City police chief Brian O’Hara said that the attacker sprayed bullets through the windows of the Annunciation Church as dozens of young students were at a Mass marking their first week back at school.
The church sits next to an affiliated Catholic school in Minneapolis, the largest city in the Midwestern state of Minnesota.
“Two young children, ages eight and 10, were killed where they sat in the pews,” O’Hara said, adding that another 14 children and three elderly parishioners were injured by gunfire.
The gunman fired a rifle, shotgun and pistol before dying by suicide in the parking lot. He had purchased the weapons legally, police said.
One 10-year-old said he had survived the shooting thanks to a friend who covered him with his body.
“I just ran under the pew, and then I covered my head,” he told broadcaster CBS. “My friend Victor saved me though, because he laid on top of me, but he got hit.”
The mass shooting is the latest in a long line of deadly school attacks in the United States, where attempts to restrict easy access to firearms face political deadlock.
FBI Director Kash Patel said the agency was investigating the shooting as “an act of domestic terrorism and hate crime targeting Catholics.”
Patel identified the shooter as “Robin Westman, a male born as Robert Westman.”
Westman, now 23, legally changed name in 2020 and identified as female, court papers show.
In a post on X, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the shooter was “claiming to be transgender” and called the attack “unthinkable.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey warned against using the attack to lash out at transgender people, and addressed the issue of gun ownership in the United States.
“Anybody who is using this… as an opportunity to villainise our trans community, or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity,” Frey told reporters.
“We’ve got more guns in this country than we have people, and it’s on all of us to recognize the truth and the reality that we can’t just say that this shouldn’t happen again and then allow it to happen again and again.”
US media reports said Westman had been a student at the school.
Videos posted online by the shooter showed a multi-page manifesto, and names and drawings of firearms.
O’Hara, the police chief, said the “manifesto appeared to show him at the scene and included some disturbing writings and content has since been taken down.”
Witnesses and survivors told of a harrowing scene with the shooter dressed in black and wearing a ski mask opening fire, and children hiding in church pews.
Video footage from outside a police cordon showed panicked parents hurrying away with their young children dressed in a school uniform of green polo shirts.
The attack drew condemnation and expressions of grief from many including President Donald Trump, who directed that US flags at the White House be lowered to half-staff.
Pope Leo XIV – the first American to head the Catholic Church – said he was “profoundly saddened” by the tragedy.
This year, there have been at least 287 mass shootings – defined as a shooting involving at least four victims, dead or wounded – across the country, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
At least 16,700 people were killed in US firearms violence last year, not including suicides. (AFP)
