Getting to school that morning wasn’t so much a commute as a migration. Walkers streamed in from most every block under towering firs and oaks. Boys on bikes whizzed down Lyndale Avenue, their green uniform polos flapping as the late August sun burned off the dawn chill.
Not long before 8 a.m., Sean O’Brien ’11 scanned the sidewalk — his preschooler Emmett hustling to keep up with Conor, in fourth grade, and Finley, in first — as he pushed the small umbrella stroller ferrying Molly in her Notre Dame hoodie: navy with a green ND, size 2T.
Mike Roaldi ’05, ’08J.D., joined the wave in his red Volvo SUV. His sixth grader, Anna Rose, had made them late by working too long on her hair — or at least that’s what her brother John, a year older, was insisting. MJ, in third grade, rode quietly: He’d never jump into a spat like that.
At the red brick building on West 54th Street, Matt DeBoer ’15M.A. had launched his own sixth grader, Gabriel, and third grader, Maria, toward their classrooms and Maya to preschool in the basement of the church next door before heading outside to greet carpoolers on this, his third school day as principal of one of Minneapolis’ dozens of Catholic schools. By the bell, he was offering a morning prayer over the intercom and a reminder that the term’s first school Mass — for which they’d practiced the prior day — was set to start at 8:15 a.m.
“We’ll see everybody over at church,” DeBoer said.
With his kids off to class, Roaldi headed home to hop online for work. But O’Brien had time before his workday began. So, after delivering his elder children, he and Molly, with her pink-and-white backpack of easy-reader books and bristle blocks, headed into the sanctuary and grabbed a spot around some other fathers at the back left, Mary side, of Annunciation Catholic Church.
Deacon Kevin Conneely ’85 was in the sacristy, thinking ahead to the morning’s Gospel reading, the one where Jesus bids woe to the scribes and the Pharisees. A retired attorney, he ribbed the new pastor of this century-old congregation about how he’d preach it to a mostly under-15 crowd.
“Father,” he asked Dennis Zehren, “you’re just going to tell them not to go to law school?”
Usually at the school’s Mass, children take the lead, delivering the readings, psalm and petitions and forming a choir of “little angelic voices.” But in the new academic year’s first week, that wasn’t worked out yet. So it was almost entirely adults at the helm, save the altar boy.
As always, Conneely took off his watch and set it next to his keys and his cellphone. He clipped his lanyard microphone to his collar, its on-off switch wired to a power pack hanging over the cincture at his waist. He gathered his deacon’s vestments: the long dalmatic over the amice, which he wrapped around his neck and shoulders while offering the prayer prescribed for the task: “Place, O Lord, on my head the helmet of salvation, that I may overcome the assaults of the devil.”
Meanwhile, in the sanctuary, a second migration was unfolding. Taller kids intermingled with shorter ones as middle-school “buddies” led in the children they’d been assigned to guide over the next hour.
Soon, the presider and his assistants were at the back of the church, not far from the few elderly regulars, the baptismal font and the bell tower, and just inside the main doors. Outside, the stone transom above those doors was etched with a message anyone could read from the street: “This is the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.”
But not everyone under the soaring roof, held aloft by gigantic stone pillars, was ready to begin.
The clock ticked to 8:16.
The deacon sensed “some confusion trying to get everybody, all the classes into the pews”: 350 students and staff, not including the 40 kids and five teachers from the preschool.
Then, 8:17.
“Let’s get going,” was the vibe Conneely got from Zehren. “We should get going.”
Soon, Principal DeBoer stepped to the lectern.
“God is good all the time; all the time God is good,” he said before noting it was the feast of St. Monica, patron of mothers, and inviting the students to put down their kneelers “because it makes too much noise to do it later.” DeBoer then joined the congregation, not all the way in the back as usual — kids wouldn’t be bringing up the gifts this time — but along the center aisle.
Pause here, he felt as he looked for a seat. The Holy Spirit: You need to be here today. Sixth pew. Mary side.
The faithful jostled to their feet. The processional hymn began.
Come, live in the light!
Shine with the joy and the love of
the Lord!
We are called to be light for the
kingdom,
To live in the freedom of the city of God!
Sean O’Brien, standing next to toddler Molly, looked around the church. Several rows up — 50 feet, maybe — were third graders, including the 8-year-old with the crazy brown hair, who a few years back had played the drummer boy in the Christmas pageant, delivering the show’s last line — “He brings us goodness and light” — before the alumni joined in for the big finish.
We are called to act with justice.
We are called to love tenderly.
We are called to serve one another,
To walk humbly with God!
Also by the skinny side windows were fifth graders, girls in green-and-blue plaid jumpers and green or white tops, polo collars allowed along with Peter Pans. Among them was a 10-year-old aspiring veterinarian with curly, light-brown hair and a full smile who had started ticking off the 63 national parks she intended to visit before her college graduation.
Come, open your heart!
Show your mercy to all those in fear!
We are called to be hope for the
hopeless
So all hatred and blindness will be
no more!
As the priest opened the Mass, small fingers crisscrossed heads and shoulders. Calls and responses echoed before everyone sat for the reading — St. Paul to the Thessalonians — and the Psalm 139 selection. By 8:26, the congregants should have been on their feet and heeding Matthew’s Gospel message about lawyers.
Should have, that is, if Mass hadn’t started late.
Instead, they were sitting, and the psalmist was approaching the final verse — “For your darkness itself is not dark, and night shines as the day” — when Conneely heard it to his right, Mary side:
An explosion.
Like a firecracker.
Windows shattered.
The smell of smoke.
More blasts, impossibly loud.
By the fourth or fifth one, the deacon knew what these noises were.
Gunshots.
He switched on his mic.
“Get down! Get down!” he shouted into the device.
“Get on the ground!”
Sean O’Brien had once been a child in this very church, at this very school — same as his mother.
The year he turned 3, his mother and father bought her childhood home, a block from Minnehaha Creek and not far from Lake Harriet, where they would raise their own big family. They sent their kids to her alma mater, Annunciation Catholic School, then sent Sean to Academy of Holy Angels for high school. There he played strong safety on a state runner-up football team and a math teacher suggested he try engineering.
Through his teens, O’Brien stuck with Annunciation’s youth ministry: water park outings, hayrides, snow tubing, 50-mile bike trips, rug burns from games of Duck, Duck, Gray Duck, along with SeptemberFest set-up and packing meals for Feed My Starving Children. While men up his line had gone to the nearby universities of St. Thomas and Saint John’s, he looked farther afield. And when a 10-page mailer from Notre Dame, with its engineering school, mentioned “the interhall sports — and they had full-contact football” — he was sold.
O’Brien quickly came to love Alumni Hall’s Mass with Father George Rozum, CSC, ’61, ’80MSA presiding. He made his dormmates into family, then wove in the London study-abroad crew. After graduation, he set his mind on officer school for the United States Marine Corps but got sidetracked by his interest in an education student from a big West Saint Paul family. By their first date — to the Minnesota State Fair — O’Brien was smitten and, soon after, also clear: “I’m kind of a Minneapolis snob; living on the west side of the river for me is nonnegotiable.”
When he and Mallory married in 2014, that’s where they moved. And when his parents downsized as his own firstborn was ready for kindergarten, they bought his childhood home and enrolled their son at Annunciation, thinking: “Well, this is the greatest place you could ever be for a kid.”
For years of Sunday mornings in the parish pews, the growing O’Brien clan looked a lot like Mike Roaldi’s family: “You would not be able to hear anything,” he says, “between the books getting dropped on the ground and the crying and the kneeler.”
Roaldi and his wife, Maria ’05, had met as Notre Dame undergraduates. After Mike earned his law degree, they married in Chicago and had their first child, then bounced to Ohio, then to Denver. They had college friends in those places and joined new parishes. “But it always felt a bit like we were at an arm’s length,” Mike Roaldi recalls. “It’s hard to get past that initial phase of small talk: What do you do for a living? You have kids? Where did you grow up?”
Next was Minneapolis, where the family’s first home offer fell through. Another put them close to Annunciation, where another predictably generous welcome threatened to prove an inch deep. Then, at one of their first Masses, Roaldi felt a tap on his shoulder: “It was a classmate . . . a couple years ahead of me at Notre Dame, but he lived in Dillon with me, and he said he recognized me, came up and shook my hand.”
Roaldi had grown up in a big Italian family: constant support, cousins everywhere, Sunday sauce, “cadence of life.” Soon, Annunciation felt like that, too: parents huddled together for hours on youth-sport sidelines — volleyball, soccer, basketball, hockey — the “Run for the Roses” silent auction; Maria crowned champion of “Dancing with Annunciation Stars.”
Somehow, at this church where families traced membership back generations, the Roaldis were home.
Matt DeBoer’s path to Annunciation also took a few stops, starting at Jesuit-run Creighton University in Omaha, where, as an undergrad not long after 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War, he watched the inhumanity of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath play out on television. “It was just that suffering, literally on display, and . . . it just dragged on for, like, weeks, and it was like, ‘Why is there not shelter? Why is there not food? Like, why can’t we figure this out?’”
He made seven service-work trips to New Orleans, then took a Jesuit Volunteer Corps gig at The Good Shepherd School in the 7th Ward before marrying Rose, a Catholic school teacher, and having a son in 2013. That year, he also enrolled in the Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program, an outgrowth of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education.
The program was rigorous, exhausting, with semesters crammed into six weeks over three summers of faith formation and leadership training that included overnight pop quizzes with questions like: “What if two teachers quit, or a pipe bursts on a school night?” He played basketball on the Bookstore courts and leaned way into the program’s call to be “driven to our knees in prayer and driven into each other’s arms and community.”
The next year, DeBoer got hired as the fifth principal in six years at the small, diverse St. Therese Catholic Academy in Seattle, where he changed up his first year’s Philippians 4:13 theme midstream to make it plural: “We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.” When the tug of extended family pulled his own growing brood to his wife’s home state of Minnesota, he worked at Catholic high schools before a retreat reference to St. Irenaeus’ famous adage — “the glory of God is a human being fully alive” — drove him again to want to lead.
Annunciation, named for the angel’s revelation to Mary that she would give birth to the Son of God, wasn’t as needy as St. Therese. It was an International Baccalaureate school and had wealthier parents who could be more invested. But DeBoer saw needs and ways to improve — even if every preteen wouldn’t love all his changes. And he wanted his kids to be part of the community, too.
Not long before he arrived, Kevin and Katie Conneely also landed at Annunciation. They had met in the 1980s when she was at Saint Mary’s College and he at Notre Dame. The golden age of Ara Parseghian and Dan Devine had captivated him: the feel of campus on football Saturdays.
But as Conneely settled in, the gridiron sparkle dimmed. Far from his expectations, Gerry Faust led the Irish to depths few fans could imagine. Still, from this gloom emerged a lesson Conneely carried through his Cavanaugh Hall presidency, graduation, marriage, corporate litigation and raising two daughters in Minneapolis. The rest of Notre Dame “opened up to me, like the musicals in Washington Hall and the forums and the speakers and the other sports,” he recalls. “That was really a great gift.”
Heading toward retirement, the Conneelys tried downtown condo life but soon returned to their old part of town. They joined St. Thomas the Apostle Parish west of Lake Harriet. And they looked into diaconate formation, a long process that at one turn reminded Conneely of his love for the peace of praying in the presence of the Eucharist.
St. Thomas did not have a 24-hour Eucharistic adoration chapel. But less than 3 miles away, inside a small, pretty space with just a tabernacle and some kneelers, Annunciation did. It offered “an intimate encounter with Jesus anytime I wanted it,” he says. It also had a school for which, after ordination, he could “be on the altar at the Wednesday morning Mass with Father, so that they could see us together.”
“Little kids don’t understand the role of a deacon,” he explains. “I wanted to be present and, you know, like, giving them high fives and knuckles on the way out of church. So, I made it a priority to be at the Wednesday school Masses.”
Including the first one in the fall of 2025.
Into his lanyard mic, Conneely screamed again: “Get on the ground! Get down! Stay down!”
From the back of the church, O’Brien watched daylight pierce stained glass at the front, near the altar.
Blam! Blam! Blam!
He grabbed Molly and dashed behind the nearest stone pillar.
This is someone attacking us, he thought. We’re getting shot at.
So, the one-time strong safety who’d flirted with the Marines pressed his toddler into his right side and took off, dropping to his knees before sliding around the baptismal font, past the center aisle, toward a pillar on the Joseph side.
From his presider’s chair, Father Zehren ran toward the wall where the shots were coming from.
Conneely grabbed the altar boy, wrestled him back into the sacristy and took him to the ground.
“I grabbed my phone, dialed 911, went back out to the altar,” the deacon recalls. “And then, I kept watching the far door — not the one where the shots were coming from but the other side — because I was concerned about somebody trying to get in that way. And the shots just kept coming and coming.”
From the sixth pew off the center aisle, DeBoer made for the doors on the Mary side that the bullets were hailing through.
My kids are in here, the father thought: his own three children. If I go down, who’s going to prevent this person from coming in and having easier access to them?
His mind swung: all the rest of the kids. If I go down, the principal knew, they get access to all of them.
So, he turned around. And that’s when he saw Fletcher Merkel, the drummer boy from the Christmas pageant, and Harper Moyski, the girl who dreamed of national parks, “down in the pews.”
Shots echoed as DeBoer moved along the brick wall between the stained-glass windows.
“Shooter!” someone screamed. “Get down!”
By then, though, the church looked empty.
Pew after pew full of children — most of them 5 to 13 years old — knew well the standard response to the chiefly American horror of gunfire at school, intersecting now with the nightmare of gunfire in a house of God.
Still sitting for the psalm, not yet standing for the minutes-late Gospel, they had been that much closer to the ground when the first bullet flew. Big kids were mixed with little; more could fit beneath every bench. And the kneelers — lowered to prevent mid-Mass racket — made the floor easier to access as they dove into piles of plaid, green and white.
Another father bolted toward the church doors near the bullets’ shifting source.
O’Brien sensed the barrage moving toward him and Molly. I need to be closer to the front of the church, he knew.
Clutching Molly, he crawled up an aisle toward the altar, to another enormous pillar, then behind it.
The students stayed down. Nobody screamed. But it didn’t feel safe.
The father at the church doors near the altar, Mary side, couldn’t get them to budge.
“Back to the back!” he yelled to other men. “Guard the doors!”
Protect the kids, he meant. Even with your life.
O’Brien’s focus was “tunneled.” He wasn’t really paying attention to Molly. I know you’re here, he thought. That’s good enough. Where do I need to be? What’s happening?
DeBoer kept moving, fumbling with his phone, trying to call 911. He circled back to check on Fletcher Merkel and Harper Moyski, to see if they were breathing.
He knew they weren’t. “But I didn’t believe it.”
Soon the shots got softer. They were still blasting, but not into the church.
O’Brien crawled along the communion rail toward the center aisle, where he saw a girl lying across a kneeler, blood around her head. She was still breathing, but she needed help, fast.
From the altar, Conneely redialed 911 on his cell: “We need multiple ambulances.”
Then, two minutes and 34 seconds after the first blast, the gunfire stopped.
Back home, Mike Roaldi was looking at his phone just after his 8:30 video meeting began when his Annunciation Hoops text chain — the dozen or so fathers who play Sunday night pickup ball — pinged.
“Active shooter up at school. At church.”
Roaldi had imagined this might happen one day. Everybody had, he figured. He’d told himself he “would go get there as quickly as possible, because I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I ever thought that there was something more that I could have done.”
He sprinted upstairs, grabbed his keys, threw on his foam clogs, told Maria — an accountant also working from home — what he’d just read. Getting into the Volvo, he heard sirens. He ran every red light to Annunciation.
“I was . . . ready,” he knew deep down, “to take out the shooter in Crocs.”
At the church, O’Brien set Molly down and reached under the wounded girl’s head and torso. With someone else at her legs, he helped shift her, gently, out of the pew. He used towels someone had grabbed from the sacristy to cradle her head.
“Molly was crying,” he says. “I was, like, squatting down. She was grabbing me from behind, like a backwards hug from around my back, and just crying. But I just kind of sat there, and I held [her] head and held her hand, and just wanted to tell her she was doing great, help was coming.”
DeBoer was with Harper and Fletcher. One lay still in the fifth pew, the other in the seventh.
Down the row where he’d sat for Mass, the principal knelt down and reached out to hold one of each of their hands. Above them hung a plaque marking the penultimate Station of the Cross, in which, in this depiction, Mary holds Jesus’ body as he is taken down from the cross.
“And, so, as I held their hands, you know . . . a father was with them, and a mother was with them,” he says. “It wasn’t their parents . . . but they weren’t alone.”
An emergency crew stepped in. DeBoer spotted O’Brien, kneeling over a seventh grader who’d been shot in the head. He made his way over and slid to the floor.
“This is Sophia,” he told O’Brien, grabbing her hand.
She squeezed back.
“Sophia, it’s Mr. DeBoer,” he said.
She “moaned,” he recalled, “like a typical middle-schooler, so I knew she was alive.”
More first responders streamed in. DeBoer felt a flash of panic about his own children. He hurried to the basement, where police officers were checking under tables, in closets and in the heaps of stuff a teacher had thrown at the door.
“They’re out,” the officers told him. His Maya, Emmett O’Brien, all the littles, were unharmed. So, DeBoer soon learned, were his two older kids.
But 29 others, most of them children, were wounded by gunfire.
It was probably 8:35 by the time Roaldi parked at the church. Police hadn’t blocked anything off yet. Kids were coming out, walking back to the school much the same as always.
Was it a false alarm? he wondered.
All he had to go on was the text. But sirens blared. Children sobbed.
What am I going to find? Are my kids safe? Are they injured? Are they alive?
Roaldi saw Zehren, then the Dillon Hall dormmate who’d tapped him on the shoulder after Mass all those years ago. He was putting pressure on a child’s wound while his son stood behind him, bleeding from one eye.
Roaldi saw his son John. Less than an hour earlier, he’d been taunting his sister over her hair. Now he was shaken, crying. But he was not hurt.
“It’s bad, Dad,” he said. “It’s so bad.”
The father grabbed his boy: Do you know where your siblings are?
MJ was just ahead, John said. He was OK. But he hadn’t seen Anna Rose.
Emergency medical technicians treated students on the curb. Roaldi recognized a girl. She was wounded, but it didn’t seem mortal.
Had she seen his sixth grader?
No.
“I ran into the church just looking up and down the pews for my daughter, not knowing what I would find and fearing the worst,” Roaldi recalls. “She wasn’t in the group of kids coming out, so I did not see her.”
A good friend of John’s emerged with others from the basement, where they’d hidden and barricaded a door.
“I was trying to make sure the younger ones were safe,” the friend told him.
Had he seen Anna Rose?
No.
Then another friend came up the stairs.
She had seen Roaldi’s daughter. She had not been shot.
“I knew within about 10 minutes,” he says, “that my kids were OK.”
Finley O’Brien’s eighth-grade buddy had gotten her out of the church after huddling with her under a pew during the gunfire, O’Brien learned. Another eighth grader had walked out with MJ Roaldi and had used his own body to shield him from the aftermath.
Conneely texted his wife around 9 a.m. to let her know he was OK but “busy.” Outside the church, he watched as two wounded, elderly parishioners got put in an ambulance with a student. The man and the woman held hands and lent the girl a cellphone so she could tell her mother she was alive.
A crush of loved ones, Maria Roaldi, Mallory O’Brien and Rose DeBoer among them, made for the school. One woman ran there barefoot, a shoe in each hand. They were directed to the school gym, where impromptu text-chains sprung up: “I see Liam. I see Blake. They’re both alive.” Outside, Conneely consoled parents who couldn’t find their kids. “The looks on their faces,” he says, “I will never forget.”
The O’Briens found each other, then walked to Mallory’s car. Someone gave Sean a Clorox wipe for his bloody hands. They realized they didn’t have the right car seats, but they risked it: Molly facing forward, Emmett in a booster, the bigger kids in the third row. They drove home and made frozen pizza for lunch.
“Mom, it was loud,” Molly said later. Three bullets had pierced her pink backpack.
By the time the Roaldis found each other, MJ knew one of his very best buddies was “the only one missing.” The family went home. It felt heavy. They all sat down on the couch, piled on top of each other. “We all wanted to be close,” Mike says. They stared. They turned on the TV to see “if we could learn anything.”
It wasn’t yet 11 a.m. “What do you do,” he wondered, “with the rest of the day?”
The kids talked a little about what they had seen at church. They asked to play video games and watch more TV. Their parents learned via text that two kids, ages 8 and 10, had died. “We knew we would know them,” Roaldi says, “because we know everybody.” The 8-year-old, they figured, was in MJ’s class.
By midafternoon, Conneely was standing before TV news cameras, shoulder to shoulder with DeBoer and the archbishop, the governor, a U.S. senator, the mayor, the police chief and agents of the federal firearms bureau and the FBI.
“Do not think of these as just somebody else’s kids. . . . And don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying,” Mayor Jacob Frey implored, pointedly stoking the American political debate that has pitted spiritual support in the wake of public bloodshed against policy change, usually gun control.
Children “should be able to go to school or church in peace without the fear or risk of violence,” the mayor continued, “and their parents should have the same kind of assurance.”
Many cheered the remark. Others, at Annunciation and far beyond, were incensed by it as a partisan pander that also belittled a central component of their faith when they needed it most.
For DeBoer, the comment was “a spark” he soon would put to kindling. No, we do need prayers, he thought. But, yes, we need action.
Stepping before the reporters, the principal spoke of the theme 83 percent of his faculty had chosen for the school year, though he knew their other options — “Come and see” from the Gospel of John and “I am making everything new!” from Revelation — also applied. The teachers, he said, had gone with Jeremiah 29: “A future filled with hope.”
“There’s nothing about today that can fill us with hope,” he said. “We as a community have a responsibility to make sure that no child, no parent, no teacher ever has to experience what we have experienced today. Ever again. I need everybody to commit those words to your speech patterns: Never again.
“We lost two angels today,” he continued. “We can’t change the past, but we can do something about the future. There’s an African proverb that says, ‘When you pray, move your feet,’” he continued. “So . . . I ask you to please pray, but don’t stop with your words. . . . Never again can we let this happen.
“I love you, Annunciation family.”
At home, Mike and Maria Roaldi used the back of a New Yorker tearaway calendar page to scribble an inventory of the condition of wounded children: “OK,” “stable,” “monitoring,” “???”.
That evening, a school family with a pool had people over. The kids had chicken fights. The grown-ups learned about the shooter, a 23-year-old Annunciation graduate whose mother once had worked at the school. In 2019 the mother had asked a court to change her child’s name to Robin from Robert Westman to reflect a change in gender identity.
The attacker had been fascinated by school shooters, police said, and had prepared a manifesto before taking a rifle, a shotgun and a pistol, all legally bought, to the church and opening fire. The last shot was self-inflicted and fatal.
Parents learned, too, of the children pronounced dead inside the church: Harper Moyski, the “bright, joyful and deeply loved 10-year-old whose laughter, kindness and spirit touched everyone,” and Fletcher Merkel, the crazy-haired boy who’d been in flag football and Cub Scouts with Conor O’Brien.
Telling MJ one of his best friends was dead was, simply, “the worst,” Mike Roaldi says.
The next morning, the Annunciation Hoops text-chain lit up with a message for DeBoer.
“I am standing here outside the windows . . . listening to what you did,” one father wrote during a new daily, predawn meet-up of fathers outside the church. “Thank you.”
“Can I come hug you guys?” the principal replied.
“I think we all could use that,” a third father piped in.
Soon, a good number of the Sunday night players were there.
Roaldi hadn’t expected the memorial. Teddy bears, daisy sprays, a handwritten note — “Sending love and support to the Annunciation community from Northrop Elementary Staff” — vases of peach roses, votive candles, a 9-year-old’s wisdom in rainbow colors: “Kids shouldn’t die first.”
From two white, wooden crosses, Sharpies hung on strings so kids could write notes on powder-blue wooden hearts to Harper and Fletcher. In chalk on plywood over a shot-out window, someone had written the lyrics — made famous by The Muppets and known by countless Annunciation grads — of the pageant song led a few years earlier by a little drummer boy: “I know there is a light. I have felt it burn inside / And I can see it shining from afar.”
The Roaldi children got whatever they wanted, at least at first, the youngest bingeing Dude Perfect on YouTube. Then, Maria and Mike rethought it and talked to trauma survivors. They reassured their kids: You are loved; you are safe.
Other parents also grasped for answers. Why did the shooter do it?
“We don’t know why,” the O’Briens told their kids. “What should our community, or anyone in this community, have done differently?” Sean wondered. But he knew that line of thinking was a “nonstarter.”
They tried to explain the nature of mental illness. “It may never make sense, and that can be OK,” O’Brien read somewhere. “I think, I mean, we got too many guns in this country. We got too much loneliness. We have forces at work in our society. . . . No one who’s in their right mind commits an act like this.”
DeBoer didn’t “spend a lot of energy” thinking about the attacker. “I forgave them that day,” he says. But he did not dismiss the context: School shooters — at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland — had targeted places they knew. So, too, in Minneapolis. “This is a broken human that we missed as a collective society,” the principal says, “and that’s why these things keep happening.”
The shooter’s connection to Annunciation made Roaldi angrier.
“I would understand the sort of random act of chaos,” he says, “more than, like, intentionally trying to destroy something that we, that so many, love — and would have welcomed and loved that person.”
Maybe, he says, there’s “something about purity and innocence that evil hates,” something the shooter had lost that created “a deep hatred and resentment.” But even months later, if the shooter’s mother “wanted to heal with us” at Annunciation, he adds, “I think she would be welcome.”
Still, the question lingers: What kind of God lets a horror like this happen?
The deacon considers “the kind of God who loved us and made us in an image of free choice, but whose love and light can overcome the reality of evil to which our choices are led,” he says, “and so the kind of God who can have redemptive power and bring a greater light even to this really, really, really dark sin.”
With the church a crime scene, Mass had to be celebrated elsewhere. The parish asked for four volunteers to carry chairs, vestments, candles, sanctus bells, banners, hosts, wine, ministers’ name badges, the lectionary and the Roman Missal to the school auditorium. About 25 helpers showed up. In the sanctuary, Roaldi noticed that the plaque for the 12th station — Jesus dies on the cross — was split at Christ’s heart and spattered with blood.
Afterward, some headed back to the church, and “folks just sort of naturally started to gather on the pews . . . where Fletcher and Harper were sitting,” he recalls. Someone flipped to the Bible verses of the angel appearing to a stunned Virgin Mary and read aloud: “Be not afraid.”
Father Zehren’s homily for the last Sunday of August reflected on the parable of the banquet guest choosing “the lowest place” over a seat of honor. But, he preached, “the tricky part of the virtue of humility is that we don’t always get to choose” — like Jesus, fallen under his cross.
“‘Can you just please just stay with me a while in this humble place, in this lowest place?’” Zehren imagined Christ asking from the dust. “‘Don’t try to run. We don’t even have to talk. . . . Just be with me.’”
That, the priest continued, “was the very same message when that first bullet came through the window and the voices cried out, ‘Down! Get down! Get to the lowest place! And stay down!’ And it was hard. And we didn’t want to be there. But now, looking back more than ever, we know that that’s where Jesus was. . . .
“Together, when we were down there in that lowest place — as we are still down there in that lowest place — we are able to look at the forces of darkness and the forces of evil. We’re able to look it in the eye. And Jesus points and he says, ‘See, look at that. Look how weak it is. Look how desperate it is. Look how it’s very clear that this is not what wins in the end. . . .’
“And when we hear that voice of Jesus, it comes to our hearts and a little light starts to dawn. And so that’s what we wait for now. And that’s what we welcome. We welcome the dawn of a new day here at Annunciation. We welcome the light of a new day. And it’s a light that will scatter every darkness.
“It’s a light that will never fade. It’s a light not just for us. It’s the light of the world.”
Glimmers of that light already had begun to emerge: the delayed start of Mass on August 27 that had children sitting when they might have been standing; the big buddies’ courage; the text chains; the EMTs; condolences straight from the pope. And there would be more: offers of free meals and counseling for shocked families; an ice-cream truck outside Fletcher Merkel’s funeral; Sophia Forchas’ “miraculous” rebound from what doctors had called “the brink of death.”
It took weeks before Conneely could manage more than four hours of restless sleep a night. With the archbishop’s blessing, he took on extra administrative duties to give Zehren more time to minister to the wounded and the grieving. Among Conneely’s new jobs were helping set up security for a visit from Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic, and evaluating options for new glass vestibule doors to replace those the attacker blew out: bulletproof or bullet-resistant?
He assisted again at the altar — “having seen the devil attack the Mass itself” — and prayed as he vested with a new understanding of “the helmet of salvation.” He pushed through fresh stress triggered whenever he turned on his mic.
As at Notre Dame, this was not what Conneely had expected. But his best college buddies encouraged him over Zoom soon after the attack: “You were meant for this.”
DeBoer’s choice of the African proverb became an instant meme and the principal a public figure with a long call list and a crisis communications adviser. He dove deeper into it: “The prayer informs how we move our feet, and the moving our feet takes us back to prayer,” he says. “It’s confusing and it’s not linear, and sometimes you got to go back and pick people up. . . . Sometimes, you got to sit still and rest. But then you pray, and you move your feet again.”
Like New Orleans after Katrina, Annunciation’s short-term recovery will take five years, he estimates. Grief and trauma will ebb and flow “every time we watch the news.”
“There’s a lot of talk about, you know, politics and legislative changes, and it’s absolutely essential,” he says. “But, I think for me, the cultural change of what toys we play with, what video games, what media we consume, the language we use, all of that stuff. . . . The middle schoolers might not like my policies, but they’re rooted in creating the world that I believe God created for us.
“Then, it’s our call to the work of justice, to making the world the way God created it to be,” he says. “It was created right and just, and so it’s about pursuing right relationships to repair the harm that’s been done.”
In the weeks after the attack, Roaldi stopped often at a spot behind Annunciation church where bullets had pierced the statue of the Holy Family: one in Joseph’s staff, another through Mary’s heart. The statue of Jesus, depicted at maybe 5 years old, was not hit. Within days, red roses, pink carnations and a sunflower adorned all three, some tucked into the gashes.
“I’m not somebody that really thinks a lot about miracles,” he says. “But it’s enough to give me a little bit of a pause.” The desecrated statue was for him still the same beacon of prayer it always had been — only now with a powerful reminder not to forget what hate looks like.
“I don’t want them to patch those bullet holes,” he says. “Some others might. But I want to feel that hope.”
Michelle Krupa is a senior editor of U.S. news at CNN.