A mother’s frantic sprint: After terrifying gunfire, racing through smoke to reach her son

Laura DuSchane had just walked her 3-year-old son, Rory, across the street to Annunciation Catholic School for his third day of preschool on what should have been an ordinary Wednesday.

Back in her south Minneapolis home, DuSchane, who is eight months pregnant, had settled onto the couch when the sound tore through the quiet. A rapid, relentless popping — gunfire, unmistakable. She leapt up, heart pounding. The bursts came in fast succession, unbroken for nearly five minutes. To her, it felt like eternity.

She flung open the back door, scrambled onto a table in the yard, straining for a glimpse over fences. Smoke drifted over Annunciation Church, clouding the stone façade. Neighbors stood frozen on their porches, faces drained of color.

“I yelled at them, ‘What do I do? My kid is in the school,’” she told the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Instinct propelled her forward. She sprinted down the street and up the hill toward the church next to the school. Two men running in the opposite direction shouted at her to turn back — they didn’t know if the shooter remained on the loose. DuSchane didn’t stop.

“I said, ‘I’m running up there. I have to go find my kid.’”

As she ran, she fumbled with her phone, trying to dial 911. None of the calls went through. She rang her husband, Patrick, instead.

Squad cars screamed onto the block, their numbers multiplying by the second. By then, she was already rushing through scenes of horror.

“I had run past a lot of trauma already,” DuSchane said. “I saw kids filing out of the church. I saw my neighbor helping bloodied kids out of the church, and I think I was like, I can’t really spend too much time looking at this because I know what I’m seeing is really bad.”

In all, 20 people were shot. Two children— Fletcher Merkel, 8, and Harper Moyski, 10 — died at the scene. Fifteen other children, ages 6 to 15, and three parishioners in their 80s were injured; they are expected to survive.

DuSchane pushed forward, not knowing the shooter was firing from outside the church — only that Rory was somewhere nearby. Children screamed and cried; some crumpled to the pavement. She saw another parent she recognized, and together they charged toward the entrance. Holding the door for a teacher clutching a first-aid kit, DuSchane ducked into the school next to the church.

She burst into Rory’s preschool classroom, where the children still sat unsuspecting. She scanned frantically until she found his face.

It had been years since she’d practiced an active-shooter drill, but muscle memory took over. Rory’s teacher, Hannah Rausch, only three days into the job, gathered the class. She turned it into a quiet game.

“Seventeen 3-year-olds sat and were quiet and didn’t move and didn’t run,” DuSchane recalled.

Minutes later, word came that the shooter was down, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound behind the church.

Outside, neon posters with “FAMILY” scrawled in block letters were taped to stop signs, pointing parents toward the church basement. It had become a reunification site. DuSchane guided Rory’s classmates downstairs, holding hands with another child until her parents arrived.

Meanwhile, parents streamed toward the school in a frantic tide — some sprinting, some staggering, faces wet with tears, desperate to know if their child was alive. DuSchane’s husband was among them. Eventually, officers began urging families who had already been reunited to step away, to make room for those still searching.

Rory doesn’t fully understand what happened — only that it was terrible.

“My child does not know what a shooter is, and doesn’t know what a gun is,” DuSchane said. “The narrative we talked about yesterday was that there was a monster at the school.

“There was a monster at the school, and the police took the monster away.”