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Two Children Killed, 14 Children and Three Adults Hurt in School Shooting; Shooter Opens Fire on Praying Students Through Church Windows; Shooter Took Own Life After Killing at Least Two Children. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired August 27, 2025 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[14:01:10]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": Breaking News, details involving the deadly mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. Children as young as pre-kindergarten were worshiping inside their church sanctuary, next door to their school this morning, when police say a shooter fired dozens of rounds at them from outside of the church, shattering the windows.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": Officials say two children, an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old, were killed. At least 14 other kids were hurt. Three adults were among the injured. You are looking at some of the heartbreaking scenes just outside a reunification center near the school.

Our producers on the ground say they've heard screaming echoing out from the halls after parents rushed in. We're also hearing from survivors, including a fifth grader, just 10-years-old, describing the moment shots first rang out.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WESTON HALSNE, 10-YEAR-OLD SHOOTING SURVIVOR: It was like shots fired, and then we kind of like got under the pews. It kind of -- they shot through the stained glass windows, I think. And it was really scary.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah. What did you do after that?

HALSNE: Well, we waited like 10 to five minutes. I don't really know. And then we -- we went to the gym and then the door is locked, just to make sure he didn't come. And we waited in the gym for more news and everyone was OK. Hurt most people were.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Who were your friend Weston?

HALSNE: My friend got hit in the back.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did he go to the hospital?

HALSNE: Yeah, he went to the hospital. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What went through your mind when you saw that?

HALSNE: I was super scared for him, but I think now he's OK.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yeah.

HALSNE: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And then, did you get reunited with your parents and --

HALSNE: Yeah, my mom was waiting outside of the -- the church when it happened.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And then --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What was it like seeing her?

HALSNE: It was -- I was super happy because like, I was scared that I wasn't going to see her because I was -- I didn't know what was happening really. I was just in shock.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And was it kind of -- was it behind you where it was happening or in front of you? Just kind of --

HALSNE: It was like right beside me. I was like two seats away from the stained glass windows. So they were like, the shots were like right next to me.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's scary.

HALSNE: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You went under the pew after that happened?

HALSNE: Yeah. And then I got --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is that what everyone tried to do?

HALSNE: I think I got like gunpowder on my neck. Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When you heard the shots, what went through your head?

HALSNE: I was like -- the first one, I was like, what is that? I thought it was just something and then I heard it again. I just ran under the pew and then I covered my head. My friend, Victor, like saved me though because he laid on top of me. But he got hit.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Your friend laid on top of you?

HALSNE: Yeah. And he got hit.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is this something that you've practiced before? HALSNE: Yeah. We practice it like every month or I don't know, but yeah, we -- we've never practiced it in the -- in the church though, only in school. So it was way different.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Was your mom super happy to see you?

HALSNE: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Gave you a big hug?

HALSNE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What was that hug like?

HALSNE: It was -- I just felt like relieved, kind of.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yeah.

HALSNE: I was very happy.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You're really brave, you know that?

HALSNE: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you have any brothers and sisters there? Or was it just you?

HALSNE: Oh, my brother is in the sophomore year of DSL (ph). He used to go to Annunciation. He got out early because of it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And you guys were at like the mass that they do at the beginning of school?

HALSNE: Yeah. And then it was like, maybe like three minutes in, the first shot fired.

[14:05:00]

And then the police were really good because they showed up really quick.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And did everybody try to make you feel safe?

HALSNE: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But it has to be probably the scariest thing of your life?

HALSNE: Yeah, it was super scary.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What do you want to say to your friend who helped protect you?

HALSNE: He's really brave and I hope he is good in the hospital. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And what do you want to say to everyone that had to go to the hospital?

HALSNE: I hope you're OK and I'm praying for you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SANCHEZ: And there are young children who are recovering right now. We just got an update from Hennepin medical center -- Hennepin Healthcare, I should say, patients there as young as six-years-old being treated -- between ages of six to 14 years old, 10 patients being treated at Hennepin Healthcare as we speak. We're of course working to get updates on their condition. Let's get some analysis now and the latest details from CNN Chief Law Enforcement and Intelligence Analyst, John Miller, who's gathering details from his sources. John, what's the latest that you're hearing?

JOHN MILLER, CNN CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Well, police have identified the shooter and they have identified the shooter through the investigation. What they have not done is officially identified the shooter to us. But what I am being told by law enforcement sources is that he's been identified based on the car he came in, based on other information they have. He has no extensive police record. He is not somebody the police had on their radar.

But they are looking at some online postings, purportedly from the same individual. And these talk about -- these are basically notes to friends and families where he talks about the pain he's been living in, that he doesn't want to live in pain anymore, that he knows what he is going to do is going to upset many people, his friends, his family, but he has to do this. He indicates in the same writings that he intends to take his life at the same time.

So, we are beginning to get a little bit of a window that is similar to other things we've seen before in terms of messages left behind, which was referred to by Chief O'Hara obliquely. We're looking into a motive from things left behind, is what he said during the press conference. That'll develop through the day. In the meantime, they're doing many other things to develop that richer picture. And I believe that one of the reasons from a law enforcement standpoint that they have not released the name, even though they know the identity, is that they're trying to give themselves room to find those social media platforms, to be able to lock those down so that they're not available to the general public and the media, to be able to find where he's been putting his head down in terms of a residence and the other locations where they're going to want to do a search warrant without having a whole lot of people breathing down their necks.

So I think we're going to -- we're going to have this identity released by police a little bit later in the day. In the meantime, we're doing some of what they're doing, which is looking into background and trying to put sense, which we will not be able to do, to what is clearly a senseless act.

KEILAR: No, we will not be able to do that. Juliette Kayyem, you're with us as well. I mean, as John is detailing what we're learning there about the shooter, I mean, talking about living in pain. A lot of people live in pain, they don't inflict it like this on other people. What are you looking for at this point?

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: So on the shooter's side, of course, is two things. One is access to the weaponry. It's just a -- it's a lot of weaponry, a rifle, a shotgun and a pistol, access to it. Did people know that he had a propensity to violence? What was his network like? And therefore, of course, what was he telling people in these -- in these missives or whatever they are that he's talking about, his own distress that John Miller is reporting about, and that's just going to -- that's going to sort of connect motive and means, right? It's going to connect sort of how did he do this and why did he do this? Which is important, regardless of whether there's a future prosecution, because we are learning and the FBI is really at the forefront of a lot of this, that we can stop mass shootings if we're looking for the right things, right?

And that a lot of that is these clues and these statements made by the shooters, telling them that -- telling people that they are about to do something that is going to harm others. So that's the first piece. The second is, you know, we have a tendency to sort of -- I don't mean this harshly -- but there are two children dead.

[14:10:00]

We're looking at a number of them critically injured, but we don't talk enough about the societal impact of gun violence on the community at large. And so, we interviewed this young boy. I mean, he's going to have that fear and that tension and that sense of what happened today for the rest of his life. There are concentric circles, and we're just starting to get a handle of those societal impacts. I'll draw you to a press conference earlier this morning, you saw the chief of the emergency room talk about these bodies coming in, all of -- most of them juvenile bodies, so under 14 years old/

He did not talk about the nature of the gunshot wounds. But this is serious weaponry. This is traumatic for a medical community. And when a reporter asked the doctor how he was doing, he also seemed to sigh it's their last -- it's their second mass shooting in as many days. And so these impacts that are -- that are not as horrible as death or being a shooting victim are things that our society also suffers each time one of these things happens.

SANCHEZ: Yeah, undoubtedly. And it's especially startling when you hear a 10-year-old, like we just did a few moments ago, describing what they saw, saying things that no child should ever have to say and enduring things that no child ever should. We also should bring in CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst, Andrew McCabe into the conversation.

And Andrew, just given what we know so far about this shooter -- actually Andrew, I'm sorry to pause the question. I just want to let our viewers know that moments ago, President Trump ordered flags be flown at half staff to honor shooter -- victims of the Minnesota shooting, and our cameras captured flags at the White House being lowered this afternoon. We understand that the president has been briefed on this. He's also made a phone call to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

Andrew, back to you. Just given what we know so far about this shooter, the fact that they targeted this Catholic school specifically at a moment in time where they knew that there was going to be a crowd of children inside the church. They apparently made an attempt to barricade people inside and then opened fire through the windows. What does it tell you about the level of planning? What does it tell you about the profile of someone who would commit this heinous act?

ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Yeah, it's a great question. It's one I've been thinking about a lot over even just in the last hour or so. We tend to be distracted a little bit by the horror or the horrific nature of the target selection. I mean, what's worse than a school, maybe a church, right? And now, here you have both targeted at once. But I think to just switch perspectives and think about it from the -- from what that this shooter did. So we have numerous examples of a very high degree of organized, disciplined thinking and a process that this person went through to prepare for and execute this, the horrible act. Right? We just heard about notes that he left for family members or associates. He's shows up in all black clothing, likely chosen for some sort of tactical reference or something like that.

He picks not just a school, but a school that's attending church. He likely knew the timing of the school-wide mass and chose it because that's the location where you would have the most potential victims packed into one small area. And then of course, he gets there with these 2x4s that we know from law enforcement were used to barricade in, or at least to attempt to barricade the victims, into that space, again, to maximize killing. So what you see, the choices made by this guy, and the plans and the preparation are all pointing in only one direction.

He wanted to kill as many people as possible. It's almost -- it echoes this, the motivations and the aspirations of terrorist attacks that we've seen, right? Yeah. The objective of many terrorist attacks being to get as much attention as possible by killing as many innocent people as you can. It's really, I'm not suggesting that this individual is a terrorist, but in terms of the way that he planned out the tactical side of this, it appears all to be pointed only in that direction in maximizing casualties.

The investigation hopefully, will reveal to us why he was so intent on this bloodshed.

[14:15:00]

I should also say that he selected an extraordinary array of weapons, a pistol, shotgun, and a rifle, also geared to inflict the most carnage in the shortest period of time possible, particularly the rifle, and maybe to a lesser degree the shotgun.

KEILAR: Yeah, no, that's an interesting point. And I wonder, Andy, because we are so much a nation paralyzed by how to deal with this, right? I think people have ideas about solutions. They're often informed by different ideologies. Where are we at this point in time? We're looking to learn details; we're looking to learn the motive. I do think increasingly people wonder what -- what does that -- what value does that hold for us, as we're looking to find some kind of solution to make sure this doesn't happen to more kids?

MCCABE: Yeah. So , unfortunately, this quest for motive, even though it seems to many people to find the shooter's motive and kind of that path that got them to this horrible place, seems to many people is like, well, what difference does it make? It happens all the time. You're not going to -- you didn't stop this guy. What does this do for us? Well, it's one of the few things we can do to try to render some intelligence from this act that will help us protect communities and institutions going forward.

If we have a better understanding about why some shooters choose schools, or why they choose particular schools or particular religious institutions, then we can use that to better inform those parts of our community that we believe are the most vulnerable to these acts. We can do that to -- law enforcement can use that information when they understand a developing maybe threat stream or intelligence about a potential threat, they can be better in proactively notifying those vulnerable kind of sub-communities to take appropriate actions and to better harden their locations and take precautions against these sort of things.

We also know from our study of these shooters that many of them engage in behaviors that get the attention of the people around them, family members, work colleagues, friends, what have you. And so better understanding those behaviors and what those signals might be telling us, if we can get people to think about those things more and to be more in tune and aware of them, when they see people in their circle exhibiting those behaviors or stating these kinds of, these sorts, making these comments and things like that, maybe people become more proactively engaged in reaching out to law enforcement or mental health services and things like that.

So, this is improvement at the margins, but right now, without the political will to do anything about this problem, which we have proven by failing time and time and time again, this is what we're left with, really nibbling away at the edges of this disastrous problem and doing whatever is currently under our control to try to help things going forward.

KEILAR: Andy, thank you for that perspective. Juliette, appreciate your insights as well. We'll have much more on our Breaking News ahead. Stay with CNN.

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[14:23:11]

SANCHEZ: We are continuing to follow a tragic situation in Minneapolis, a shooting at the Annunciation Catholic School, yet another American community ravaged by gun violence and now reeling.

KEILAR: With us now is Manuel Oliver. Manuel's son Joaquin Guac Oliver was one of 17 who were killed in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. And Manny, you and your wife Patricia just celebrated Guac's 25th birthday that would've happened here just a few weeks ago. You know all too well what these parents who have lost kids are going through. What is on your mind? What should we be keeping a focus on at this moment?

MANUEL "MANNY" OLIVER, FATHER OF PARKLAND SHOOTING VICTIM JOAQUIN "GUAC" OLIVER: Well, my initial thought is that, I believe that thoughts and prayers this time are out of the picture. I mean, these kids were actually praying and all their thoughts were placed on the, right, God they were all praying to, and still they were shot. And so far, I believe two of them lost their lives. So, I know exactly what those parents are going through, and I know exactly what the other parents are going through.

So ones that are still don't know if their kids will be able to survive or not, these are terrible situation and it hasn't stopped. That's the worst part of it. Since the last eight years, since I'm part of this terrible (ph) group, this hasn't stopped. It has been increasing actually.

SANCHEZ: And since Parkland and 2018 and what happened there, since Guac was killed, there have been nearly 400 more school shootings. And today, this one in Minneapolis, marks the 44th this year. That means that for the year, we're averaging one every week.

[14:25:00]

Manny, have we learned any lessons as a society in the last seven years since you lost Guac?

OLIVER: We haven't. And it's even before that. Let me tell you -- let me give you a number. Since Joaquin was shot four times with an AR-15, more than 350,000 people have been shot. And we do nothing or very little. But now, we're in a different position. Hear me out. We have a president that has been able to do things without asking anyone. So , I have a message for the president this time. You can make things happen. You can actually stop this from happening and there's no political risk in here because you're going to still be the president for the next three years. So this is a time for us to change things and I think the President Trump can do this. And it's coming from me, so I think we should plan on solutions.

KEILAR: And you, Manny, right now, you're actually on your way to Los Angeles. You are doing a one man show called Guac. And you take the audience behind the scenes of what has become this all too common experience, what it is to be you, what it is to be a parent who loses a child in a mass shooting. I saw your show; I covered it this past winter when you did it in Washington, D.C. and you do something that a lot of people have not done in this situation. You take people into it. And so, I wonder why you think that is so important as we are looking at these pictures of parents, of their anguish, as you are trying to communicate that to people. Why is it so important that Americans sit with that as you see it?

OLIVER: Well, it's important because we engage people into the problem. We have a problem. We fail as a nation. We haven't been able to fix this, not only this administration, but previous administration. No one has been able to fix this. And I think that theater, bringing it into, in front of people inside a theater place, venue, it brings that impact to your own life. This is when you think that, oh, this could happen to me, maybe I should get involved. Well, I think we should all get involved.

I think that what happened today, those two kids, those two kids are more than enough for all of us to change things, to put restrictions on anyone who is planning to buy a gun and to put restrictions on anyone that has a gun, so the gun is locked. So, they might say that it's too early to talk about guns. I don't think so, because my shooting -- department shooting happened almost eight years ago, and it's not early to talk about that one. And they're all the same. So yes, I believe in art and theater as a communication tool that is very effective.

SANCHEZ: Manny Oliver, we always appreciate having you on. Thanks so much for joining us.

OLIVER: Thank you very much, guys.

SANCHEZ: We're following the Breaking News out of Minneapolis today. Among the wounded and in the hospital right now, we understand is an eight-year-old girl and her grandfather spoke to CNN affiliate, WCCO. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZUHEIR SAFE, GRANDDAUGHTER INJURED IN SHOOTING: It's very sad. Should not be this way. this is the -- people should not have guns.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What are going to say to her when you see her?

SAFE: I'll give her a hug, that's all.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: Stay with CNN. We'll be right back.

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