opened fire, legally bought the firearms used in the mass shooting.
• President Trump and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz ordered flags to be flown at half-staff. Trump said flags at the White House and at public buildings across the US would be at half-staff until Aug. 31 as a "mark of respect for the victims of the senseless acts of violence" in Minneapolis.
• Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden also spoke out, NBC News reports. "What happened today in Minneapolis is heartbreaking, and Michelle and I are praying for the parents who have lost a child or will be sitting at their hospital bedside after yet another act of unspeakable, unnecessary violence," said Obama, who was president during the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012. In one video, Westman expressed his admiration of the Sandy Hook shooter and other mass killers, the New York Post reports.