Parents await news during an active shooter situation at the Annunciation Church.  Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Star Tribune via AP

Dear Commons Community,

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.

The shooting, which occurred shortly before 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, is 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.  As reported by Education  Week and othermedia.

The shooter, who has been identified as a 23-year-old, shot through the church windows during the service, as dozens of children sat in the pews. The pre-K-8 school’s first day of classes was Monday, according to a post on the school’s Instagram page.

In a local press conference yesterday afternoon near the scene of the crime, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara confirmed that in addition to the two children who were killed, 14 children between the ages of 6 and 15 were injured by the gunfire. Three adults in their 80s, believed to be parishioners of the church, were also shot and injured. Each of these 17 victims is expected to survive, O’Hara said.

Annunciation Catholic School Principal Matt DeBoer said the school’s teachers acted quickly and heroically during the shooting.

“Children were ducked down, adults were protecting children, older children were protecting younger children,” he said during the afternoon press conference. “It could have been significantly worse without their heroic action. This is a nightmare, but we call our staff the dream team, and we will recover from this.”

To the school community, he said: “I love you. You’re so brave, and I’m so sorry this happened to us today.”

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—all purchased legally—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.

Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wrote on X that the FBI is investigating this shooting “as an act of domestic terrorism and hate crime targeting Catholics.”

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.

According to an analysis by Education Week, 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. That incident resulted in the death of an 8-year-old.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey addressed the community in a press conference shortly after the shooting occurred. In an emotional statement, Frey told community members: “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying.”

“These are kids that should be learning with their friends,” Frey continued. “They should be playing on the playground. They should be able to go to school or church in peace without the fear or risk of violence, and their parents should have the same kind of assurance.”

Prior to yesterday’s shooting at Annunciation Catholic School, there had been seven school shootings this year that resulted in injuries or deaths, Education Week’s analysis found.

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, Mich., 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, Tenn., on March 27, 2024.

Tragic!

Tony

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.