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The 23-year-old who killed two students at a Catholic school in Minneapolis “appeared to hate all of us,” authorities said as they continued to piece together a motive for the mass shooting earlier this week.
At a press conference on Thursday, Joe Thompson, the acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, said videos and writings left behind by the shooter — identified as Robin Westman — “expressed hate towards almost every group imaginable,” including Black people, Mexican people, Christians, and Jews. “The shooter appeared to hate all of us,” Thompson continued. “The shooter’s heart was full of hate.”
Thompson went on to say that the only group of people the shooter “admired” and “idolized” were other school shooters and mass murderers. Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara echoed this sentiment, saying the shooter had a “deranged fascination” with mass killings. (Thompson, O’Hara, and others declined to identify Westman or other mass murderers by name due to the way many carry out such attacks in search of notoriety.)
Authorities have yet to identify an exact motive, but Thompson said bluntly at his press conference, “The shooter was obsessed with the idea of killing children. The shooter saw the attack as a way to target our most vulnerable among us… I won’t dignify the shooters words by repeating them, they are horrific and vile; but in short, the shooter wanted to watch children suffer.”
Two children, ages eight and 10, were killed in the shooting, while nearly 20 more were injured, most of them children. Per the latest reports, one child remains in critical condition.
According to Thompson, the shooter left behind “hundreds of pages of writings,” which authorities will continue to examine and share more information from in the coming days. As The Associated Press also notes, a YouTube channel believed to belong to the shooter contained several videos (which have since been deleted). One showed weapons and ammunition, some of which had phrases like “kill Donald Trump” and “Where is your God?” written on them.
Another video appeared to show a person pointing at the windows of a drawing of a church, then stabbing it with a knife. And one video appeared to contain a suicide note addressed to the family. In the note, the shooter confessed to having long-held plans to carry out such a shooting, while there was also talk of serious depression. (The shooter died in the parking lot from what authorities believe was a self-inflicted gunshot.)
Authorities also confirmed that the shooter previously attended Annunciation Catholic Church’s school, where the shooting was carried out, and their mother worked there. A former classmate told The AP, “I remember they had a crazy distaste for school, especially Annunciation, which I always thought was pretty interesting because their mom was on the parish board.”
