Annunciation Church Shooting: A Week Later

Hello and welcome to a follow-up to Kim’s essay about the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, MN. Today is September 6th.

Annunciation Church and school are located next to each other, and it was my family’s school and parish. My parents had seven kids, and there was a Stewart attending the grade school from 1956 until 1978. At times, four of us were moving through the grades simultaneously. People talk about a place being a “second home”, and with the hours spent in school for eight years, attending weekly Mass, “Holy Days of Obligation,” serving as an altar boy, and playing sports, the school and church were the places my family spent the most time growing up, apart from our house. Over the years, each of us kids took a different path with our faith, but Annunciation is something that never leaves you. We had funeral services for both my parents at the church. My niece and nephew went there, too. I was at the school last month with my sister to honor a music teacher who recently passed away. I know every room, every space, every door, and every inch of that church and school.

Last week at Annunciation Catholic Church, a routine Wednesday started with a Mass attended by the grade school students and teachers, but as we all know, it was this school, this church, and this community’s turn to experience an active shooter event. I’ve known about other school shootings such as Sandy Hook (2012), Uvalde (2022), and Covenant School (2023), and many others, but these happened in the abstract, something I watched through a screen or read about. This time at Annunciation, it was MY church, MY school, in MY neighborhood, a part of ME.

After the shooting, people started to visit the church and drop off flowers. The number of flowers quickly grew, and they needed to be cared for and organized. A group of people who were in the midst of grief started to organize the area into a place to receive, display, and maintain what has become a large flower memorial around the church. A few days ago, they didn’t have this task of managing all these volunteers, supplies, media, and thousands of visitors who are also grieving. Over a few days, the organizers had an online volunteer sign-up, a webpage for donations, and signage for people to donate to funds for the victims. They are making it up as they go, running on instinct and a few hours of sleep but making the flower memorial a place people can spend time and process their grief in their own way: working to support the flowers, praying, leaving messages, cards, small gifts, or being with others who feel the same way.

After a few days, they became exhausted and put out a call for help, which is how I became involved. I’m one of those people who “works” through their grief, so I went to do something, and it has helped me because I needed to turn sorrow into service. Myself and others just went there to do what we could. We keep the flowers watered, take off the plastic, put out additional five-gallon buckets (more than 200 so far), pick up litter, etc. With all the flowers in the area surrounding the church, the sight is beautiful, but then the thought as to why the flowers are here comes back. The flowers are people's expression of love and support.

Blue and green ribbons, the school colors, have been created from donated material, cut by volunteers, and taken by those who visit the flower memorial. Thousands of these ribbons appear around South Minneapolis as an expression of support and affirmation of the tragic event. Colored chalk is available, and now the sidewalk, doors, and plywood covering the broken windows around the church have become a canvas where wishes are given, anger is expressed, and prayers are left.

There have been volunteers from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day since the day after the shooting. It’s maintained with love and devotion as a place for people to gather, grieve, express, pray, and connect. You feel it in your heart, see it in everyone’s eyes, and hear it in snippets of their discussions as you labor maintaining the site.

Words cannot express how moving this flower memorial is when you consider that everyone volunteering is in shock and grief. Any and all emotions are present at the flower memorial: there is fear and love, anger and angst, rage and hope.

I’ve worked at the flower memorial each day since Sunday, and some of the volunteers tell you what happened to them or people they know. There is a young man who is a junior in high school who graduated from Annunciation, and his mom is a teacher at the school. He said his mom was in the church when the shooting happened. I asked how she was doing, and he said, “as well as can be expected,” which is Minnesota-speak for “not well.” This young man almost lost his mom that morning. He is impacted, too, and she will need his strength. One of the flower memorial organizers is good friends with and lives next door to one of the families whose child was killed. She didn’t need to say more; it was in her eyes, and you could feel the emotion like heat. The clerk at Walgreens across from the school told me she heard the shots and watched the parents sprint toward the school. The clerk is a mom, so she knows what those parents were thinking: “Is it mine? Is it my kid this time?” On another day, I was at the hardware store getting more five-gallon buckets and other supplies for the flower memorial and was talking to a guy who said, “Let’s get 10 of the smartest people in a room and figure it out.” I replied that the answer to school shootings was not a technical problem but a policy problem. Then I went on to say that this country has solved technical problems before, such as going to the moon; however, the policy came first (i.e.: “…before this decade is out, land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth”). Once the policy was in place, the money flowed, and the work commenced to solve the technical problems.

School shootings have become so routine that the stories follow a template: breaking news, terrified students and teachers, heroic first responders, frightened parents rush to the school, and political leaders make their statements either calling for change and action while others say it’s too soon after the tragedy to do anything. “Let’s wait until there are cooler heads.”

The shooting is a loss of innocence, the end of “It can’t happen here.” Previous shootings were terrible, but I watched them on a screen or read about them. Now it’s real; it happened at a place I know, a place that is part of me.

People can argue the causes of these school shootings, but the debate is not followed by serious effort. We’ve seen this horror show so many times that Congress and the White House don’t bother to even mention any sort of change or solution. Check this week's news yourself to see what topics are more important for Congress and the White House to pursue, what issues are more worthy of hearings than a solution to school shootings such as at Annunciation Catholic Church.  There are a lot of grassroots calls for the Minnesota State legislators to do something but the state House and Senate are closely divided and agreement on consequential legislation is remote.

In 2024 alone, there were 267 injuries and fatalities resulting from school shootings. For 2025 so far, there have been 31 deaths and 86 injuries from gunfire on school grounds. Annunciation Catholic Church was the eighth school shooting thus far in 2025.

These mass shootings at schools and elsewhere have become like a hurricane, something that happens and impacts a lot of people. There is the typical cycle of breaking news, constant coverage for a few days, interviews with survivors or people in the area, coverage of a milestone such as when students return to class or church services resume and then perhaps a “one year later” story. Then, invariably, the country moves on to another topic.

There was a lot of courage that day. Teachers protecting students, students protecting each other, first responders rushing in not knowing if another shooter was inside, parents running towards the school. If only our leaders would show the same courage and work together to solve this problem of school shootings.

Normally, these essays finish with something upbeat, a lesson learned, or a moral to the tale. People like stories with “and they lived happily ever after.” This essay does not end that way. The camera trucks have left, the news cycle has already started to move on, and national interest fades. It’s not known when school will restart; it’s not known when the church will reopen and hold Mass; it’s not known when the students and teachers will return, but the two who were killed will not. How the parents, teachers, and students will go on is not known. That they will go on is certain because that’s what humans do. They will do as well as can be expected. How they will be forever changed is also not known.

For me, I’m different now. For one thing, when I see kids going to school, heavily laden with backpacks, I say a little prayer that they stay safe, that they end up back home where they started.

What is certain is that if nothing is done to fix the problem of school shootings, then prepare for the next one. It will come.

Here’s my advice if nothing changes: five-gallon pails work well for bunches of flowers; use “Signup Genius” to organize shifts of volunteers; real candles look better than electric ones. A refreshment table with free food and drinks is good to have, as well as porta-potties.