Inside Annunciation Church, terror and heroism as an attack unfolded

The excitement of new beginnings seemed all around Wednesday morning at Annunciation Catholic School in south Minneapolis: the first week of the school year. A new principal, and a new priest at the adjoining parish.

Signs posted outside the church captured the mood: “A future filled with HOPE!”

Shea McAdaragh, whose oldest child is a second-grader at Annunciation, hadn’t planned on attending the annual back-to-school Mass. At the last minute, he crept into the back pew behind the teachers, parents and students, some as young as 6.

Outside, near the parish’s tiny wiffle-ball diamond, a 23-year-old shooter lurked.

The opening hymn began and the priest walked solemnly down the aisle.

Then a dissonant noise: Pop-pop-pop-pop.

McAdaragh’s a hunter. He knows the sound of gunshots. But he saw no shooter. Instead, when he looked to the stained glass on the east side of the big church, he saw light coming through the stained glass windows. The shots, he realized, were coming from outside.

McAdaragh’s screams pierced the quiet: “STAY DOWN! STAY DOWN!”

Just don’t let the kids outside, he thought.

Later, the casualty count would be horrific: 19 people shot, 16 of them kids. Two would be declared dead at the scene. Others would be rushed into surgery. But in the moment, all McAdaragh could think of was protecting a church full of children.

The first 911 calls came in at 8:27 a.m. Inside the church, McAdaragh watched the principal rush toward the gunfire and lock a door. Some groups ran to the basement and hid in a classroom.

The first Minneapolis police officer on the scene burst in just a few minutes after it all began.

By then, the gunfire had stopped. The shooter had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound just outside the church. The shooter’s weapons — a semiautomatic rifle, a shotgun and handgun — had all been purchased legally, and recently, police would later say.

McAdaragh told the kids they could get up from their hiding places under the pews. He saw terror in their faces.

“The thing that’s going to stick with me,” he said, “was when I said ‘you guys can get up,’ and I knew some kids weren’t going to get up.”

Parents and teachers began to triage students as more police and emergency responders rushed in. They assessed which students were injured and which most severely. They wrapped students’ wounds to stanch the bleeding. They carried the injured out of the church. One second-grader thought it must have been a robber trying to steal the prizes from the century-old church’s upcoming SeptemberFest, one parent said.

Cellphones buzzed around the tight-knit neighborhood surrounding the church. Parents abandoned cars on side streets and sprinted to the school, where they were escorted by police into the basement.

Police officers brought the injured to the front of the church, where paramedics loaded them sometimes two or three at a time into ambulances.

Two kids, ages 8 and 10, died at the scene from gunshot wounds to the head, according to police and eyewitness accounts. Fourteen more, ages 6 to 15, were injured, plus three parishioners in their 80s. Of the 11 people brought to HCMC, seven were in critical condition, and four required operations.

One of them was Endre Gunter Jr.

He was sitting in Mass when he looked out the window and saw the shooter coming, said his grandmother, Denise Roberts. A girl next to him was shot in the head. Endre was shot in the stomach. At HCMC, surgeons removed bullet fragments from his body.

“He’s groggy but he’s resting,” Roberts said after speaking with him.

Parents gathered in the school parking lot before they were brought into the basement gymnasium to see their children. When another second-grader calmly told his father, “The shooter shot himself,” the father burst into tears.

Renee Lego, who has a fifth-grader and an eighth-grader at Annunciation, was trying to digest the events at her home Wednesday, surrounded by family and friends. Her boys were unharmed, out back shooting hoops.

“Both my kids have blood on them,” she said. “I got as close as I could [to the school] and kept trying to get ahold of my kids — I didn’t know if my kids were alive or not. We have a friend whose son is unaccounted for [late Wednesday morning]. We don’t know what that means. Several of my kids’ buddies are at HCMC. Just cannot make sense of any of this.”

At his house just a few blocks from Annunciation, McAdaragh said he was still in a daze. He hadn’t even begun to digest what had happened. In the immediate aftermath, he had run through the pews, yelling his son’s name, checking the two dead children to make sure neither were his, before he realized his son’s second-grade classroom had fled downstairs.

He worried what it would feel like going to bed that night.

“I don’t know what’s next,” McAdaragh said as he walked back to the church. “I don’t know what’s next for Annunciation. I don’t know what’s next for the school. But today I just want to put the pieces back together.”