The shooting finally stopped. Then came everything else

MINNEAPOLIS — Near the end of a hall on the second floor of a red brick schoolhouse, third graders cozy up to read.

Some pull on weighted blankets. A few take off their shoes. A handful settle under desks to plow through popular comics “Dog Man” and “Big Nate,” or the series “I Survived,” in which fictional children narrate their courage through disasters from Pompeii to Pearl Harbor.

After what happened to this school’s 300 or so students just three days into this academic year, their teacher considered purging her classroom of most every book. Nonfiction is nothing if not a buffet of bombs and blood. Even made-up stories feature characters who die, often shot by a gun.

But you can’t filter their ordeal for them, Darcie Mullinax learned early from the trauma experts who came to this century-old private school to help everyone learn how to sleep again, how to think again, how to consider what might come next.

They will have to access it, she learned: revisit it, work through it, accept it.

Sure enough, after classes resumed, Mullinax got wind from a mom that some of the 8- and 9-year-olds in her homeroom were working, unassigned, on their own book:

“I Survived a School Shooting,” they called it.

They talk about it so matter-of-factly, this next bunch of grade schoolers to endure the chiefly American horror of gunfire on campus, intersecting in their case with the broader hell of gunfire in a place of worship.

First through eighth graders were at Mass in the sanctuary next to Annunciation Catholic School when a shooter — in a rampage of 2 minutes, 34 seconds — killed two children, wounded 27 other people with gunfire and left dozens more with shards of glass and other debris in their skin.

The invisible fallout reached far wider.

Authorities rushing in found the attacker dead, plus a semiautomatic rifle, a semiautomatic pistol and a pump-action shotgun, along with 116 spent rifle rounds and three shotgun shell casings.

Rarely had so many, so young been targeted so ferociously in a place their community’s ties were pulled so taut: second- and third-generation Annunciation students alongside faculty members’ own kids; older buddies next to younger ones at the weekly school service in the stone church whose etched, street-facing transom declares, “This is the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.”

The hours after the August 27 shooting brought gutting campus reunions for stunned children and parents, who, until then, had mingled mostly in times of joy: Sunday Mass, youth hockey and basketball, the yearly Dancing with Annunciation Stars fundraiser.

Those who couldn’t find their kids that Wednesday rushed to join them at one of four hospitals, then often spiraled into days of sleepless uncertainty.

Two families faced the abyss of learning a child would never come home.

And, then what?

In a nation with more firearms than people, others have plodded along this path: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde. Still, only a thin playbook exists for what happens after run-hide-fight, banner headlines and candlelit vigils.

So, Annunciation, named for an angel’s revelation to the Virgin Mary that she would give birth to the Son of God, is trying to figure it out.

After quiet reading time in Mullinax’s class some five months after the attack, third graders form groups to work on a research project: Inventions that Changed Our Lives.

“Some of you look like you've already started, which is amazing!” their teacher begins before pivoting to discuss “the use of Google and making sure the thing we are searching is the topic that we picked.”

Three girls dig into the origin of stuffed animals, or stuffies, like the weighted ones kids all over this school grab these days. The toys can be calming, as can other new offerings: noise-canceling headphones, at-will juice boxes, bounce boards and therapy mini-sessions in halls freshly carpeted so dropped water bottles don’t trigger duck-and-cover.

Trauma, though, is wily. It finds a way in.

“I’m nervous about this,” a girl in the stuffie group tells Mullinax of her online research, “because it says a stuffed animal means ‘security.’”

“Oh,” the teacher sighs, shrapnel still lodged in her left hand near where her Apple Watch thwarted a bullet. “They mean, like, ‘security,’ like comfort; not security ‘security.’”

Not like the first responders who evacuated the church that day, carrying out kids riddled with bullets. Not like the young men in black uniforms who now patrol recess, firearms out of view but at the ready.

As students chat over their projects, Mullinax’s room gets louder — and a little silly. A girl in a fuzzy fleece over her uniform jumper picks up a friend and cradles her in a princess carry.

All smiles, they sidle over to their teacher.

“Hello, Mrs. Mullinax,” 8-year-old Quinn Moyski says, lifting her giggling pal. “This is my friend,” she ekes out before the whole thing swirls into pure laughter.

Little girls being little girls.

There’s no way to tell by looking that Quinn’s 10-year-old sister, Harper Moyski, was killed in the hail of gunfire.

Up in Harper’s fifth grade classroom, her desk sits near the rear door. Notes on folded pink and purple paper fill its book slot, plus a metal bin under it and a basket on top. Marker-decorated clam shells rest there, too, along with braided, beaded bracelets in pink and white. There’s a tiny volleyball and a therapy bottle with pink glitter floating in water.

Back in Mullinax’s room, three boys sharing a Chromebook settle in at a desk at the front of the room, near the bookshelves. Atop it sit nine small rubber ducks, one dressed as Santa.

Classmates congregate here. They bring Swedish Fish. A blue flower. A sweatband. The desk’s name card reads Fletcher Merkel, the third grader killed during the school Mass. His friends drop folded notes into his blue backpack, the one with sea creature prints and fuzzy keychains, still hanging on a hook in the class closet.

Mullinax at first didn’t know what to do with Fletcher's things. She wanted to get it right, to honor him without dwelling on his absence — and why he wasn’t there.

“This is where his desk is, and this is where it’s staying,” the kids told her.

But maybe we should move it to another place in the room, she suggested. Maybe he sits at a different spot?

“No,” they said, “he sits right here.”

Over their keyboard, the boys argue over which milestones to highlight in their poster timeline of the telephone’s evolution. The first call ever made was in 1876. The message was short and direct. And all these years later, it could convey what these students so badly want to say to the missing pal whose desk they work at whenever they can:

“Come here — I want to see you.”

A few hours later, seventh grade girls cluster at the school’s main doors. One has auburn hair, cropped short, a little wild. She laughs, a backpack over her shoulder. Nothing makes her stand out especially, the divine wish of most any young teen.

But she is different.

She is the miracle.

When Tom Forchas learned from his boss about news reports of a shooting at his children’s school, he called to tell his wife, a pediatric critical care nurse already rushing to work for a mass casualty event about which details had been scant.

“I can’t,” Amy Forchas replied when Tom told her. “I can’t go in.”

It would be too much. He felt it, too. Maybe she could turn around, drive straight to Annunciation: find their daughter and son, help at the scene.

But then, Tom Forchas felt a tug, something stronger than the impulse to flee.

“No,” he said to his wife. “This is what God called you to do. These are our people.”

She drove to work. He rushed to school, found their fourth grader, Anthony, physically OK. But a friend of their seventh grader fell down crying as she told him Sophia had been shot, taken away in an ambulance. A little boy — a first grader — was in it, too.

Forchas called his wife, who already knew the worst-hurt patient had arrived at Hennepin County Medical Center and been whisked to a room for treatment. Kids she knew came through the doors. None was Sophia. A nurse asked Amy Forchas for a picture of her 12-year-old, took the phone she used to pull it up, found the worst-hurt patient, then came back.

“Yes,” the other nurse told Amy, “it is your daughter.”

Tom Forchas didn’t know it yet. Still, he drove to the hospital with one hand on the wheel and one hand holding Anthony’s in the back seat. The whole way, they talked out loud to God: “Please, let us see Sophia again.”

A bullet, they all soon learned, was in her brain.

Forchas went numb: Would someone come get him to say goodbye to his daughter? Would someone come to say, “Your kid’s already gone”?

Time froze. Modern medicine amped up: CT scans, blood thinners, wires everywhere, a five-day vigil over the swelling, paralytics, her head shaved, doctors opening her scalp. On the ninth day, her neurosurgeon gave reporters an update on Sophia’s condition.

“There is a chance that she may be the third fatality of this event,” he said. “But the doors have been opened a little bit. And there’s some rays of light shining through.”

Her family embraced its faith. “However we can get her, we will take her home,” Forchas told God. They’d build a wheelchair ramp on the house, expand the back porch door, feed her by spoon. Others prayed, too: rosaries outside Annunciation’s bullet-riddled facade; intentions at the altar of nearby St. Mary’s, the Forchases’ Greek Orthodox church; intercessions at the Vatican; appeals from Norway to New Zealand to a village far up in the mountains of Greece.

When medical staff visited Sophia’s room, her dad could tell they sensed the Holy Spirit.

“I just feel she's gonna walk out of here,” more than one told him.

“I'm glad you feel it,” he thought, “because I don't know if she's gonna make it through the night.”

The Annunciation community hung on every twist. They already were planning memorials for two children and starting to glimpse the flashes of darkness — insomnia, screaming fits, empty stares — that lay ahead.

They needed Sophia to get better.

They needed her to come home.

Around that same time, Mollie and Jesse Merkel spent their 12th wedding anniversary at their 8-year-old son’s funeral.

The couple had rushed to Annunciation right after the shooting, found their fifth grader, Milo, and second grader, Hazel; their 3-year-old, Rory, was safe with Mollie's mom. They watched relieved parents take kids home. Hours passed. Someone offered them water.

A paramedic asked them for a picture of their third grader. People who knew where Fletcher was saw them, said nothing. Then, when they were effectively alone in the gym, some half-dozen first responders and school staff walked out a door and toward them.

“He's gone,” a trauma specialist told the Merkels.

Taken by ambulance, his mom presumed, for medical care.

“Well, what hospital?” Mollie asked.

The school principal, Matt DeBoer, looked at her and Jesse. A father himself of three children who’d just survived the shooting — two in the sanctuary and a preschooler in the church basement — he saw them trying to sort it out.

He made it plain: He’d held their boy’s limp hand, told him how much his parents loved him.

“Mollie,” he said, “Fletcher is dead.”

Time froze. Mollie and Jesse sat in shock as Harper Moyski’s mom came screaming into the gym, asking where her child was. The same half-dozen responders went to her. An awful noise erupted. She collapsed, rolled on the floor.

The Merkels learned Fletcher’s body was all but alone in the church. Mollie tried at least three times to go to him. Police held her back. Someone asked for his dental records. It was dark out by the time his parents, with their pastor from nearby Mount Olivet Lutheran, were let into a back room of Annunciation church to pray over their child, wrapped in white sheets.

Fletcher had been their messy, dirty kid who just didn't care if there was stuff on his clothes or his face, even as he proclaimed when he returned last summer from his first stint at sleepaway camp: “I showered every day!”

Now, his mom found his hand, focused on his arm freckles and did that thing they always did:

Squeeze it three times — “I love you” — and then, squeeze it four — “I love you, too.”

With sparkly blue eyes under a mop of wiry, blond hair that bobbed a foot above his classmates, Fletcher had been his friends' glue, ensuring no one got left out of flag football or hikes or songwriting for Alien Blood, the four-kid rock band with a repertoire of 10-second singles, including one for his crush, “Violet Star.”

Those same classmates, with Fletcher’s cousins — dressed in bright colors, like the Merkels had requested — soon were lining up as his pallbearers.

At the funeral, a cantor standing near the casket sang Fletcher’s favorite single. Jesse Merkel had never really listened to the lyrics, which — with their nods to “angels up in the clouds” and the day “we're dead and buried” and the plea, “Oh, Lord, return me to dust” — seemed an odd choice for an 8-year-old.

Perhaps, though, not really so odd for a boy who adored dirt. And protected his friends. And told his mom he loved her not just once or twice but four times, with a squeeze.

Its first verse ends like this:

So, if our time is runnin' out
Day after day
We'll make the mundane our masterpiece

At a Mass shortly after the shooting, Annunciation’s pastor had preached about this unthinkable misery and suggested to his congregants a radical approach: to endure it with such faith and love that they inspire onlookers to want what they have, to “want to sing with an Annunciation song.”

But, then, at Fletcher’s funeral, Father Dennis Zehren asked this:

“Do we have what it takes?”

Nobody went to school for weeks after the attack.

By the second week of September, experts with the Washburn Center for Children — the Twin Cities mental health care agency with roots in an orphanage opened in 1886 — had embedded at Annunciation and consulted, along with other specialists, on the school team’s plan to bring students and staff back.

That Monday’s focus was teachers — not as educators but, simply, humans. The next day: how to stand again in front of pupils — many with physical wounds, all in the throes of trauma — with whom they’d endured a savage assault.

Wednesday was backpack pickup.

Some kids came with friends, huddled ahead of clumped-together parents: strength in numbers. Others wouldn’t get out of the car. Experts manned every room.

“Do you want to come in?” one asked a second grader.

“No,” she replied. “I'm too scared.”

“That's OK,” the helper said. “Do you want to look from the doorway?”

Annunciation, an International Baccalaureate school where full tuition runs about $8,000 per child per year, already offered social-emotional learning and had the kind of engaged community required to support this kind of healing, Washburn’s site chief could see.

Still, when classes resumed September 16 — starting with half days and three-day weeks — some kids wouldn’t go into the building. Others couldn’t wear the same color shirt they wore to school August 27. Still others cried, fell asleep at their desks, flopped on the floor.

“This doesn't feel good,” the experts told everyone, “but we're going to work on being here together.” First, they emphasized that however anyone responded during the gunfire — fight, flight, freeze, faint or fawn — was automatic: Nobody got to choose. Then, those memories got stored in your brain, your heart and your body, ready to reemerge at any moment, like any memory might.

“You might get sweaty, you might feel nervous, you might want to lay down all of a sudden; when you hear a loud noise, you might freeze,” they said.

Trauma is like a puzzle, broken into a million pieces because we can't take in the whole thing at once, they went on. And the ultimate goal is to make meaning of and put those pieces back together.

In the first six weeks, at least eight full-time Washburn clinicians delivered more than 1,300 hours of therapy, one-on-one and in groups, at Annunciation. That alone cost more than $150,000, paid largely by a gift from Minnesota-based insurance provider Medica.

The expense over the next couple years would push well past $1 million under a plan crafted by Annunciation and Washburn.

Washburn also helped caregivers who were showing up for their kids but not quite sure how: Compartmentalization and avoiding stuff, experts explained, is a survival skill.

And, eventually, you have to unpack it.

Mike Moyski has two new voicemails on his phone: 74 and 52 seconds. Both are from his wife, Jackie Flavin. Each is stamped 8/27/25.

The messages came in around the time their oldest daughter, Harper, a 10-year-old aspiring veterinarian with a big smile and plans to visit all 63 national parks before her college graduation, took her last breath.

He cannot listen to them, even as they linger at the top of his queue, blue dots as bait.

Flavin had worried about this very nightmare. Even after they fell in love and started a family, she couldn’t shake it: How could anyone bring kids into a world with school shootings? They bought a house four minutes by car from the small, private school they’d picked for Harper and Quinn so Flavin, who works from home, could get there quickly in an emergency.

Not that it mattered.

Moyski did pick up his phone the time Flavin called to tell him Harper was dead, her 4-foot-10, 100-pound frame torn apart so brutally by a war weapon that more of her remains would be found inside Annunciation’s church weeks after the attack.

Flavin got the news at school, minutes after the Merkels. She crumpled to the floor, into another world. Dark. Howling. Broken. Even for the trauma experts, it was too much. Everyone stayed away, left her to wail.

Well, almost everyone.

Harper’s parents did not know Annunciation’s larger-than-life outreach director well. But when no one else would approach the mother in agony, he got onto the ground, right up to her ear.

“Jackie,” he whispered.

“Jackie ...” pulling her back. “Jackie ... ”

Flavin got up and went to another room, where she waited alone in a shirt drenched by tears. She took it off, sat in only her bra. She heard voices in the hall, tried to get dressed again, couldn’t manage the sodden top back over her head and arms.

“I actually don't fucking care,” she thought.

Humanity, drained.

Raw.

“I am,” she sensed, “an animal.”

Her husband of 12 years found her. They embraced, collapsed.

A crisis response worker offered them oxygen from a tank, inhaled and exhaled conspicuously, trying to coax them from the void.

In ... out ... in ... out ...

The parents held each other.

In ... out ... in ... out ...

Breathe, both thought.

Just breathe.

The Haegs did not have a plan for any of this.

But it isn’t like Brittany Rawson Haeg, a former teacher who works for the state supporting social studies education, and Joe Haeg, a technical writer of manuals for machines that make semiconductors, hadn’t thought it through.

Whenever headlines screamed about shootings targeting schools, Rawson Haeg would address the fraught topic with her middle and high school students. Such events, she had learned, were rare and more often unfolded at suburban or rural high schools.

She took the knowledge home, confirmed with her husband that the small, metro, Catholic school their three children attended did not fit the mold.

It wouldn't happen at Annunciation, she thought. She probably even said it out loud.

That was before the August 27 shooting plunged them into research they’d never imagined: How much lead, leaching from embedded bullet fragments, is too much for a 43-pound body? How do you help a first grader who lacks the words to express his anger, his pain, his fear? How can you make sure no other family has to face anything like this ever again?

Minutes after the gunfire that morning, David Haeg, 6, told a grown-up outside the church he needed a Band-Aid. But it was clearly much worse. So, David, messy with blood, was walked to where Sophia Forchas, bleeding from her head, was already waiting for an ambulance.

Both got in, and a medic asked the boy, still learning letters and words, his name.

“D ... mountain ... upside-down mountain ... I ... D,” he spelled.

All the way to the hospital, David worried: “Is Sophia going to be OK?”

The Haegs rushed to school and found their older kids, Eleanor in fourth grade and Owen in sixth, bodies unharmed. They learned David was at Hennepin County Medical Center.

Doctors told them he had a lacerated spleen, had been struck twice in the head, had shrapnel all along his left side — the side that had faced the skinny windows of red, gold and sea-blue glass as the reader near the altar recited Psalm 139.

Surgeons had tried to remove as many bullet pieces as possible; the remnants bore lead, which can impair learning and behavior, especially in children. They managed to leave David’s spleen intact, albeit with two large fragments they dared not nudge. On his CT scans, his left side glowed like Christmas lights.

“The other shrapnel,” doctors told them, "is, like, really, like, teeny, tiny. ... A lot of it will work its way out. ... You might find pieces of it in his bed.”

David had loved school. He was famous at Annunciation even before kindergarten because of his family’s stories about him: An animal lover, he once coaxed a wild rabbit nearly into their house; he did impressions, good ones, eyebrows in play; he told fart jokes; he giggled at his dad, smartphone videos prove, when he was just 2 months old.

Before first grade, David did a two-week, phonics-focused summer program at his school. When it ended, he wanted more: “I'm going next year!” he told his mom.

Now, he was in pediatric intensive care.

He would not sit up.

He would not get out of bed.

Harper Moyski’s parents could not bring themselves to go home to where the couch sagged just a touch in the spot she always sat to binge “Doogie Howser, MD”; to where her room remained as she’d left it, skin-care product boxes piled up near the Labubu herd.

So, they, with Quinn, went to a Sheraton in Bloomington, some 7 miles away. For two weeks, they wept over each other in a king-sized bed. When it seemed too much for their third grader, they left her one of their phones on speaker — in case she needed them — and carried the other, on mute, as they walked for hours around the hotel parking lot.

They saw Harper in the shooting stars. In the streetlamps. Everywhere.

Back when Flavin and Moyski first met, at 20 and 21, both already had been to 12-step rehab and gotten clean. They envisioned a life and knew how to fight for it. And it was everything they’d wanted, even when life itself felt like a curveball for their older daughter.

As a toddler, Harper struggled with her senses. She wouldn’t let them brush her curly hair. She refused to get into her mom’s white Subaru Ascent, even though it was the same model as her dad's blue one. She wore cat leggings and a purple, Door County, Wisconsin, shirt every day for a year because anything else felt funny.

Helping her figure it all out made her parents feel like champions.

Harper, perhaps paradoxically, also ate up adventure: zip-lining, wake-surfing, smoothies that landed on the ceiling.

And she never backed down: “Our girl asked every question and expected real answers,” her family wrote in her obituary. “She told the truth even when it was inconvenient.”

The week after she died, a spiritual medium told her parents: “Harper forgives the shooter.”

Neither would they make the attacker a focus of their anger. Even as the grocery app kept suggesting exotic options like dragon fruit, and as the automated appointment reminders from Harper’s pediatrician made them roar, “She’s not well!” Even as they moved to an apartment, then a new house, where her remains — heavy, in a good way — grace the mantle in a golden urn etched with a rhinestone-dotted tree.

Within days of Harper’s death, Moyski and Flavin met with state lawmakers — some who drove hours to visit them — to talk about how to wipe out the scourge of gun violence. At Fletcher’s funeral, the couple sat behind a sea of children, and Flavin wrote resolutions in her mind.

"We will protect these kids,” she swore, not least the friends of her late child who soon treated her like a beloved aunt as they grew taller, more substantial, in a way her oldest daughter never would.

“All kids deserve so much more,” Flavin thought, “and not just (safety from) gun violence. But let’s start, we’re starting there.

“I just feel it my bones.”

Tom Forchas wasn’t considering anything of the sort in the weeks after the attack.

He didn’t know a sniper had killed conservative commentator Charlie Kirk or Russia had breached Polish airspace. He hadn’t heard about the meeting other wounded students’ parents had had with the FBI or the lobbying some quietly had begun for tighter laws to govern gun and ammo purchases and reporting someone who might pose a danger.

The world outside Sophia’s recovery was on indefinite hold.

“We love you,” her family told her. “Just fight. You got to fight. You got to keep fighting.”

Days became weeks. The swelling went down. Sophia’s eyes blinked open.

“There was an incident at school,” they said. “You’re severely injured, but you need to fight.”

A breathing tube and a feeding tube kept her from talking. Her right leg wouldn’t budge. She could not move her arms. Something seemed wrong with her left eye.

She wasn’t the only one who got hurt, they told her. Lots of kids did. A bullet slammed the skull of the PE teacher’s daughter, whose head got shaved, too, though only half of it.

More days passed. Sophia felt her body again. She stood up, scooted to a chair, sat down. The next day, she walked to the bathroom. Then, 30 feet. Then, around the unit, 50 or so yards. Then, around it twice. On September 18, she dribbled a basketball.

She spoke again, slowly. Some words wouldn’t come: “presentation,” “Thursday,” “blue.” She relearned them — far too soon, it seemed, after her parents had watched her do it the first time.

When setbacks came, Tom panicked, spiraled, fell down a hole. He was angry at the deficits. And at the monster that took over the attacker who did this to his child.

He could forgive the shooter for letting the devil in.

But not for letting the monster take control.

Not for this act of evil.

He focused on Sophia’s recovery. When she stumbled, the next day, she’d pick right back up.

Soon, she moved to rehab. Then, in late October, a white stretch limo with a police escort spirited her home. Neighbors lined the streets, waved pink posters and cheered. The motorcade stopped at her mom’s work, Hennepin County Medical Center, where the staff put out a big, royal blue sign — “Sophia Strong” — and waited in line to hug her.

Challenges lingered: Feeling OK about her growing-in hairdo. Occupational and speech therapy. Building enough energy for a full school day. Getting back to the basketball court.

Her parents faced new obstacles, too: How to raise this “miracle child,” who sparked such precious hope and also was supposed to load the dishwasher after dinner. What to do with the donations pouring in online for them, as for at least eight other Annunciation families and the parish’s Hope and Healing Fund. How to repay all the prayers and support that, they sensed without doubt, helped pull their daughter back from the edge of death.

There aren’t enough words in all the languages to express gratitude, Forchas knew. And there isn't enough time from now until eternity to say thank you enough.

When David Haeg got home from the hospital, his family’s days became a matrix of doctor visits, therapy appointments, doses of medicine the 6-year-old refused to swallow.

Joe Haeg took leave from work and stuck a decal — “Don’t Panic,” in red and yellow block letters — on a black traveler’s notebook. In it, he used a ruler to pen a “Tolerance Graph,” with dates on the X axis and hours on the Y to track his little boy’s ability to make it through the day.

When it felt possible, they tried to get back to the parts of their old life that mattered most. Not long after the shooting, close friends were getting married. Haeg was a groomsman; his wife, a bridesmaid. Their whole family was invited to the rehearsal.

David was on the fence.

“You don’t have to go. You can stay here with Nana and Papa,” his dad told him. “If you decide you want to come, that's also fine. It's up to you.”

Before the attack, David sometimes hesitated like this. He’d not want to go somewhere, do his best to explain why, maybe cry a little. Then, he’d get there and love it.

David wanted to go to the rehearsal, he told them. They all got ready and piled into their minivan, which Joe backed out of the driveway, then steered over to Interstate 94.

That's where it dawned on David the event might be in a church.

He absolutely now did not want to go.

And he let his parents know it.

David found his dad’s work bag, upended it, tried to destroy the portable keyboard inside. He unbuckled his seatbelt, another mortal threat as they flew down the highway. Then, from the back seat, came screaming like nothing David ever would have spewed before slivers of a shooter’s fire-hot shells pierced his slight frame.

“I hate you, Daddy!” the boy yelled. “I hate you, Daddy! I hate you, Daddy!”

But that is not at all what Haeg, still trying to keep his family safe on the road, heard.

After stepping away from his job to spend most every hour in gentle support of a boy who had walked away from a massacre he could not understand with a body now polluting him from the inside out, Haeg heard David scream this:

"I am in just, such a great deal of distress. And there is nothing you can do for me."

Bursts like this came out of nowhere, things you would never consider: like, Christmas movies. David had loved “Home Alone” so much he watched it in the summer. But he couldn’t anymore because of the gangster-film audio its young hero uses to scare the dopey thugs laying siege to his home: a machine gun’s drill.

Same went for the opening scene of “White Christmas,” set in WWII. Even “Doctor Who” and that Super Bowl ad for the Army set off the Haeg kids, all of them. David now required a ton of time to manage. And Eleanor and Owen needed triple the attention they used to.

And their parents just didn't have it. The Haegs were doing their best. But there just wasn’t enough time to deal with it all.

On top of that, Brittany Rawson Haeg was helping lead the Annunciation Light Alliance, a new parent-led advocacy group, separate from the parish and the Hope and Healing Fund, that met on Monday nights at a pizza joint a mile or so from the school.

They knew they were not the first to embark on civic action after their children were shot at in a place they expected to be safe: Sandy Hook Promise, Moms Demand Action, Everytown for Gun Safety. But they felt compelled to act anyway, hoping to persuade lawmakers to pass bills that might make mass shootings more unlikely.

The group, including Harper’s and Fletcher’s parents, already was planning to display 60 empty desks — symbolizing kids killed by guns — at the state Capitol to encourage legislators to back proposals for systems to identify would-be mass shooters and bans on certain weapons and gun components.

Rawson Haeg believed school shootings, however monstrous, were crimes of despair often carried out by lost, isolated youth seeking solace in the internet's dark corners. So, she leaned into an effort to foster public dialogue about gun violence, with hopes it might make society less polarized and those online haunts less attractive.

It wouldn’t be easy, she knew. But it was better than surrendering to her fury over the shrapnel contaminating David.

Joe Haeg also struggled to place his anger. If the shooter were alive, the father might write letters to that person. He might visit and lash out at the killer who took his “pre-David” away. He might even cut loose and scream, like his youngest child in the back seat of the family van, hurting so badly and with no clear escape:

"You have fucked up my whole life.”

From the center of her colorful classroom five months after the attack, Sara Slack turns on her trademark cheer to deliver some practical advice for the morning’s next lesson, plus a tacit dose of wisdom.

“I don’t want you to think too hard because it’s more obvious than you think,” she tells her first graders. “Sometimes, we make things harder than they have to be because it’s just ingrained in us as humans.”

As the kids hunch over worksheets, Slack spots a girl whose light pink scrunchie holds back soft, mousy curls.

The teacher sees her face, her blank stare.

She knows that look.

The girl has started having dreams, her mom told Slack a few days earlier.

She’s not been sleeping well.

She’s not been the same.

It’s like at home, where Slack’s daughters — third and fifth graders at Annunciation — crack the door to the bathroom and start their mornings on a trampoline to regulate their bodies and dillydally too long on weekends because they’re scared to go to ballet class.

Slack did not know where Willem and Eloda were in the church when the blasting began. As students’ blood stained the floor, she remembered her own children as babies and grieved for the years her husband and son, just starting seventh grade at another school, would lament the murders of her and the girls.

After all three survived, Slack slept in fits, made sure her back never faced a door, and wept for the wife, mom and friend she’d been before August 27. She coped by taking an antidepressant, going to therapy, teaching barre classes and, like all the educators who’d been fired upon, going back to work — hardly a given after campus violence.

Here in her classroom, Slack considers the girl with the scrunchie as the class's black therapy bunny, Lucy George Rabbit, hops out from under a desk.

The teacher grabs a walkie-talkie and presses a button on its side.

“Hi, Washburn friends,” she says to the childhood trauma counselors still embedded at Annunciation. “Can I get a Washburn helper in room 103?”

The girl slips out the door just as David Haeg stands up and grabs a weighted, stuffed triceratops named Tiny Bob. In size 1 Pumas, he steps away from his desk to a table with a spool-shaped wobble stool where he prefers to work, his shrapnel wounds hidden under his dark green polo and inside his skull.

Among the kids’ self-portraits at the back of the room — most crayon drawings with bright yellow or brown hair, aqua eyes, pink- and red-lipped smiles — David's is only in pencil.

Eight minutes later, the girl with the scrunchie is back. In sneakers with “Love” and hearts printed in black over pastel splotches, she wends past the crucifix on the wall, the easy-reader books, the lunch boxes stamped with planets and flowers and sharks.

Soon, it’s time for phonics: long vowels, silent E.

David approaches his teacher.

“Um, can I get a Washburn person?” he asks.

“Um, yeah,” Slack tells him. “Should you do your warm-ups first?”

He stares at her. That look, again: vacant, tired.

He blinks.

She picks up the walkie-talkie.

“Can I get a Washburn helper in 103?”

As the boy heads for the door, Slack pivots, upbeat: “Who's ready to do some working?”

The girl in the scrunchie looks ready. Her face is soft. Her blank look is gone. She raises her hand, smiles. She gives the right answer, earns praise from her beaming teacher:

“Amazing!”

At the end of another school hallway, a bulletin board features 26 circles, each with blue and green splotches — Earth from space — and a phrase typed out in the middle:

“A future filled with HOPE.”

It is the theme, borrowed from the prophet Jeremiah, that 83% of Annunciation’s faculty picked ahead of this school year — and the one Principal Matt DeBoer shared, via news cameras, in the hours after the shooting.

“There’s nothing about today that can fill us with hope. We lost two angels today. We can’t change the past, but we can do something about the future,” he said. “There’s an African proverb that says, ‘When you pray, move your feet.’ ... I ask you to please pray, but don’t stop with your words. ... Never again can we let this happen.”

The adage quickly became a new theme at Annunciation: “Move your feet,” printed on navy hoodies kids wear to school, teachers to work, parents to Sunday Mass. The left sleeve bears two white hearts, each with initials: FM, for Fletcher; HM, for Harper.

Out the school’s glass doors and around the rectory, the initials also are stamped on a vinyl sign declaring: “Joy” and “Hope,” with a heart and a dove. A statue of the Holy Family once stood in this spot. After the shooting, some saw what happened to it as a sign of hope, perhaps even a reason to believe in miracles. Others couldn’t stomach it.

Bullets had pierced the sculpture near a tousle-haired Jesus, depicted at maybe 5 years old. One left a hole in his father Joseph’s staff. Another lanced his mother Mary’s heart.

On this late winter day, DeBoer takes to the sidewalk, retracing the shooter’s steps. The attacker, who a decade ago attended eighth grade at Annunciation, had a “deranged fascination with previous mass shootings,” Minneapolis’ police chief said, “like so many other mass shooters that we have seen in this country, too often, and around the world.”

“FIND ME I AM BEGGING FOR HELP,” the Annunciation shooter wrote in a journal found after the church massacre, “I AM SCREAMING FOR HELP.”

Further along, DeBoer points out the site of the attacker’s last shot: self-inflicted and fatal. In its wake, the principal burst out of the church onto this very spot. Though power-washers scrubbed this sidewalk soon after, nothing can erase the freeze-frame in his mind.

“I will always,” he says, “see a dead body right there.”

Through the same door, DeBoer heads into the church, then downstairs. There’s the closet where a wounded 12-year-old hid with her dad, the PE teacher, and where DeBoer stood, arms up, to show SWAT officers he wasn't the killer.

It’s all wiped clean.

Still, Annunciation hasn’t hosted a school Mass since August 27, even after the church reopened in December after a rite of reparation. Some schoolkids are afraid of stained-glass windows. Or the pastor in his vestments. Or sitting near their cross-grade buddies in attentive silence.

Instead, students lead prayer services on Wednesdays in the school auditorium. For some, though, even that is too much. In February, Slack asked her students’ parents whether Wednesdays made the kids nervous — and if they’d rather not go to prayer service.

Half opted out.

It’s still very early, the episode taught her, to decide who’s ready.

In the church’s restored sanctuary, a temporary memorial sits near the skinny windows: a small table with a lit prayer candle where the fifth pew used to be, another where the seventh was — where Harper and Fletcher died. Around them, a potted garden blooms: tall white stock, green-leafed pothos, tulips, an umbrella plant, roses of red, pink and white.

And white chrysanthemums, a symbol of friendship, innocence — and truth.

A few days after Fletcher Merkel would have turned 9, his family hosted FletcherFest in the school auditorium.

Hundreds came in early January to revel in his favorite things: a reptile show, dodgeball, pizza, animals made from balloons, including at least one that popped in a startling reminder of why they all were there. An artist gave adults permanent tattoos of arrows to honor the party’s namesake, Fletcher, or “arrow maker.”

Between the bouncy slide and the ice cream, Fletcher’s friends recounted the things they loved because of him, like fishing. His dad had nurtured the hobby in part as an excuse for trips, including one last summer when a camera captured Fletcher, full grin, hugging a 7- or 8-pound bowfin.

The FletcherFest crowd was a comfort to Mollie Merkel — and also, perhaps, an answer to the question Father Zehren had posed at her son's funeral: “Do we have what it takes?”

“Jesus ... tells us, ‘Yes, you have what you need; as long as you are with me, you will have what you need,’” the priest had preached. “We will continue to cling to you. We will continue to cling to our faith. We will continue to cling to one another.”

For Jesse Merkel, the event in their slain child’s name was a worthy reason — raising money for a scholarship to help kids attend Annunciation through graduation — to push through his introverted nature, to keep Fletcher relevant.

People move on, the parents know.

It’s how the world works.

At home, Fletcher’s room remains much as he left it August 27: shirts behind white accordion doors and a half-dozen potted plants, including a money tree he got at 4 inches tall, propagated with his mom and planned to take, ceiling-high, to his college dorm.

A cutting of another plant Fletcher and his mom tended together now sits on the governor’s desk, an honor not unlike the donations that poured into Annunciation after the shooting: cards and flowers; school trips to Wild hockey and Loons soccer games; visits from Twins legends and a Vikings coach.

The gifts and the famous athletes’ compassion drove home the promise: Love can prevail. The Merkels also got a trip to Universal Studios and embraced it as a chance to get away, quietly, together. But Fletcher's older brother insisted on a caveat for the future.

“I want to stop doing special stuff,” Milo told their mom, “just because my brother’s died.”

Not long after the attack, Fletcher’s younger brother and sister started taking toys into his room to play. Weeks later, though, 3-year-old Rory offered this jarring observation when a therapy session’s topic turned to his two brothers.

"No,” the toddler said. “I just have one brother, Milo.”

It was a bit like their dad, contemplating whether Fletcher is still 8 or if he turned 9.

"Is he or was he?” Jesse Merkel asks. “I'm not sure.”

“Like, he is,” Mollie Merkel says. “His presence is always here.”

"Yeah, that's a question,” his dad adds.

“There are hundreds of questions that don't have answers.

“And that's one of them.”

Dance music throbs on a frigid Saturday night in a converted warehouse in downtown Minneapolis’ North Loop. Women in sequined halter tops and strappy heels join men in sparkly, gold sports jackets at tables with plated hors d'oeuvres: mac and cheese, sliders, braised short rib. Lines snake from two full bars.

On a side wall, scores of black-and-white kids’ portraits project toward circular tables of six or eight and banquet tables, draped in black with white runners, around a cement dance floor.

“When were those pictures taken?” wonders Slack, the teacher whose sense of time since the shooting has become a kind of chaos.

“Oh, right,” she realizes: no blank stares. “It must have been last year; they all look so happy.”

On a facing wall, two portraits are much larger: Fletcher, his hair perfectly mussed over gleaming eyes and a sharp jaw; Harper, with a middle part and an open smile missing one lateral incisor, top right. Sketched hearts surround their faces — one atop each with a set of wings — and the same curved message below: “We love you.”

Music pulses: Jennifer Lopez, Aerosmith, Nicki Minaj.

Starships were meant to fly
Hands up and touch the sky

This is the 11th annual Dancing with Annunciation Stars fundraiser. It’s usually held in the school auditorium that hosted FletcherFest and served as the church when the real one was a crime scene.

But even that space is too small for what this year’s event has become: a massive push for donations to help shell-shocked teachers; a celebration of new heroes, from the first police officer to enter the shattered church to the mom who paused her corporate career to run recovery logistics; a glitzy moment just to let loose, with 99-cent, mini bottles of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky in pockets and clutches for the post-program dance party.

The organizers are the parents of a blended family of five Annunciation survivors, including a seventh grader who, from under a pew, pulled slug shrapnel from her leg thinking it was glass and, shortly after the attack, walked her mom through the escape plans she’d formulated for every room she goes into at school.

Some 800 people — school parents, a US senator, the mayor, city police, parishioners, Father Zehren, the Merkels, Moyski and Flavin, the Haegs, a throng of teachers and Washburn personnel — pack the venue’s 12,000 square feet. The emcee is the parish outreach director who went to Flavin on the floor at the core of her anguish. He’s now in a blinding silver dinner jacket.

As every year, Annunciation amateurs pair with professional ballroom dancers for routines they rehearse for weeks, just like on TV. Men flaunt chest hair and hoist partners onto their shoulders. Women in tearaway costumes dip and twirl. The real contest is who rakes in the most charity money and takes home the disco-ball trophy.

The first-round finale is always big. But this year’s will be bigger. You can just feel it.

Tom Forchas is a stocky guy. He wears his dark hair clipped short on the sides and a little longer on the top. On this night, he’s in a royal blue satin vest with a matching tie.

After Sophia came home, he and his wife, Amy, had to think about a lot, including the online fundraiser – set up for them by a friend and backed largely by strangers – that had ballooned to seven figures. Forchas did not love accepting any of it. But he reasoned it out like this:

“When you give to the guy on the corner or when you give to your charities and when you go bring food to the food shelter, it makes you feel good. It makes me feel good to do that, right?

“So,” he decided, “I’m going to allow them to give to my daughter because she is fighting the fight against evil.”

Forchas also got a call from the dancing event planners. He’d never dreamed of doing anything like what they proposed. But if he could reckon with his shame, guilt and gratitude over the money, he figured, “Why can't I get a good feeling about dancing? Have fun?”

Forchas had learned all about how the brain, infiltrated by a speeding bullet, can protect itself from further damage, then rewire the flow of blood to do the old work in a new way. He and Amy had helped Sophia learn how to speak again, walk again, eat, read, play.

After all that, surely, he could learn to swing and foxtrot. Surely, he could shimmy a little to manifest his eternal appreciation.

“If there was anybody who had an out this year not to dance, it was this guy,” the host says as Forchas and his partner take the floor. Supporters in royal blue sparkles and sequins, many from his family's Greek Orthodox church, stand and cheer. Three-foot cutouts of Forchas’ face bobble.

They start out to Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell,” complete with the twist and the Batusi: sideways peace signs like a wriggling eye mask. But after the track morphs into a couple other songs, Forchas stops and looks to his left.

He puts out his hand, the one that steered to the hospital while he and his son prayed aloud to God.

Sophia, in a flowy, royal blue sequined dress to match Forchas’ vest and tie, stands up, takes it, twirls out onto the floor.

The crowd explodes.

It’s the miracle girl, now 13, dancing with her dad — just like they learned, step by step, together.

The standing ovation rivals another moment from this fevered night, which raises $250,000 for teachers’ recovery separate from parish’s Hope and Healing Fund.

As another dance number crescendos, the crowd begins to sing — maybe not so much the “Annunciation song” Zehren had envisioned of his flock but in late Gen X-Millennial unison, raised arms bobbing. Most everyone here in these last months has visited, directly or at a single arm’s length, one or another version of hell.

Their trauma is far from easing. It may last forever. For now, though, these parents, teachers, therapists, faith leaders and others stand together as many belt out the lyrics of a post-punk single released long before any of the kids in the projected portraits was even a glimmer.

Friends bear-hug. Toast. Sob. Or laugh, pure, like third graders as the refrain surges:

But it's just the price I pay
Destiny is calling me
Open up my eager eyes
'Cause I'm Mr. Brightside

Back at school the next Monday, DeBoer stands at the front of the auditorium and opens the daily, all-school assembly:

“God is good,” the principal says.

“All the time!” the students shout.

“All the time,” he says.

All together: “God is good!”

It’s the same call-and-response he gave from the altar ahead of Mass on the school year’s third morning, just before telling everyone to put down their kneelers — an instruction, aimed at reducing racket during the service, that ended up making it easier for most children to dive for safety.

Among each class now stands a teacher, usually the same one who was with them that day in the church and who, in the minutes after the blasting, took a frantic inventory.

“Who do I have?”

The moment returns most every day to Darcie Mullinax — Fletcher's teacher whose own daughter also survived the attack — and her colleagues. Constant counting, sometimes with a panic flash for a student who’s gone to the bathroom.

“Who do I not have?”

In a matter of days, of course, the teachers won’t have to count anymore, at least not for a while. Like every school year, this one will end. Families might move away. Eighth graders will graduate to high school, not all to the same one.

Will they be branded “the Annunciation kids”? As the parish extends its Washburn contract at least through mid-2027, will they get the support they need? Will the Hope and Healing Fund — which by May collected $4.7 million, 20% of which already had gone to students’ and staff mental health care and other needs — end up raising enough? Will new families even consider this school, foster its next generation — and the tuition yield — that’s kept it going since 1923?

“Love is the opposite of fear,” DeBoer likes to say. But America’s history of school shootings proves factions form, over: logistics like resuming school Mass in the church; how politicians — from state lawmakers to the Catholic vice president — ought to respond; how to mark anniversaries and properly mourn the dead.

“How can we let love win,” he asks, “put love first and stay together and be community through all the hard things that are yet to come?”

Slack worries about how she’ll cope without her students every day, the first graders who understand her like nobody else can. The experience they shared might be the most intimate in all humanity:

“We were all gonna die together.”

Soon after the attack, some teachers wondered why they weren’t killed.

Mullinax told them this: “Our job is to triage these kids through the next phase of whatever comes next. That's why we survived. Like, we're alive because they need us to help them through the days, months and years ahead.”

To support the kids, teachers worked to heal themselves. Slack kept up therapy: Talking about the shooting helped, as did upping her antidepressant dose and attending a late-winter math summit where she got to focus not on the trauma but just how to be a better teacher.

“Missing myself is one way I can look at it,” she began to suppose by late winter. “Or another way is, like, I'm recreating myself.”

With her students, Slack spoke openly of the attack. She read them a story that the parents of David Haeg — the classmate with shrapnel in his body — wrote about why he needed a coming CT scan so everyone might understand it better and fear it less.

First grade is a year of rapid language development, David’s educator mom knew. For her youngest son, that fostered a new sort of self-talk implausible before the attack: “I'm a dummy”; “Everybody hates me”; “All the grown-ups wish I was dead.”

David also stoked a new social-emotional sophistication unlikely of a boy his age, revealed yet again as he helped his family make lemon and cinnamon rolls for Easter: “Oh, I need to tell Miss Tessa that I love kneading,” the 7-year-old told his mom, referring to one of his 18 medical providers. “It feels so good to my body.”

He’d made strides, for sure: insisting his dad not escort him back into school after Christmas break; joining his class on a field trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, albeit with a Washburn chaperone; seeing his lead levels plateau such that surgery to remove shrapnel from his cheek and occipital bone got kicked down the road.

Still, to his parents, none of it was a triumph.

When kids survive something like this, they knew, people want it to be inspiring.

But it’s not.

David has to work so hard.

They see it. So does Slack, every day, as she reminds all her students:

“Don't let this person” — the shooter — “take what you love and make it scary.”

Slack now wears another sweatshirt common at Annunciation. Midway down the front is a small red heart against the light gray fabric. Above it are four words. Inked in blue, they could read like a throwaway punchline, a Hallmark cast-off, an ad man’s quick-and-dirty.

They do not capture all it’s taken — the counselors, the weighted stuffies, the surgeries, the folded notes, the Hail Marys, the prescriptions, the bottomless weeping, the roadside cheers, the policy briefings, the suppressed rage, the sequined dance routines — for Annunciation to push through the layered consequences of its school shooting nightmare.

But they are, perhaps, the foundation of this fragile community’s disjointed trek from the unimaginable to whatever comes next:

“Love,” the motto reads, “is the Medicine.”