Minneapolis – Mass was underway on Wednesday morning to mark the beginning of the academic year at the Annunciation Catholic School when the bullets began to pass through the glass.
That the shooting, which killed two students and wounded more than a dozen other people, happened when Mass was celebrated is something that Reverend Dennis Zehren is still reflecting.
“I will reflect on that for the rest of my life,” Zehren said in comments before Saturday Mass, the first for the parish from the shooting. “It’s something I can never see.”
Zehren, who was in the Catholic Church Annunciation during Wednesday’s shooting, remembered running towards the sound of bullets, hoping to be able to help in some way.
“If I could have entered between those bullets and the children,” said Zehren, “that’s what he expected to do.”
The students Fletcher Merkel, 8, and Harper Moyski, 10, were killed. Another fifteen children, from 6 to 15 years old, were injured with three adult parishioners.
Six people remained hospitalized on Friday, including a child in critical condition and an adult in serious condition, according to Hennepin Healthcare. The police have said that all injured victims are survived.
The suspect died of a self -inflicted gunshot wound, police said. The authorities have not identified a clear reason. Joseph Thompson, fiscal lawyer of the United States for the Minnesota district, said the suspect was full of hatred and was obsessed with the idea of killing children.
During the Mass on Saturday, which was held in a separate campus building from where the shooting occurred, Zehren cried when he remembered the congregation that was told to stay down when the rounds of what the police have described as a semi -automatic rifle rang.
“The voices shouted, below, descents, casualties. Stay depressed. Stay depressed. Do not get up,” he said. “When we were there, in that low place, Jesus showed us something. He showed us, I am the Lord, even here.”
The congregation, Zehren expected, put evil instead.
“Together in that low place, we look with Jesus in the eyes of the forces of darkness, death and evil,” he said. “And Jesus pointed out, and he said: ‘Look, can’t you see how weak it is? Can’t you see the desperate? Can’t you see that this can never last?'”
Zehren urged parishioners in their darkest hour to welcome the “light of a new day.”
“A small moment of darkness has brought a light that is far beyond everything we have experienced before,” he said. “Never in all my years I experienced such effusion of love, light and hope.”
Archbishop Bernard Hebda hoped that returning to the Mass after the shooting would help the parishioners of the Church to claim a sense of normality.
“It is the return to those things that are so familiar to us that I think it is important,” he said before Saturday.
Charlie Lyman, a parishioner whose three children attended Annunciation, said after the Mass that the Church has been a source of strength for the family and community of southwest Minneapolis for decades and will continue to be so.
“This place instills a feeling of great faith to be good to each other, to help each other, be friendly to each other,” said Lyman, whose family helped build the church.
Tess Rada attended the Mass with his 8 -year -old daughter, Lila Hostetler, a student in an ad, and said it was reassuring Zehren sharing her feelings.
“Just listening to the emotion in his voice was very, it was pleasant,” he said. “It was like, you know that these emotions do not escape anyone. We all feel it, but we can feel it together.”
Dennis Romero reported from San Diego and Selina Guevara de Minneapolis.
