Robin Westman, who carried out the horrific mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, had a former middle school classmate who claims she knew something was seriously wrong from the beginning.
“Something I knew was off… he would put up his hand and say, ‘praise Hitler,’” Josefina Sanchez, who sat next to Westman in seventh school, told local reporters. Reflecting on her bewilderment as a child, she said, “I was a kid; how was I to know what to do?”
During a school Mass, Westman, a 23-year-old former student and the child of a church employee, opened fire, killing two children and wounding 17 others before ending their own life. Given the extreme rhetoric found in manifestos and weapon engravings, authorities are looking into it as a possible act of domestic terrorism and hate crime.
The eerie memory highlights how early warning indicators can be ignored and pushes communities to identify and address troubling behavior before catastrophe occurs.