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The Situation Room

Gun Violence in America; Minneapolis School Shooting Investigation. Aired 11-11:30a ET

Aired August 28, 2025 - 11:00   ET

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

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PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: Happening now: a community shattered by the mass shooting on children praying at a Catholic Church, two young kids killed. We are set to get an update soon on the people who were injured. And, of course, we will bring that to you live.

Welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Pamela Brown. Wolf Blitzer is off. And you're in THE SITUATION ROOM.

And we begin this hour with the mourning in Minneapolis, as the community deals with the shock and sadness of a deadly school shooting. Wednesday, a shooter opened fire on morning mass at Annunciation Catholic School, killing two students just 8 and 10 years old.

And, this morning, mourners are putting flowers and messages in front of the school's church, as more than a dozen people, including as many as 11 children, are still in the hospital. And we are about to get an update from a hospital official. So, of course, we're going to bring that to you.

And authorities have identified the shooter as 23-year-old Robin Westman, a former student at that school. Westman was armed with three weapons and died of a self-inflicted gunshot. Police say hundreds of pieces of evidence have been recovered, but a motive is unclear.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN O'HARA, MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, POLICE CHIEF: This is an individual that harbored a whole lot of hate towards many people and many groups of people and clearly intended to commit an act of violence with as much carnage and trauma as possible for the purpose of their own personal notoriety.

And we are open to every possibility in terms of what a potential motive may be.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Let's go to CNN's Laura Coates in Minneapolis.

And, Laura, the police chief also went on to say that he believes the shooter intended to get inside of that church to inflict even more harm, more casualties. Of course, this is horrific. Two children died, so many injured, but, at the same time, this could have been a lot worse. It's just unfathomable. What is the scene like there where you are?

LAURA COATES, CNN HOST: You have that split screen, Pam, of the horror and the depraved regard, disregard for human life that took place yesterday.

On the other side, you have got the heroism from neighbors who were hearing gunshots. I talked to one neighbor yesterday who heard it first, one or two, and then say, what could that be, and then said, by the 10th, he said he knew that it was gunshots and he began to just run from his home towards the church.

He was an alumni of the school. His grandchildren went there. His kids went there as well, could have been there. And so he ran to the scene, even holding the hand of two girls who he said were in obvious despair and nervous and asking for their parents and wondering what was going to happen next. He waited until the police arrived, until the ambulance came, welcoming the sirens.

You saw when you arrived yesterday neighbors who were on their lawns with lawn chairs communing together, supporting one another. There were even these neon poster boards that have the words "Family" with an arrow pointing to the area where family members could come to try to reunify with their children.

All throughout the morning, you have seen parents with strollers and little babies and toddlers holding yellow flowers and mixed bouquets to then put at the site of the school. Remember, these children were in mass at the time. They were praying. It is the first week of school. Not too far from me, there is actually a "Welcome back" marquee that is continuing to roll welcoming students from a summer where they're supposed to come and be with their friends and be with their community once again.

And instead what they are now is, is bonded by the horror of what happened, and, as you said, the investigations unfolding more and more details about who this individual was. But today, in my hometown, I'm looking at community members showing you what Minneapolis, what the Twin Cities really is.

And it's community. It's neighborhoods who are going together, coming together. People are walking around. This is a community of dog walkers, of a grocery store. Life is transpiring all around. There's a restaurant. There is a neighborhood here.

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And this school, this community is right there. And I'm telling you, when you talk to some of the neighbors, you talk to what they have learned and the people that they have connected, you really do see a sixth degree of separation here, even less. People know everyone. They remember.

They may have a tie here. My own nephew was in day care a block away at a neighborhood church. And just thinking about what has happened in this community, and it's not the first time, even in the last several months, that a tragedy has struck this community of Minnesota.

You also had the assassination of an elected official and beyond. And, Pam, today, as you're watching what should be school buses and parents coming to have their coffees of the first week of school and rejoicing at perhaps the parental break one might have after a long summer, they are holding their kids tighter.

They're wishing they had that yesterday back.

BROWN: Yes, understandably. I mean, I know, from afar here in Washington, I'm certainly holding my kids tighter. They go back to school next week, and it's just taken on a whole new meaning, right?

So, in terms of the victims...

COATES: It really has. I mean, my kids start next week as well.

BROWN: Go ahead.

COATES: It's awful.

BROWN: It is. You should be thinking about the excitement of getting their back-to-school clothes and supplies, and instead this is overshadowing everything.

And now you have these school children grappling with the loss of their two classmates. Many others are still in the hospital. What more can you tell us about the victims, Laura?

COATES: You know, we are still learning that there are so many still hospitalized, but there is hope on the horizon, we're told, for so many.

Leigh Waldman is actually -- do we have Leigh Waldman? I'm not sure if we have her to give the very latest on what's going on. But I want to go to her because she has really been diligent about trying to get all the update information.

Leigh, what can you tell us about the condition of those 14 children and adults who are also survivors of this horrific event?

LEIGH WALDMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Laura, this community is wrapping their arms around this church behind us, but also around those children that you mentioned, 14 of them also hurt in this tragic shooting that happened, the youngest one 16 -- or 6 years old, rather.

Now, thankfully, those kids are going to be OK, as are those three adults who are in their 80s. They're expected to survive their injuries, their physical injuries. But the road to recovery for their mental state after experiencing something like this is going to take much longer. We have been outside of the Annunciation Church all morning long now.

And we have watched this memorial continue to grow. A man carried a large wooden cross up this hill here and placed it in front of that church, and he was sobbing as he did so. It's standing alongside two of those smaller crosses, where people are writing messages to their classmates who were taken yesterday while they prayed in church.

Now, we spoke to some young kids who were dropping off yellow flowers. Each of them they lived down the block from the church. They were home. They heard those shots ring out. Their mom called them said, get in the basement. She didn't know what was going on. It was 11-year-old Ruth and her little sister Sage (ph).

Take a listen to what Ruth had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RUTH PIER LUISSI, CHILD MOURNING SHOOTING: It's really important to show up, because, if you don't, then this stuff can keep happening and people can keep getting hurt and families keep getting torn apart. It's really terrible.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALDMAN: And, Ruth, she's 11 years old. She doesn't go to school here. She goes to the public school.

But for an 11-year-old to have the state of mind to know that things need to change here because families are being ripped apart, it just speaks to how raw the emotions still are here. We have spoken to so many neighbors who say, we know people say it all the time it's not supposed to happen in your community, but here they're just so shocked.

They had no idea something like this was coming. They said this church is a center point in their community. Even if you don't attend the church here, you get your Christmas trees from here every year around Christmas time. You walk your dogs on the church property. It's a central point in this community and it's a central point that is broken right now, Laura.

COATES: It's so true to think about, and just the heart-wrenching nature of parents afraid, not knowing what is happening. Of course, we have come become all too accustomed in this country even with my own elementary school children of active shooting drills.

They were in mass. It is unbelievable. And, of course, law enforcement -- I want to turn to John Miller, because law enforcement is trying to try to understand what has happened here. They are involved in a very active investigation, despite the fact that the shooter has died.

Talk to me, John Miller, about where things stand right now with the investigation. What do we know? You have some new reporting?

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JOHN MILLER, CNN CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: We have some new reporting, some breaking news, really.

It's based on our conversations with investigators who are trying to get a richer and more granular picture of the shooter's planning and intent for what happened yesterday after a day of us all saying it couldn't have been worse.

We now learn that the shooter's plan likely was for it to be much worse. Police believe that the actual intent of the shooter was to get inside that church and open fire on the audience from the interior with the multiple weapons he carried. That would have given him -- think about this, Laura.

That would have given him a free open field of fire. They believe that because he confronted locked doors outside the church because the mass had already started that he was forced to improvise by shooting through the stained glass windows blindly and hitting whom he could hit in the blind.

Let's go to police Chief Brian O'Hara, who talked about that on our air moments ago.

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O'HARA: Well, certainly, the shooter had been inside the church in the past, we believe, and it would seem from his intention to barricade at least the doors on the side that the shooter did intend to get inside.

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MILLER: So the shooter had been in the church in the past.

Well, we know he went to school there, but CNN has learned from senior law enforcement officials that, weeks ago, he returned to the church. And wandering inside, looking around, he was approached by a church employee, who asked if he could help him. And he explained to the church employee -- I'm sorry -- Westman explained to the church employee that he was there trying to reconnect with his faith, get a feel for the place.

What law enforcement believe is that Westman's actual intent was reconnaissance that day.

They believe that that trip to the church, that looking around is what helped him to create this carefully drawn, handwritten diagram that he used as part of his planning and that they believe that this diagram and those wooden boards that he put through the exit doors, the emergency exit doors outside the church, were actually intended so, when he opened fire, the children, if they fled towards the emergency exit, would have found them blocked and those smoke bombs actually emitting smoke and they would have been unable to exit.

I know this is all hard to digest because we think, what could have been worse? If he had gotten his plan the way he intended it, it would have been much worse.

COATES: John Miller, that is horrifying to think about that planning.

Pam, I want to go to you, because we have heard -- we just think of the unique vulnerability of a place of worship from what happened with Dylann Roof in South Carolina to now, the idea of people welcoming somebody in under this pretextual reason that they were trying to connect with their faith, only to have them plan to unleash this savage assault.

It's unbelievable, Pam.

BROWN: Yes. I feel sick to my stomach after what we just heard from John Miller...

COATES: Yes.

BROWN: ... that the intent was to go inside, cause more harm, more killings of these young children, and to keep them trapped by barricading the door and having the smoke so that there's mass chaos. What kind of evil is that?

COATES: What kind of evil.

BROWN: And the thing that is so scary to me, Laura, like, the thing that really scares me is how many more people are like that in this country who want to do the same thing. And that is just what is so terrifying, right?

It's just -- it's a unique American problem with these school shootings.

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BROWN: Go ahead.

COATES: It is.

I was talking to Mary Ellen O'Toole, who you know is a renowned profiler, and just talking through. And one of the things she said was the real fear of copycats...

BROWN: Yes.

COATES: ... and knowing about how the people who would dare to do this, who are sick enough to be involved in this and horrific, they are almost learning from and trying to mimic and then one-up the last person.

We know that the weapon here, the weapons that were used had different names of reference points for prior mass shootings. And this is part of what law enforcement, as John Miller was talking about, are going to try to piece together with an eye towards creating that profile to be able to deter and prevent.

BROWN: Yes, and in this case from our reporting is that the gunman here had this fascination with the Sandy Hook shooter. And it is just so sick and we have to do better as a society to prevent further tragedies.

Thank you so much, Laura. We appreciate it.

And our coverage continues with David Hogg. He survived a school shooting seven years ago and has fought to reduce gun violence ever since.

You're in THE SITUATION ROOM.

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BROWN: Welcome back to our continuing coverage of the deadly mass shooting in Minneapolis.

A killer attacks Catholic schoolchildren as they celebrate the first mass of their school year.

Joining us now is David Hogg. He was a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when a government killed 17 students and staff. And he has since become a prominent advocate for gun safety.

Thank you so much for joining us, David.

It has been 7.5 years since Parkland. And I just was asking you before, during the break, what is it like for you every time a school shooting happens? You said at this point there's a callousness. Tell us more about that.

DAVID HOGG, CO-FOUNDER, LEADERS WE DESERVE: Yes. I mean, I think this happens for a lot of survivors. And it sounds wrong, but there's a certain kind of numbness that comes over that I think more than anything is a survival mechanism.

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But I think the more important thing here is that, in spite, obviously, of the recent news, there has been progress that has been made on guns. a bipartisan group of members of Congress came together and passed the first bipartisan gun law after the Buffalo and Uvalde massacres in 2022, and we saw a double-digit reduction in gun homicides as a result of that.

And it's obviously nowhere near enough and you're not going to hear about shootings that don't happen on programs like this, obviously.

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BROWN: Well, yes.

HOGG: But there has been progress that has been made. It's nowhere near enough.

But the most important message that I think people need to take away from what we did after Uvalde and Buffalo is that this issue is changing and we are making progress on it. But the bottom line is, Republicans and Democrats are still too divided on this, and that Democrats only talk about how does somebody get a gun typically.

Republicans love to only talk about why do they pull the trigger, right, capability and intent. We need to talk about both how do they get the gun and why do they pull the trigger at the same time. And if Republicans in Congress right now, where they have a trifecta, don't want to talk about how somebody is getting a gun, let's talk about the intent.

Let's talk about, why do our young people have this level of hatred in our country where they go and do things like this, and what systems can we put in place to ensure that we're preventing shootings before law enforcement has to show up? Because if we're putting our law enforcement officers as the first line of defense against this, we're failing.

BROWN: Yes.

And I actually spoke with Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara in the last hour, and I asked him about whether there were any missed warning signs. And he told me that in these early stages of the investigation there was nothing out of the ordinary that would have tripped up law enforcement in the lead-up to that attack and that would have triggered Minnesota's red flag law when purchasing those weapons legally.

So when you look at that, what more do you think could have been done to prevent these sorts of tragedies, in your view, like what we just saw in Minnesota?

HOGG: Well, I think first and foremost a basic thing that we -- that Republicans and Democrats and Congress could do right now is in order to figure out how to prevent these shootings, you know what would be useful? Funding for research at the CDC and NIH.

This is the leading cause of death for young people in this country right now.

BROWN: Yes.

HOGG: And historically it has gotten barely any funding. Typically, it's only gotten about $25 million, compared to the billions of dollars that most other causes of death get at those agencies.

We need more investigation and research into that, that we could pass simply as a reconciliation measure without having to deal with the filibuster with just 51 votes. That could be an easy thing that we could do, but also obviously more information is coming out about this.

But the bottom line is this. Donald Trump has the power to do something about this. After Parkland, he repeatedly said, you guys are cowards. You're not going to do anything because you're afraid of the NRA. We need to do something about guns. That is what he said. And then he met with the NRA and did nothing. Why? Because he is a coward. And my message to Donald Trump is that, you are a coward, sir. You are not going to do anything about this issue because you are terrified of the NRA, even though you have the power to save tens of thousands of lives.

You are the strongest president in modern American history, with a choke hold over your party and both chambers of Congress. You have the power to end this, but you are not going to because you're a damn coward.

BROWN: OK.

I want to talk about what we are actually hearing from politicians on both sides of the aisle, not just Democrats, but even conservatives. You had the conservative FOX News host Trey Gowdy suggesting this morning that it may be time for a national reckoning on guns, that this is not the sort of thoughts and prayers rhetoric that we are used to hearing after these tragedies.

So are you seeing a turn in terms of how politicians on both sides of the aisle are now responding to school shootings like this?

HOGG: Yes, I think there has been somewhat of a turn on it. As I mentioned, there were -- I think it was 10 Republican senators that voted for the Safer Communities Act after you have Uvalde, the first federal gun law in 30 years.

But it's still not enough, obviously, as given the fact that I'm speaking on the show right now after this happened. I think what Democrats and Republicans need to do is they need to go and meet behind closed doors and talk with each other and say, all right, what can we actually do here that we can both politically survive with, but actually does something about this, even if it's not super huge, even if it's not super sexy and out there for either political side and seen as a win for either of them?

What can we do to save lives? Even if it's just one or two or three or 100 lives, that's still worth it, because the answer here, regardless of whether or not you completely agree with me on this issue or you completely disagree with me, I think we all can agree that we have to do something.

And the answer cannot be inaction, as it has been for decades.

BROWN: I want to play some sound from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey this morning and talk on the other end of it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JACOB FREY (D), MAYOR OF MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA: We have more guns in America than people. I don't see a reason why people should be able to buy a gun one month and then buy a gun the next month and then the next month after that.

People obviously that have these severe mental health issues should not have access to guns, yet this particular individual had access to a whole heap ton of them. People who say that this is not about guns, you got to be kidding me. This is about guns. We do need to take action.

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There are other countries around the world where horrific acts have taken place like this, and then they step up to make a change so it in fact does not happen again. We can take that same sort of action here now and let this be the last time. Again, how many times have you heard people talk about this, and there needs to be a necessary change, and then change isn't made? It's on all of us.

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BROWN: So what do you do in a situation where there are more guns than people in this country? Of course, there are laws that are being put on the books, like in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for red flag and so forth, but what do you do in this situation?

HOGG: Well, one, at this point, we have to address this issue as a cultural one that we have as well, where there's a kind of -- if you're somebody who threatens to shoot up a high school, like the shooter at my high school did, I think it's hard to say that you're a responsible gun owner or that you should have a firearm in the first place, right?

And I think part of what we have to address is the hatred that is driving us, because there are still going to be those guns out there no matter what we do at the end of the day. What we can address, though, is both why do they want to pick up the gun in the first place and how do they get guns as well?

A lot of these shooters tend to be younger people. They tend to be in their 20s a lot of the time. They oftentimes are purchasing their guns very recently to these shootings. Part of what we can look at is, OK, a lot of these mass shooters, for example, max out their credit cards, and then go and commit these atrocities, even though they couldn't theoretically afford to pay for that.

What are we doing to look into that, right? And then I think part of it too is we have to address this culturally as a country by working together and saying, look, I know that you don't agree with me, for example, on banning a gun like the AR-15, even though I think that that is necessary. Let's put that aside.

What can we agree on in Congress, in our state legislatures, whether it's in -- here in Congress or in Minnesota to do something in their state legislature on guns, and acknowledge the fact that no single answer here is going to be perfect? When you have more guns than people, there are still going to be shootings that happen, but we still can make meaningful impacts.

There are states in this country, like Massachusetts, that have gun death rates 70 percent lower than the national average. So it's not like this is rocket science. It's not like we don't know what to do. The resource that we lack in this country to do something about this issue is not the knowledge of what we need to do about it. It is the courage to actually do something about it in the first place.

And I know there's a lot of people that say right now, well Republicans have a trifecta in Congress. They're not going to do anything. Guess what? After Parkland in Florida, a state that is a lot more red, I would say, than the rest of the country as a whole, we actually did something about guns.

We raised the age to buy. Despite what everybody said, including a lot of Democratic pollsters and consultants and pundits, said, we actually did something. We raised the age to buy a gun to 21 in our state, and we passed a red flag law that has been used well over 10,000 times since the shooting at my high school in Florida.

Part of that was because of the work of people like Jared -- now Congressman Jared Moskowitz working across the aisle with Republicans to actually get something done. That's possible here in Congress too. The question is, is our president actually going to direct his Republican members of Congress to actually do something about this, or are we going to continue having this debate over and over again as more kids die?

BROWN: David Hogg, thank you so much.

HOGG: Thank you.

BROWN: I appreciate it.

Just ahead right here in THE SITUATION ROOM, we are awaiting a news conference from Minneapolis, where we will get an update on the victims of Wednesday's shooting.

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