A Minneapolis neighborhood cradles this grieving Annunciation family

Mollie Merkel stood next to her murdered 8-year-old son’s bed. She picked up a little green blanket, nuzzled it to her face and inhaled.

“This is his baby blanket,” she said. “It still smells like Fletcher.”

Fletcher called the blanket his “green gank” and never left home without it. They didn’t break him of the habit until age 6. Every night, Mollie sleeps with it, rubbing the same worn corner Fletcher always rubbed, breathing in his scent.

In the months since Fletcher was fatally shot during the first all-student Mass of the school year at Annunciation Catholic School — a massacre that also killed 10-year-old Harper Moyski and injured dozens more — the Merkels have clung to everyday relics of their second child’s brief, full life. Jesse Merkel, Fletcher’s dad, wears Fletcher’s silver cross around his neck. He touches it and talks to his slain son. Sometimes the relics bring comfort, sometimes more heartbreak.

Whatever they’re feeling, they’ve learned how large their village has become.

Sometimes, on bad days, Mollie reaches out after kids’ bedtime to a support circle: Other neighborhood moms who come by whenever she asks.

One night, after their first family trip without Fletcher, she asked them to come to his room. Several moms tiptoed up the stairs. His room looked the same as when Fletcher last put on his white Annunciation uniform on Aug. 27: a display of fishing lures, a Richfield Baseball League trophy, Captain Underpants books. The comforter is no longer on Fletcher’s bed; his parents put it in a storage bin, hoping to hold his scent. Outside Fletcher’s bedroom window were memorial ribbons neighbors tied around trees in their southwest Minneapolis neighborhood, and lit-up hearts in the windows of every house.

Mollie told stories about Fletcher. Together, the moms cried until she was ready to fall asleep.

In the dizzying days immediately after the shooting, the world focused on this southwest Minneapolis neighborhood. Television news trucks set up shop at Mac’s Fish & Chips across from the school. Politicians pledged action in news conferences. The vice president visited grieving families. For a fleeting moment, life here slowed to only include the things that matter. Neighbors hugged on sidewalks, parents cried at Kowalski’s while picking out bunches of grapes, signs saying “OUR ❤️ IS WITH ANNUNCIATION” sprouted in yards.

Fletcher Merkel’s name had become synonymous with a uniquely American contagion, one more name in a impossibly long, sad list: Daniel Mauser, 15, Columbine. Dylan Hockley, 6, Sandy Hook. Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo, 10, Uvalde. Fletcher Merkel, 8, Minneapolis.

Mollie and Jesse Merkel ask for one simple thing since this tragedy tore apart their lives: for people to remember not just how Fletcher died but how he lived.

They want Fletcher remembered as the charismatic glue who held together his third-grade class, who cooked scrambled eggs over a fire in the Boundary Waters and hooked a snapping turtle at the lake near their house and stormed the field when the Minnesota Gophers beat USC last fall, tearing off his shirt in celebration.

Their block has not.

In summer 2024, Mollie and Jesse Merkel decided they needed more space for their four children. They moved a half-mile from Lynnhurst to Kenny, into a slice of the neighborhood some nickname “Unicorn Village.”

“This block sometimes doesn’t feel like real life,” said one neighbor, Alyssa Olson, who has two kids at nearby Kenny Elementary School.

“You just open the front door and your kids go find a friend and you know they’re going to be cared for,” said another neighbor, Nicole Farrell, who has a seventh-grader at Annunciation.

Here, neighbors keep a tool library (why buy a chainsaw when you can borrow one?). They hold backyard Air Fryer fests (fun, except for all the blown fuses). They play street pickleball (on a spraypainted court). Tucked between an elementary school and a swampy lake on whose banks kids build forts, hardly any car traffic passes. Neighbors call it a “front-yard block.” An unwritten rule is kids roam freely in front yards but must ask permission for backyards. This means pickup football on the street, adult beers on Adirondack chairs, a communal basketball hoop, bands of bike-riding kids, Halloween bonfires.

On that morning, Erin Wetherbee was on a bus to the State Fair with a friend when an ambulance tore past. Passengers started chattering about another school shooting when Wetherbee’s phone rang: A paramedic said her eighth-grade son had been shot in the arm. Wetherbee got off the bus and Ubered to Children’s Minnesota.

Messages pinged among neighborhood moms, confirming which kids were OK. Soon, those messages boiled down to one question: “Has anyone seen Fletcher?”

The Merkels were in the Annunciation gymnasium where families reunited with kids. Other kids had told them they’d spotted Fletcher, who is tall for a third-grader and resembles his older brother, so they initially thought Fletcher was safe.

“There were less and less and less people in that gym,” Jesse recalled. “Then it was just us.”

Within hours of the shooting, moms on the block had emptied out nearby dollar stores of blue and green plastic tablecloths, Annunciation’s colors. Olson’s yard became a ribbon-making command center. Wetherbee’s son was released the next day, and by the time they got home, the neighborhood was plastered in ribbons as Annunciation’s tragedy rippled outward. Wetherbee’s home filled with the overlapping circles of her life: neighbors and family and colleagues from Minneapolis’ VA hospital.

At the Merkels’, at the Wetherbees’, at the Farrells’, sandwich trays appeared. Local restaurants donated meals. Neighbor kids scrawled sidewalk chalk art. One neighbor put a cooler on the Merkels’ porch, and others kept filling it with beverages for visiting mourners. A meal train filled up through the new year. Neighbors chipped in to buy the Merkels a chest freezer for all the extra food.

“If you don’t have this kind of support system, build it now,” Farrell wrote on her Facebook page. “No one should have to walk this road alone.”

Families held bonfires to capture a semblance of normal for Annunciation families. Sometimes, Jesse got angry when he saw other kids experiencing joy, even though he knew that reaction didn’t really make sense. “You can sit and mope and feel sorry for yourself, which is really easy to do,” Jesse said. “But we have three other children. We try to make it as normal as we can, which is impossible. But what’s the alternative?”

Mollie would tear up cardboard boxes and feed them into the bonfire, disassociating as she stared into the flames. Around the bonfire, some Annunciation kids started weeping out of nowhere. Others seemed unaffected until they suddenly started sharing graphic details about Aug. 27.

The neighborhood had turned into a cocoon, a sanctuary for grief.

The day Fletcher was murdered, his older brother, 10-year-old Milo, walked into Fletcher’s bedroom. He grabbed a sheaf of papers from a comic book Fletcher had been sketching the night before. He looked at the final panel in the comic, where Fletcher had drawn a stick-figure picture of himself and his older brother. There, Fletcher had scrawled, “Today I lost my best friend.”

Milo hung it in his room.

Later, Milo wondered aloud if his brother had known he was going to die.

“He was my best friend,” Milo said. “Why did he write that the night before?’”

Memories of Fletcher are all over the Merkels’ house. Friends helped make an ofrenda for Fletcher for the Mexican Day of the Dead holiday. They filled it with Fletcher’s favorite things: Swedish fish and Mini Chips Ahoy, a Green Bay Packers football and an animal encyclopedia.

The only thing Milo has asked for since his brother’s death is a golden retriever puppy to join their full-grown labradoodle. They named the puppy Xander, after Fletcher’s middle name, Alexander.

It feels like an open, healthy way to grieve. And because the Merkels talk about Fletcher, their neighbors do too.

“A big reason why it’s still so top of mind is because of Mollie’s transparency,” said Olson, the neighbor. “She refuses to close the blinds. She wants the world to know the most intimate parts of Fletcher.”

Fletcher loved a Halloween display at a nearby home, a dolls graveyard. This Halloween, the dolls were holding hands and a sign: “For the boy who loved us.” Around Fletcher’s birthday in January, a neighborhood tattoo shop will offer free arrow tattoos; Fletcher means “maker of arrows,” and Mollie has an arrow tattoo on a finger. Jesse got the same tattoo, right above his heart. The nearby South Lyndale Liquors & Market will hold the inaugural fundraiser for the Fletcher Merkel Scholarship Fund and feature Fletcher’s favorite foods: bleu cheese and prosciutto, truffles and bacon mac and cheese. The neighborhood association is chipping in for a bench in Fletcher’s honor at the nearby lake.

Neighbors know the Merkels can’t always handle heavy conversations, so some just send a heart emoji every couple of days. Jesse has told friends to pick a random date in winter and create a calendar reminder to check on them. He fears winter will be the hardest, when the darkness lingers and the block hibernates.

“There are hundreds of regrets I have to live with now for Fletcher, and there’s nothing I can do about them,“ Jesse said. ”But I have hundreds of regrets with my other kids and with Mollie and with my other friends and with my career that I have a chance to change.

“I don’t know what’s next after this life. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s heaven. Maybe it’s something different. Who knows? But I know I’ve got somewhere between one day to 50 years left to close the loop on as many of those regrets as I can, and to say that in the end, I did my best.”

Through their window, blue and green Christmas lights — Annunciation’s colors — glowed in the Merkels’ yard. Nine more houses on their block had the same color lights.