More details are emerging after a shooter opened fire at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis during a Mass attended by young students, killing two children and wounding more than a dozen other people. The shooter died by suicide at the church, which is attached to a school building.

Eighteen other children and adults were injured in Wednesday’s shooting, which occurred during a Mass marking the beginning of the school year. 

Here’s what we know about the shooting.  

What happened at Annunciation Catholic Church? 

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said in a Thursday news conference that the department received calls of shots fired at 8:27 a.m. Wednesday. A police officer arrived at the scene at 8:31 a.m. and was directed to the shooter’s location by a parishioner, O’Hara said. 

O’Hara said the shooter fired a rifle through church windows and was also armed with a shotgun and a pistol. The shooting occurred at the beginning of the Mass, O’Hara said. Three shotgun shells and 116 rifle rounds have been recovered, as well as one live round from the shooter’s handgun that malfunctioned and became stuck in the weapon’s chamber, O’Hara said Thursday.

A government official briefed on the investigation and a law enforcement source told CBS News that the shooter was wearing all black clothing. 

An 8-year-old and a 10-year-old were killed while they sat in the pews, police said. 

Eighteen others, including 15 children between the ages of 6 and 15, were injured, O’Hara said. The number of injured rose from 17 to 18 on Thursday when officials said another injured child, who was transported to an area hospital by a private vehicle, had been identified. The three injured adults were all parishioners in their 80s, O’Hara said on Wednesday afternoon.

Police immediately entered the church and attempted to provide first aid, O’Hara said. The injured were rushed to area hospitals. 

Hennepin County Medical Center received 10 patients and said one adult and five children were in critical condition. One adult and three children were being treated for non-life-threatening injuries. Children’s Minnesota said Thursday that it had discharged six patients and was treating one child. It did not share the statuses of the patients it was still treating. M Health Fairview Masonic Children’s Hospital said it had one pediatric patient in stable condition.

All of the injured children are expected to survive, O’Hara said Wednesday afternoon. 

Families of Fletcher Merkel and Harper Moyski issue statements

The families of the two children who were killed — 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel and 10-year-old Harper Moyski — spoke out for the first time on Thursday, each issuing statements and asking the public to respect their privacy.

“Fletcher loved his family, friends, fishing, cooking and any sport that he was allowed to play,” Jesse Merkel, Fletcher’s father, said Thursday while delivering the family’s statement. “While the hole in our hearts and lives will never be filled, I hope that in time, our family can find healing. I pray that the other victim’s family can find some semblance of the same.”

Michael Moyski and Jackie Flavin also issued a joint statement.

“Harper was a bright, joyful, and deeply loved 10-year-old whose laughter, kindness, and spirit touched everyone who knew her,” the statement read. “Our hearts are broken not only as parents, but also for Harper’s sister, who adored her big sister and is grieving an unimaginable loss. As a family, we are shattered, and words cannot capture the depth of our pain.”

Who was the shooter at Annunciation Catholic Church? 

Three law enforcement sources told CBS News the shooter was Robin Westman, 23, from suburban Minneapolis. The shooter acted alone, O’Hara said. Westman died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the back of the church.

The shooter recently bought the three guns legally and does not have any known criminal history, according to O’Hara. O’Hara told CBS News on Thursday that no law in Minnesota would have prevented Westman from buying the weapons. 

The shooter visited the church weeks before the shooting and apparently conducted surveillance there, according to a Minnesota official and a federal law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation.

O’Hara said police executed search warrants at three residences connected to the shooter. “Additional firearms” were recovered during the searches, he said on Wednesday. O’Hara said hundreds of pieces of evidence were recovered from the residences on Thursday. O’Hara told CBS News that police are also searching electronic devices. 

Officials search for a motive

O’Hara said he could not comment on any motive. He told CBS News that the shooter was “deranged” and had an obsession with past shootings. Police have not identified a “triggering event” for the shooting, O’Hara said. He warned in Thursday’s news briefing that the investigation might not provide the answers the public is seeking. 

“This individual had a whole wide variety of hate to various individuals and groups,” O’Hara told CBS News. He added in the Thursday news conference that the shooter wanted to obtain notoriety and was fascinated with previous mass shootings. 

Investigators said they are aware of a video the shooter had scheduled to post on YouTube as the shooting occurred. The police chief described it as a manifesto that included “some disturbing writings.” The YouTube account and its videos have been taken down, and FBI investigators and other law enforcement officials are looking into them, O’Hara said. CBS News has reached out to YouTube for comment.

Westman appears to have attended the school, according to CBS News’ Confirmed team. Westman’s mother worked as a parish secretary at the church, according to its website, and as an administrative assistant at the school, according to a newsletter. She retired from the church in 2021, according to a Facebook post from the church. 

A senior Minneapolis official briefed on the investigation told CBS News on Friday that investigators have spent hours interviewing the shooter’s mother to determine if she was aware of any significant warning signs before the shooting. Ryan Garry, a lawyer representing her, said that she is “completely distraught” and “has no culpability whatsoever.” All family members are being interviewed, the official said. 

The shooting is being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism and hate crime targeting Catholics, FBI Director Kash Patel said Wednesday on social media. 

In an X post on Thursday, Patel said the shooter left “multiple anti-Catholic, anti-religious references,” expressed “hatred and violence toward Jewish people” and “wrote an explicit call for violence against President Trump on a firearm magazine.”

Officials react to church shooting

President Trump said on Truth Social that he had been “fully briefed on the tragic shooting” and said the White House would “continue to monitor this terrible situation.” 

“Please join me in praying for everyone involved,” Mr. Trump said.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Trump signed a proclamation calling for flags at the White House and other federal buildings to be flown at half-staff until Aug. 31 “as a mark of respect for the victims.” The White House flags were lowered moments after the proclamation was signed. 

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he had been briefed on the shooting and was “praying for our kids and teachers whose first week of school was marred by this horrific act of violence.” Walz also said that he had spoken with Mr. Trump. 

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called for change after the shooting. 

“Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying,” Frey said. “It was the first week of school, they were in a church. These were kids that should be learning with their friends. They should be playing on the playground. They should be able to go to school or church in peace without the fear or risk of violence, and their parents should have the same kind of assurance.”

Rhona Tarrant

contributed to this report.

High-mass stars with eight or more solar masses are mysterious. Despite the fact that they’re more easily observed than their lower-mass counterparts, astrophysicists have struggled to explain how they become so massive. The problem is that while they accrete material and become more massive, they’re also shedding mass.

Stars form in clouds of predominantly hydrogen called giant molecular clouds. Thousands or even millions of stars can form in a single massive cloud. As a protostar forms, it gathers material from the cloud into a swirling accretion disk around itself. The young star accretes matter directly from this disk.

But at the same time that it’s accreting matter and growing, the young star is also getting rid of some of its mass through stellar winds and bipolar outflows called protostellar jets.

This artist’s illustration shows a young protostar inside a cloud of gas. A swirling accretion disk surrounds the star, and protostellar jets are emitted from each pole. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC)

The powerful jets coming from young stars carry mass away from the stars and can also create cavities in the surrounding material. Both of these phenomenon can limit a star’s growth. Some theory shows that this should limit the mass of stars to between 20 to 40 solar masses, yet astronomers routinely observe stars much more massive than this. The list of the most massive stars contain many stars between 100 and 200 solar masses, and the single most massive star known, R136a1, is almost 300 solar masses.

This issue is one of the most active issues in astrophysics. How do massive stars become so massive? The question is made more challenging because observing high-mass stars while they’re forming is difficult. The process is hidden inside opaque clouds of gas and occurs very rapidly. Much of what astrophysicists know about high-mass stars comes from simulations and indirect evidence.

New research in Science Advances may have the answer. It’s titled “Massive extended streamers feed high-mass young stars,” and the lead author is Fernando Olguin. Olguin is from the Center for Gravitational Physics at Kyoto University.

Olguin and his colleagues used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe a high-mass star formation region named G336 ALMA1 about 10,100 light-years away. They found streamers feeding gas from the surrounding clouds directly onto a protostar without an accretion disk.

“Our work seems to show that these structures are being fed by streamers, which are flows of gas that bring matter from scales larger than a thousand astronomical units, essentially acting as massive gas highways,” said lead author Olguin.

The young star is being fed by one streamer, possibly by two. They’re like spiral arms that feed gas from the surrounding region into the region where the star is forming. One of the streamers is more directly connected to the central region where the star is forming. Measurements of the streamer suggest that it delivers so much gas to the still-growing star that it quenches the feedback effects that can otherwise limit the star’s mass accretion.

These figures show some of the ALMA observations of G336 ALMA1. The left panel shows the 1.3 mm continuum that reveals the movement of cold gas and dust. The blue and red lines represent the blue-shifted and red-shifted streamers respectively. The right panel shows the emission from hot methanol. It shows a clear connection between the blue-shifted streamer and the young star ALMA1. Image Credit: Olguin et al. 2025. SciAdv

Previous observations showed these streamers, but they weren’t high enough resolution to observe the central region clearly. Those observations suggested that the streamers were feeding a disk. But these newer ALMA observations show there’s no disk, or perhaps only an extremely limited one.

“We found streamers feeding what at that time was thought to be a disk, but to our surprise, there is either no disk or it is extremely small,” says Olguin.

This schematic from the research shows the different kinematic components and flow scenarios for the protostar ALMA1. Green arrows represent outflows, the blue and red represent the streamers of gas, and the red to blue arrow shows rotation. Image Credit: Olguin et al. 2025. SciAdv

If young stars can gather mass from streamers without the need for an intermediating disk, then that can explain how stars become so massive. They essentially bypass limitation to their growth.

“The case of G336 ALMA1 shows that streamers can play an important role in feeding high-mass protostars,” the researchers explain in their paper. “To continue accreting gas, the density around the source has to be high enough to quench the feedback from the young star or the momentum carried by the streamers has to be high enough to overcome the feedback in the absence of a disk.”

Researchers have detected streamers feeding stars before, but only low-mass stars. A 2022 paper found a streamer feeding into the disk surrounding a young star. “The streamer is delivering more than enough mass to sustain its protostellar accretion rate,” those researchers wrote.

But these streamers are much more massive, as is the star ALMA1.

“We estimate masses between 0.3 and 0.6 solar masses for each inner streamer,” the authors write. “These masses and the resulting infall rates are an order of magnitude or higher than those found in streamers feeding low-mass stars.”

There could still be a small accretion disk around the star, and it could be the last link in the chain of matter that feeds the star. But the disk’s mass, if it’s there, is comparable or lower than the mass of the streamers.

“It is thus the large mass of the reservoir, at large scales, and the streamers, at small scales, that have allowed the formation and continuous feeding of the young high-mass star at the center of ALMA1,” the researchers conclude.

Delta Air Lines has agreed to pay $79 million for dumping 15,000 gallons of jet fuel onto a community in southeastern Los Angeles County five years ago, drenching children playing at a school, to settle a federal lawsuit by local residents.

On Jan. 20, 2020, Delta Flight 89 took off from Los Angeles International Airport en route to Shanghai with 149 passengers for what is typically a 13-hour nonstop flight.

That voyage, however, lasted only 25 minutes due to a plane malfunction, forcing the pilot to turn the aircraft around over the Santa Monica Bay and head back toward the airport.

In the lawsuit settlement, Delta said the plane lost thrust shortly after takeoff. The plane couldn’t land, however, because it was already over the maximum landing weight of 160,000 pounds. Flights landing at LAX typically approach the airport from an inland route and take off over the ocean.

En route back to the airport, the plane’s pilots dumped thousands of gallons of jet fuel over Cudahy and multiple schools.

Dozens of children, and 40 people overall, from Park Avenue Elementary School in Cudahy were hit by the fuel and treated by medical personnel.

Other schools, including Pioneer High School in Whittier, also claimed students were hit with the jet fuel.

Delta noted in court documents that it agreed to the settlement “without any admission of liability” to avoid the uncertainty and expenses of a trial and “to eliminate the distraction and other burdens this litigation has caused to Delta’s business.”

The lawsuit was filed by two Cudahy couples and homeowners, Frankie Lomas and Roxanda Yancor, and Jose and Maria Alvarado.

The settlement totals $78.8 million, which translates into $50.6 million for victims after attorneys’ fees and other court costs. The fund will be sliced into thirds, with two-thirds, or about $33.9 million, set aside for property owners, and one-third, or about $16.7 million, for residents.

At bare minimum, a property owner will receive $888.82 per claim, while a resident will receive $104.34, according to court documents.

The estimated numbers of those who were affected are listed in the lawsuit as 160,000 residents and 38,000 properties.

Calls to the plaintiff’s attorney and Delta Air Lines were not immediately returned.