An assailant, who killed two children and wounding 17 other people in a Minneapolis church where parish school students were attending Mass on Wednesday, has been identified as a transgender woman.
Robin Westman, formerly known as Robert Westman, opened fire through the stained-glass windows of a church at the Annunciation Catholic School—where he had once been a student—during a back-to-school Mass filled with children at approximately 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday.
According to the New York Post, just hours before the deadly assault, the 23-year-old posted a series of disturbing videos on YouTube, including a manifesto. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara confirmed this during a press conference.
One of the videos, lasting nearly 20 minutes, shows Westman leafing through a handwritten manifesto filled with unsettling content. Much of the document is written in a crude code that combines Cyrillic characters with English phonetics.
In these writings, Westman fantasized about “being that scary horrible monster standing over those powerless kids” and expressed admiration for the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.
Court documents reveal that Westman petitioned in Dakota County, Minnesota, to change his birth name from Robert to Robin at age 17. The request, which cited that Westman “identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification,” was approved in January 2020. However, five years later, Westman appeared to have abandoned that identity.
FBI Director Kash Patel said that the agency is investigating the attack as “an act of domestic terrorism and a hate crime targeting Catholics.
