Minnesota's school security failure and pathway to radicalization probed after shooting

The deadly shooting at a Minnesota Catholic school should prompt school security review and an investigation into how the transgender-identifying attacker was radicalized, experts say. 

The attack, which left two students dead and more than a dozen injured after Robin Westman, a transgender-identifying 23-year-old, targeted students at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis while they were attending a back-to-school Mass at the church of the same name. Westman had previously posted disturbing and incoherent content on social media, including images of weapons with "Kill Donald Trump" and "Nuke India" written on them. 

The Minnesota government is also facing criticism over its failure to provide security funding for religious schools, despite pleas from the Catholic Bishops Association in the state, who wanted to harden security after a spate of school shootings across the country in recent years. 

Minnesota allocated “millions” to fund public school security, but refused to provide similar resources to private schools. Amy Swearer, Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said school security could have made all the difference in the attack. 

“When we look at what happened here, one of the things that we know actually stops these, these mass shooters, is one, what is the quickness of the response, the swiftness of the armed response, but also the ability to detect these threats in advance and to deal with them and to have secure facilities,” Swearer told the Just the News, No Noise TV show. 

“And that funding, again, unfortunately, was not secured for these schools, and we can only look back now and ask, what difference might that have made?” Swearer asked. 

“And I think the answer, and unfortunately, is that it might have made a much bigger difference than some of the things that are often thrown around in the aftermath of these sorts of events, about taking away certain types of firearms,” she said. 

Catholic schools' appeals for school safety went ignored 

The deadly shooting follows two separate appeals by the Minnesota Catholic Conference, the public policy representative of the state’s six Catholic dioceses, to the state government to extend the public school security funding implemented in 2019 to religious and private schools.

Their appeals, in 2022 and 2023, came shortly after two prior deadly shootings at schools in Uvalde, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee. The Bishops’ organization argued that students attending Catholic schools should have access to the same security funding that the state’s public institutions receive. 

“We need to ensure that all our schools have the resources to respond to and prevent these attacks from happening to our schools,” wrote Minnesota Catholic Conference’s executive director Jason Adkins in an April 14, 2023, letter to Gov. Tim Walz and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan. The letter was also signed by Tim Benz, President of Minndependent, a group that connects private and independent schools in the state. 

“Since 2020, nonpublic schools have been advocating to be part of the Safe Schools Program that provides funding to school districts for emergency response training, security upgrades, mental health services, and security resources,” the pair wrote. “Unfortunately, this program currently does not cover nonpublic schools, charter schools and intermediate school districts, and it is a levy-only program for school districts.” 

The groups sent the letter to Gov. Walz in the immediate aftermath of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, which bears striking similarities to the attack on the Annunciation Catholic School. Both appear to be carried out by radicalized, gender-confused individuals. The nearly two-year investigation into the Covenant school shooter’s writings and life, however, did not identify a specific anti-Christian motivation. 

Now Walz says he “cares deeply about the safety of students”

On Thursday, FBI Director Kash Patel said the bureau “gathered information and evidence demonstrating that [the Annunciation shooting] was an act of domestic terrorism motivated by hate-filled ideology.” 

The director said in a post to X that Westman “left multiple anti-Catholic, anti-religious references both in his manifesto and written on his firearms” and “expressed hatred and violence toward Jewish people.”

Walz’s office said that the governor “cares deeply about the safety of students” and has “signed into law millions in funding for school safety,” in a statement to the National Catholic Register, which first reported on the unanswered letters. The outlet confirmed that none of the previous funding bills included monies for non-public schools. 

Also coming to the forefront are questions about Westman’s radicalization pathway and what impact his mental health, possible gender dysphoria, or even foreign actors could have had.  

[The] shooter's journal, which had anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and radical leftist ideology detailed in it…was also written in Cyrillic, which is the Russian alphabet as well,” Eric Conroy, former CIA agent and candidate for Congress in Ohio told the Just the News, No Noise TV show. 

“So there are a lot of angles to explore here and to investigate, including not only the hate crime angle, but also any international entanglements. It's very bizarre that it was written in or part of his journal was written in Russian as well,” he added. 

Gender dysphoria and mental illness in adolescents under review

Swearer said that the proper focus in this case is not on the firearms the perpetrator used, but on the signs of mental illness that may have emerged before the shooting, raising red flags with those closest to him. 

“Here is an individual who was clearly unhinged, who was, you almost have to assume, showing signs of being unhinged. And we have to look at the who, not the what. And I think again, unfortunately, here you have an individual who was mentally ill and clearly evidencing signs of being a danger to themselves or others long before this. And we have to look at intervention, early intervention, for these specific individuals to stop this,” Swearer said.

“It's not about the type of firearm. I think that's really undershooting what we could be doing in terms of prevention. Here it is about taking all firearms out of the hands of people who are dangerous and getting them help,” she continued.  

The shooting, which is the fifth actual or foiled attack since 2019 involving a transgender-identifying perpetrator, continues to raise questions about what impact an apparent struggle with gender dysphoria may have had on the Annunciation shooter’s mental health. 

Shooter on being trans: "I wish I never brain-washed myself” 

Reported pages of the shooter's deranged notebook, which the killer posted to social media before the attack, show that Westman appeared to struggle over his decision to try to become a woman. In the manifesto, he said that he was “tired of being trans” and wished he “never brain-washed himself,’ according to the New York Post. 

“I only keep [the long hair] because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself,” he wrote, according to the Post’s translation of the manifesto—written mainly in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. 

“I regret being trans.. I wish I was a girl I just know I cannot achieve that body with the technology we have today. I also can’t afford that,” Westman later wrote.

Elsewhere in the manifesto, Westman wrote about idolizing other infamous school shooters, including the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012.