‘No going back.’ Minneapolis church shooter turned violent after sometimes turbulent upbringing.

The journals kept by the shooter in the Annunciation Catholic Church attack are filled with racist vitriol and a morbid fixation with mass murderers.

They also reveal a young adult in the throes of a crisis.

She had quit her job. She had moved in with a friend after breaking up with a longtime partner. She believed she was dying from a terminal illness.

It was time to put in motion the attack that she had spent months planning.

“There is no going back,” Robin Westman wrote in a notebook entry dated Aug. 16. “I blew all my money, quit my job, left [my partner], am slowly dying of cancer and am so hopelessly ruthlessly lost in despair and disdain for this world.”

Eleven days later, she fired more than 100 bullets through stained glass windows at the south Minneapolis church, killing two and wounding 19 others before taking her own life outside the church.

The dead and 16 of the wounded were students at Annunciation School, a K-8 school that Westman herself had attended.

The Minnesota Star Tribune reviewed court and police documents, hundreds of pages of Westman’s writings and reached out to more than 50 former neighbors, classmates, co-workers and family members in an effort to understand her murderous intent.

The evidence suggests someone struggling to find her place in the world. Her home life became less stable after her parents divorced when she was still in elementary school. She bounced between several high schools as a teenager and struggled to navigate relationships and questions of identity as an adult.

But some former neighbors, co-workers and classmates said they saw no hints that Westman could be capable of such rage and senseless violence.

Her father and siblings did not respond to interview requests, and many others in the shooter’s orbit declined to speak to reporters. The morning of the shooting, the Star Tribune reached her mother, Mary. She was crying, and when asked if her child had carried out the shooting, she said: “No, I can’t right now. I can’t.”

The Star Tribune is referring to Westman with she/her pronouns because available legal documents list her gender as female.

Neighbors had mixed views about the family, and few wanted to speak publicly, even if they liked them.

The one thing everyone agreed on was that the Westmans fully embraced their Catholic faith. One recalled Mary Westman once walking down the street, carrying a cross, to demonstrate her beliefs.

A 2005 photo published by the Associated Press showed Mary and her daughter, Theresa, at an anti-abortion rally outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul. Mary was holding a crucifix.

At least while their children were young, neighbors said, the Westmans home schooled them, with many Saturday mornings spent on religious education.

Jim Westman was described as a loving father who could also be a strict disciplinarian. Neighbors in Maplewood recalled Westman replacing the muffler on a neighbor’s lawn mower after repeatedly – and unsuccessfully – complaining about the noise.

In 2003, the family moved to a Hastings neighborhood where most homes sold for twice as much as the family’s old Maplewood-area home.

A former neighbor remembered that Robin wasn’t allowed to go trick-or-treating at Halloween because of her parents’ religious beliefs.

The shooter’s life became more turbulent when her mom and dad separated in July 2011. Later that year, when she was 9, her mom filed for divorce after 25 years of marriage. During the proceedings, Mary moved her children to Kentucky, according to court records. They moved back to Mendota Heights by the time the divorce was finalized in 2013.

At the time, court records show, Mary Westman hadn’t been able to work outside the home for years because of health problems, including colon and breast cancer.

Mary Westman “does not have the ability to meet her monthly living expenses and is in need of permanent spousal maintenance” from her ex-husband, a Dakota County judge noted in his order granting the divorce.

Robin Westman later attended Annunciation Catholic School, where she graduated from eighth grade in 2017. Her mother worked at the church as a parish secretary, according to the search warrant and church records.

There were few signs of family stress. Before the divorce, police responded to a “juvenile problem” at the Hastings home in 2010. One of Westman’s sisters hit an unidentified sibling on the head with a phone, but police noted that Mary Westman was able to calm her down before officers arrived, records show.

In 2018, police responded to a “mental health” call at the mother’s home in Eagan. The incident report has been mostly redacted but shows police assisted in checking the welfare of an unidentified juvenile in the home.

In her journals, the shooter wrote that she first began obsessing about school killings in seventh grade. However, officials at two schools she attended as a teenager said they found no record of behavior problems.

In writings displayed on videos Westman published online, she apologized to her parents and expressed love and gratitude.

Westman jumped from school to school after Annunciation. She attended at least one Minneapolis charter school in 2017, then transferred to St. Thomas Academy, a Catholic all-boys school in Mendota Heights.

One of Westman’s former teachers at St. Thomas remembered her, at the time known as Robert, as a “kid who needed help,” and said she saw evidence of self-inflicted wounds on Westman’s arms.

“[Westman] was definitely odd, was really into furries and odd artwork and said some odd things, but wasn’t violent towards others to my knowledge,” Sarah Reely wrote on Facebook.

Reely said she lost track of her student after Westman transferred to another school. She posted a photo of a sculpture — a clay head with arms and legs but no torso — Westman had given to her.

“I am posting this to remind people that it’s a snowball effect of multiple system failures at a national level, that every murderer was once a kid in someones classroom who needed help, and that this issue is so much deeper and more complicated than we want to admit,” she wrote.

Westman left St. Thomas in 2018 after finishing freshman year, later graduating from Southwest High School in Minneapolis in 2021.

Lashana White had a few classes with her at Southwest. She said her first impression was that she was closed off and “very quiet,” but was more talkative with people she knew.

White said Westman became more outgoing after she began using female pronouns.

Westman’s name was legally changed to Robin M. Westman in 2020, a change her mother sought because her child “identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification,” court records show.

White said she never saw her classmate be angry or aggressive. After the switch she was “bubbly,” and “started speaking out to everybody.”

They shared another thing in common: Annunciation Catholic Church and School. Kielty and his former wife were married there, and he worked as a custodian there from 1979 to 1985.

Kielty said it took a while to get Westman to do more than mumble a few words in the hallway. A breakthrough came this year before Kielty moved to South Dakota in June.

“I was always trying to get a ... little small talk. When I came out the door one evening to have a cigarette, he was smoking some pot back there.”

Kielty said his neighbor appeared to be identifying as a male, and that he never objected to his use of male pronouns.

They talked for an hour. Kielty, a guitarist and singer, bonded with Westman over music. “We talked and we talked and we talked at different times,” he said.

Kielty said he “never would have believed” his neighbor was capable of carrying out a massacre.

In March, Westman was hired to work at the Rise medical cannabis dispensary in Eagan, according to a current Rise employee who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak to the media.

Her job was to discuss products with customers. She worked there until Aug. 16, quitting shortly after being disciplined for missing work, the colleague said.

Despite that, she was well-liked by co-workers, and they never heard her express bigoted views, the Rise employee said. However, on multiple occasions she expressed admiration for Luigi Mangione, the man charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City last December.

This summer, Westman appears to have started keeping a lengthy journal detailing her violent plans. The writings and videos are disturbing and, at times, incoherent. They suggest an unraveling that was largely invisible to family and others.

Giulia Dossi, a visiting assistant professor of Russian language and area studies at St. Olaf College, and Anna Pearce, a teacher of Russian as a foreign language who worked in the past at St. Olaf, verified the transliteration of the writings scribbled in the Cyrillic alphabet.

The writings display some anti-establishment beliefs, a nihilistic worldview and fascination and reverence for a wide array of school shooters and mass killers. The journals explain how Westman studied videos of those massacres, outline a racist ideology and show a preference for targeting children and killing as many as possible.

Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson said “the shooter expressed hate towards almost every group imaginable.”

“I think I must be evil,” Westman wrote. “That’s the only explanation I can think of.”

In her writings, Westman considered many locations to attack before choosing the church, in part because she believed its layout and lack of security measures would lead to more casualties.

At times, she wrote about wanting to be stopped. She detailed a sour relationship with a person she lived with. At the time of the shooting, Westman had been staying at a St. Louis Park home. Her father told police that she had recently moved out of her Richfield apartment after she “broke up with a significant and/or romantic partner,” according to a search warrant.

Some of the notebook entries suggest that she was also questioning her gender identity. At one point, she expressed regret about identifying as female, but she also acknowledges how good it made her feel.

As with Kielty, the Rise employee said Westman was using he/him pronouns this year and didn’t appear to identify as a woman.

Westman was surprised how easily guns could be bought. And she wrote at length about the particulars of choosing and buying them, working to raise money for the weapons, her visits to gun ranges and her fear of detection by family and authorities.

She also noted that she enjoyed talking about guns with her dad and brothers.