MINNEAPOLIS — The children of Annunciation Catholic School in south Minneapolis were engaged in the most innocent and peaceful of rituals.

Dressed in their green uniforms, they were praying at the adjacent Annunciation Church at a children’s Mass to start the school year.

The Wednesday morning service had barely begun when high velocity rifle fire — as many as 30 to 100 rounds, according to witnesses — started ripping through the windows and striking the children, leaving two dead and others wounded.

The violence, perpetrated by a 23-year-old former student, police said, tore through the tight-knit community and far beyond. What Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey referred to as “horrific violence” brought a deadly end to a summer that began with the assassination of a state legislative leader.

The shock and grief from perhaps the worst outbreak of mass violence in Minneapolis since the 2012 Accent Signage killings that left five people dead including the shooter was felt as far away as the Vatican. More than 600 people, including Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, attended a vigil at the Academy of Holy Angels later Wednesday to mourn the slain students.

Slain as they sat in their pews were an 8- and a 10-year-old. Seventeen others, 14 of them children, were wounded. Seven people, including one adult, remained in critical condition, according to Hennepin Healthcare.

The injured children were between the ages of 6 and 15, according to Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara. The three injured adults were in their 80s. All the injured victims are expected to survive, O’Hara said.

The shooter, armed with a rifle, shotgun and pistol, began firing outside of the church, according to O’Hara.

Identified as 23-year-old Robin Westman, the shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to police.

“This was a deliberate act of violence against innocent children and other people worshipping,” O’Hara said.

An Annunciation parent at the 8:15 a.m. Mass said students were packed into their pews when the gunfire began from outside.

“He just pepper-sprayed through the stained glass windows into the building, 50 to 100 shots,” said the parent, who did not want his name used. “This is terrible. This is evil. I don’t know how you defend against this.”

Neighbor Andy Winchell said the rapid volleys of gunfire “went on for a minute, plus.”

”It was very loud, like a ‘bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop,’ " Winchell, 42, said. “We were like, ‘What was that?’ ”

The shooting stopped. Then came silence, broken by the sirens of emergency vehicles.

“All of a sudden you hear sirens from everywhere,” Winchell said.

Soon, frantic parents were abandoning their cars on side streets and running to the school, crying for their children.

“The parents were parking on the street by me coming out screaming, asking where their kids are,” said Madee Brandt, 24, a nanny who was driving to work near the church when her vehicle was boxed in by police vehicles.

Traumatized children, some crying, some bleeding, began to emerge from the church.

One little boy walked between his mom and dad, holding a stuffed animal. A Hennepin County sheriff’s deputy hugged a despondent parent in the middle of Diamond Lake Road. Another little boy, crying and walking from the scene, was heard saying to his father, “I don’t feel safe.”

“Both my kids have blood on them,” said Renee Lego, an Annunciation parishioner who has a fifth-grader and eighth-grader at Annunciation Catholic School. She said her older son thought it was fireworks or a gas explosion until he started to see people falling.

“It’s just horrific — so cowardly. This person knew this was our first all-school Mass of the year. It was obviously planned. This is the children’s Mass, not an advertised Mass for the public," Lego said.

Kristen Painter, business editor for the Minnesota Star Tribune, has a second-grade daughter and a preschool son at the school. Her son was sick and stayed home from school Wednesday. After dropping her daughter off and getting to work, Painter got word of the shooting.

She rushed to the school and was brought into the basement gymnasium with other parents to reunite with their children. Many students were crying, Painter said, while others were silent and looked terrified. Children and teachers had dropped to the floor during the shooting, taking cover under the pews.

Speaking to students, parents and staff, the school principal, Matt DeBoer, said teachers and older children tried to shield the younger students from harm.

“It could have been significantly worse without their heroic action,” he said.

There was the denunciation of the violence by eE Elected officials and community leaders decried the violence.

“Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now,” Frey said. “These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school.”

“Every one of us needs to be wrapping our arms around these families giving them every ounce that we muster.”

Walz spoke with President Donald Trump on Wednesday morning about the shooting, according to a source familiar with the call. Trump called to offer his condolences to Minnesotans, the source said, and Walz thanked him for his support.

“I’m praying for our kids and teachers whose first week of school was marred by this horrific act of violence,” Walz said.

Within five hours of the shooting, Trump ordered that American flags throughout the country be flown at half-staff until sunset Sunday.

Meanwhile, families rushed to HCMC where many of the injured were taken. Denise Roberts was among the first.

Her grandson, Endre Gunter Jr., was shot in the stomach. “A girl next to him got hit in the head,” Roberts said. “He’s groggy, but he’s resting.”

She added that her daughter-in-law, Danielle Gunter, was in shock. “I don’t know if she will ever let Endre out of her sight again,” Roberts said.

Law enforcement later identified the suspected shooter as Westman, of Richfield.

A video posted Wednesday on a YouTube channel that appears to have belonged to Westman displays four guns, ammunition, a letter to family and friends and clothing the narrator apparently planned to wear “tomorrow.”

The firearms shown are a rifle, a shotgun and two handguns. At times menacing and laughing maniacally, and at other times quietly apologizing to family, the narrator speaks about plans to injure children without remorse, invoking the names of a multinational investment company, an oil company and a beer company, as well as a Second Amendment activist running for Congress in Texas.

Words, phrases and drawings had been scrawled in marker all over the weapons and magazines, some of the messages antisemitic, one reading “kill Donald Trump.”

There are references to a pedophile and a rapist, and hostility toward Christianity, including the image of Jesus on a shooting target and phrases scrawled on the guns such as, “Where’s your God now?”

The guns Westman allegedly used were lawfully purchased, according to O’Hara.

Police executed four search warrants Wednesday, one for the church and the other three at nearby residences related to the suspected shooter, and “additional firearms (were) recovered from there as we speak,” O’Hara said.

Public records show Westman’s father, James Westman, owns a home in south Minneapolis, less than one mile from Annunciation. Police were stationed outside the home, which was cordoned off with crime scene tape.

Westman’s mother seemed distraught when she answered a call but told a Minnesota Star Tribune reporter she did not know if her child was the shooter. It appears she has ties to Annunciation. The church said in a 2021 Facebook post announcing her departure that she provided “wonderful hospitality.”

A 2017 Annunciation yearbook showed that Westman, who went by Robert at the time, attended the school for at least one year.

FBI Director Kash Patel said his agency is “investigating this shooting as an act of domestic terrorism and hate crime targeting Catholics.”

Bernard Hebda, archbishop of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, said that prayers have been coming in to the archdiocese from the pope and “so many from all around the globe, all praying for the families of Annunciation Parish and School and for all who were impacted by this morning’s senseless violence.”

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(Kyeland Jackson, Louis Krauss, Jeff Day, Reid Forgrave, Mara Klecker, Sofia Barnett and Rohan Preston of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed to this story.)

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