Who was Robin Westman? Minneapolis church shooter was obsessed with mass murderers

Robin Westman, 23, has been identified as the shooter responsible for the horrifying mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis on Wednesday, August 27, 2025. During an all-school Mass held for students and faculty in the first week of classes, Westman opened fire from outside the church, shooting through the stained-glass windows. He wielded three legally purchased firearms—a semi‑automatic AR‑15‑style rifle, a 12‑gauge pump‑action shotgun, and a 9 mm pistol, the latter of which jammed during the attack—while barricading exit doors with wooden planks, apparently intending to prevent anyone from fleeing.

Westman killed two children—10‑year‑old Harper Moyski and 8‑year‑old Fletcher Merkel—and injured 18 others, including mostly students aged between 6 and 15, along with three elderly parishioners. After the shooting spree, he died by suicide at the scene.

Authorities have uncovered a disturbing trove of online videos and handwritten journals Westman posted or left behind, which reveal a deep obsession with mass murderers and violent fantasies. In YouTube videos—one 20 minutes long, another around 10—he showed a red spiral notebook filled with rambling passages, some in Cyrillic, and confessed that “mass murder has been on my mind for a while… writing this journal is causing me a lot of conflict.” He praised the Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza as his “favorite” school shooter.

In another video, Westman displayed his guns and magazines, which bore ominous inscriptions: hateful and antisemitic messages including “6 million wasn’t enough,” “kill Donald Trump,” as well as the names of notorious mass killers like Robert Bowers, Anders Behring Breivik, and Adam Lanza.

His writings also detailed deliberate planning: policing crowd behavior, analyzing church vulnerabilities, and choosing his time to strike during large gatherings or recess—he even considered an attack during “a large group of kids coming in from recess” before settling on a church function as a target..

Despite such meticulous planning, Westman had no known criminal history. He grew up in a quiet neighborhood in Richfield, Minnesota, and had attended Annunciation Catholic School before graduating eighth grade in 2017. In 2019, at age 17, Westman legally changed their name from Robert to Robin, with court documents noting that Westman “identifies as a female,” though they later wrote in a diary that they felt conflicted about gender, stating, “I don’t want to dress girly all the time… I know I am not a woman, but I definitely don’t feel like a man”.

Investigators are treating the case as both a potential hate crime—targeting Catholics—and an act of domestic terrorism.