The Minneapolis Shooter and Mental Illness

The official word from the police is that there are no signs of mental illness in his background.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Thursday on MSNBC that he doesn’t have any information about any previous mental illness of the shooter, identified as Robin Westman, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. O’Hara added that Westman, 23, was never confined for mental illness.

That may be true in a very strict sense, i.e. Westman was never committed to an institution, but there are some signs that something was wrong and on at least one occasion it appears police were involved.

More than seven years before Robin Westman opened fire on a Catholic school as Mass was underway, killing two children and injuring 17 more worshippers, police were called to a townhouse in the Twin Cities suburb where she lived with her mother.

The heavily redacted police report NBC News obtained from the police department in Eagan, Minnesota, is dated Jan. 26, 2018, and it includes a two-word description explaining why an officer was dispatched to that address: mental health.

It also includes a brief synopsis that reads “assisted Mendota Heights with a check welfare of a juvenile.” Mendota Heights is another Twin Cities suburb.

The name of that juvenile and what exactly prompted police to be summoned to the three-bedroom home on Crane Creek Lane were blacked out in the report.

Two years earlier there was another call to the police. This would have been sometime in 2016.

Two years before the mental health call, police responded to a report of a “criminal offense” at the residence, according to a police report. But beyond noting that the case was closed, the report blacks out all the details describing the event.

No idea what that was about. His parents divorced in 2013 so things at home were not going well. But there are also disturbing reports from around this time when Westman was still in Middle School:

In seventh grade, Sanchez says she struck up a friendship with the boy she knew as Robert Westman, but that friendship was short-lived after some unusual behavior.

“When you see something erratic, it doesn’t leave your mind… so he would put up his hand and praise Hitler,” Sanchez said.

“I think that’s a spiritual battle,” said Sanchez of the manifesto videos. “I don’t think it’s this world, it’s demonic, I’m sorry, it is. I think we need Jesus. He needed him.”

In late 2019 Robert Westman sought to change his name to Robin. This was granted in 2020.

Robert Paul Westman, born June 17, 2002 requested a name change as a minor in 2019 to Robin Westman. This action was granted in 2020. pic.twitter.com/G9n8dpvkEu

— Harrison Krank (@HarrisonKrank) August 27, 2025

In 2021, Westman graduated from high school, but apparently he had gone to several different schools.

A former student at Annunciation, Westman attended at least three different high schools, ranging from a $25,000-per-year all-male Catholic prep school to a no-nonsense military academy to a public high school, from which he graduated in 2021.

So nothing concrete but definitely signs of some amount of chaos and disruption in his life which may have contributed to his odd behavior. There may also have been a recent trigger.

The shooter who opened fire on a crowd of people and killed two children at a Minneapolis church and school had recently broken up with a romantic partner, according to a search warrant obtained by FOX 9 Investigators…

The father told police the shooter recently “broke up with a significant and/or romantic partner” and had been staying with a friend.

But the biggest clue that something was wrong was his journals which are filled with his fixation on previous school shootings and his desire to become a monster. 

There’s an AI translation of the journals on X in which Westman recounts asking a school classmate “If there was a school shooting, where would you hide?” He said he gotten himself in trouble for this but promised he didn’t mean anything by it and was merely suspended for a week. “The police never went deep…” he wrote. Could this be what the police visit in 2016 was about?

Anyway, I’m not a health professional but you can’t read this guy’s writings or look at what he did and not conclude something was deeply wrong with him. Hopefully we’ll learn more over time.