Scribble

David Rind

00:00:00

This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and gun violence doesn't end when the bullets stop flying.

Michelle Krupa

00:00:06

People who have had this kind of trauma. It should be and is as newsworthy as the events themselves.

David Rind

00:00:13

Stick around.

Michelle Krupa

00:00:16

So I am an editor on CNN's National Hub. I handle mostly digital stories. And I was working at our newsroom in Atlanta on the morning of August 27th. And the news came in of a school shooting. And as you might imagine, my desk has a protocol.

David Rind

00:00:35

Unfortunately, in 2026, school shootings are as much a part of school in America as geometry or English literature. They have been far more often here than any other country on earth. They happen so often, in fact, they can start to run together. You might've heard my colleague Michelle Krupa there mention a shooting that happened on August 27th, 2025 and wondered, which one was that again? And I don't blame you for thinking that. I don't necessarily think it's a crass thought to have. It's just the sad, sad reality we live in. Well, the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis that happened just three days into the school year was unique. Not necessarily for the horror it created, but for where it occurred.

Erin Burnett

00:01:19

Out front tonight, the breaking news. A horrific act of violence at school. Two children are dead after a shooter, clad in all black, opened fire through the stained glass windows of the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, first barricading the doors to prevent anyone from leaving. It was like...

Student

00:01:35

'Right beside me. I was like two seats away from the stained-glass windows so they were like the shots were like right next to me. The first one I was like what is that? I thought it was just something then I heard it again I just ran under the pew and then I covered my head. My friend Victor like saved me though because he laid on top of me but he got hit.

David Rind

00:01:56

'This kind of act of evil should never happen, and it happens far too often. In a matter of minutes, two kids were dead. 27 other people were injured. The gunman also died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Michelle has covered a lot of these shootings for CNN, but this one felt different.

Michelle Krupa

00:02:17

You know, I knew kind of off the bat that this was a kind of community that I already knew well.

David Rind

00:02:22

Why's that?

Michelle Krupa

00:02:22

So I went to K through eight Catholic school, uh, in the suburbs of Chicago. And, um, after high school, I ended up going to Notre Dame and, um on my drive home, it occurred to me, like, this is a big Catholic school in the Midwest. Um, and they're going to be a ton of Notre Dame connections to this school. I didn't know a single one as I was driving, but it just, it just felt like it was for sure. I had a, yeah, for sure

David Rind

00:02:50

She got in touch with a journalism professor at the university and with CNN's permission, started working on a story for the alumni magazine. Michelle soon developed relationships in the Annunciation community, meeting these families, hearing their stories. Her piece in the magazine came out in early January, but she wanted to go deeper.

Michelle Krupa

00:03:08

The dad who rushed back after dropping off his kids and, you know, frantically trying to find them even before the police arrived in the church said something to me that was sort of the germ of this additional reporting that I have now done for CNN. He found his three children, third graders up through seventh graders. His wife met them at church. They all went back home. They piled on the couch together. They just like wanted to be physically close to each other. And I asked him like, what were you thinking? In that moment, like, like just holding your family after such a such a horrific thing. And he said, you know, it was 11 o'clock in the morning. And I wondered, what do you do with the rest of the day? I'm a mom. I have sons who are 10 and 14. They go off to school every day. It crosses my mind every day that a school shooting could happen. I think because I have worked in the news and like been in these kinds of stories for so long, I have imagined those like the initial hours and maybe the initial days and like what that would look like in my community. But I've really. Before this, I'd never really let myself explore what happens next. That's the question that my reporting so far has aimed to answer.

David Rind

00:04:39

Many families impacted by the shooting were understandably skeptical about talking to media. Many have not spoken to the press at all, but some of them did open up to Michelle for the first time. She thinks it's possible the piece in the Notre Dame Alumni Magazine made the families comfortable with her and showed she would handle their stories with care and nuance. And so, as the school year continued, she kept reporting, kept looking for an answer to that question. What happens next?

Michelle Krupa

00:05:10

'CNN for part of this reporting sent me to Minneapolis. And I went to mass on Sunday morning and I sat next to the little, the two-year-old who I'd written about. And after mass, which the big mass at Annunciation is still held in the school auditorium. The church itself is a real source of pain and fear for a lot of people in that community.

David Rind

00:05:33

Oh, so they don't hold services in there yet?

Michelle Krupa

00:05:36

They do hold some services. The Archbishop performed a right to sort of reclaim that as a faith space, and there are some Masses, but the big Sunday Mass that a lot of families go to, you know, the most popular Mass, is still held in the school auditorium. And I went to that Mass and I was sort of hanging around afterward and talking with people I knew and knew people I was meeting. And Sarah, this teacher, walks up to me and she looks at my press badge that that was hanging off my. Belt loop and she said, what is CNN doing here? And I thought that I would just straightforwardly explain to her what I was up to and, you know, apologize if it made her uncomfortable in any way and that would be that. What happened instead was that she stopped and we talked for an hour at least and then she walked myself and a photographer that I've been working with on this story, Liam Doyle. Back to her classroom and sooner than later, we were sitting on her floor petting her therapy bunny that's now a mainstay in her classroom for her first graders. And her just telling us all about what it's been like, how her life has had completely changed, how she missed the person that she used to be.

David Rind

00:06:53

So, obviously, so much has changed for the people that were impacted here, obviously in the school and the families directly impacted. Why don't we start in that school where you were, you know, on the floor with the therapy bunny. What is life like for the students right now?

Michelle Krupa

00:07:11

So you walk into Annunciation and it sort of looks like, you know, it's just a regular school. There's crayon drawings on the, you know, up on bulletin boards, all in a row. They're all sort of versions of the same, whatever the assignment was. I got to visit in February, so there were like little snow boots lined up outside every classroom. But then, you know, I look a little deeper and I had some questions. You know, you've got the therapy bunny that wouldn't have been there before this. The whole school, more or less now, is carpeted, which it was not before the shooting, because as you know, like almost everybody has a metal water bottle now, and you have 300, so kids, somebody's gonna drop their metal water bottle, and the faculty and teachers found that for themselves and for all of the children, like someone dropped a water bottle, and it was like duck and cover.

David Rind

00:08:03

Oh wow, that was triggering just to hear that sound.

Michelle Krupa

00:08:08

'Yes, there's a long existing pediatric mental health care agency called the Washburn Center for Children that has existed since the 1800s in Minneapolis and quickly became a partner with Annunciation early on when kids went back to school, part-time in the middle of September. The way it sort of worked, and I saw this happening, teachers have these walkie talkies right there, like sort of yellow walkie-talkies, they have the button on the side. And a teacher will notice, because this is just who everybody is now, that a child is struggling, right? Staring off into space, head down, maybe flopping around on the floor. And we'll just pick up the walkie talkie and very casually and quietly say, hello, friends, I need a washburn helper in room XYZ. Within a few minutes, that child will slip out the door and get sort of a mini therapy session from a trained professional. Sometimes kids ask, Ms. So-and-so, could I see a washburn helper now?

David Rind

00:09:11

'So there you have, you know, the mental health angle at the school level just for the kids who are in class and need this on a day-to-day, but obviously the kids go home, right? And they take a lot of that stuff with them. What does that look like for the families trying to heal?

Michelle Krupa

00:09:30

Yeah, I've met some really remarkable people, David, who are living through just the absolute impossible, whose lives changed in a fraction of a second.

Brittany Rawson Heag

00:09:39

And we're always like, David was the happiest baby because he was, he was like so happy and so easy.

Michelle Krupa

00:09:45

There's a little boy named David, he is very young. He was six when he was hit. He has a tremendous amount of shrapnel in his body. It's in his cheek, it's in the back of his head, it's on his spleen.

Joe Haeg

00:10:02

I don't think he notices it. Like his body just kind of like pushes it out. But yeah, you find like metal fragments in his bed.

Michelle Krupa

00:10:07

His parents told me that before all this, he just loved school. He loved the movie Home Alone. He watched it in the summer.

David Rind

00:10:16

Who among us?

Michelle Krupa

00:10:16

Right. He can't watch that movie anymore.

Joe Haeg

00:10:22

All alone has suddenly become very challenging to watch because there is the scene in which she uses the gangster movie.

Home Alone Clip

00:10:30

'I'm gonna give you to the count of ten to get your ugly, yellow, no-good keister off my property before I pump your guts full of lead. All right, Johnny, I'm...

Michelle Krupa

00:10:41

If you've seen it, there's that bit that has like the black and white gangster film and it's a it's like a key piece, right? It's like how the Macaulay Culkin character scares away these like goons who are trying to break into his house and David can't listen to that and neither can his older brother and sister. And sometimes now.

Brittany Rawson Heag

00:11:01

Happy can slip really fast and panic.

Michelle Krupa

00:11:10

'Another piece that David's parents told me, they sort of said that now they were shocked that they even tried this at the time, but everything was so new and fresh and they were trying to go back to their normal life that about a week after the shooting, they had some close family friends who were getting married. David's dad was a groomsman and his mom was a bridesmaid and everybody was invited to the rehearsal dinner. And they gave David an option to go. He could stay with grandparents if that made him more comfortable. They didn't put pressure on him to go, but he decided that he wanted to go and so they get into the van, they all pile in the van together and they get up on I-94 and sometime they're flying down the interstate, it dawned on David that this event might be in a church and he just lost his mind.

Joe Haeg

00:12:00

He found my work bag and was trying to like, destroy things out of my workbag because he wanted me to go back and we were on the highway.

Michelle Krupa

00:12:11

And he found his dad's work bag and he tried to like destroy a keyboard that was in it and his dad was telling me the story and he said he hears him like unbuckle just really scary for a parent right it's a little kid who's unbuckled on the interstate and then from the back Of the car he hears David yelling, I hate you, daddy. Oh, child.

Joe Haeg

00:12:40

I know he doesn't mean that. And that's not what I'm searing.

Michelle Krupa

00:12:47

And Joe, his dad, has the presence of mind and emotional sophistication to tell me that he didn't at all hear David saying, I hate you daddy.

Joe Haeg

00:13:01

What I shoot there is like, I am in just such a great deal of distress and there is nothing you can do for me.

Dr. Walt Galicich

00:13:25

I'm gonna be blunt, Sophia is still in critical condition in the intensive care unit. There's a chance that she's maybe the third fatality of this event.

Michelle Krupa

00:13:40

You might remember another child who was badly injured in this event. Sophia Fortress is a seventh grader. She was shot in her head. She has a bullet in her brain. Not too many days after the attack, a neurosurgeon in a press conference said out loud to reporters and the whole world that he wasn't sure that she wasn't going to be the third fatality of the event.

Dr. Walt Galicich

00:14:09

But the door's been opened a little bit and there's some rays of hope shining through.

Michelle Krupa

00:14:15

I talked with her dad who remembered and still draws very deeply on his faith. They're Greek Orthodox. Their kids go to this Catholic school. He talked about nurses and doctors and visitors coming into the room. And he said he could see that they felt the Holy Spirit. And they would just say to him, she's gonna walk out of here. And he thought like, she can't open her eyes. She can't move her legs. She can speak. She has a breathing tube and a feeding tube. Like, I don't even know if she's gonna make it until tomorrow. Sophia made a really remarkable recovery. By September 18th, she was dribbling a basketball. She was walking her way around the unit. She ended up going to rehab for a few weeks. She had a police escort and a limousine to take her home. But even then, there's occupation and physical therapy, speech therapy, she had to relearn all kinds of words, including the color blue. Her parents said, we just watched her do this as a kid. She was 12. They just watched here do all these things for the first time and there she was like having to redo them. Tom, her dad told me that you know, a glimmer of all of this is that because she was hit quickly with a bullet and because she down on the ground, she doesn't have much recollection of the attack, which is something that really haunts many, many, many kids who remember hearing, you know the deacon from the altar yelling into his mic, get down, get down. Get down, being on the floor, a dad. Just this morning told me that his son crawled under the pews looking for someone he knew so that he wouldn't be alone when he died.

David Rind

00:16:21

God, that's horrible. It strikes me that, you know, in covering a lot of these and hearing so many different stories from these shootings, like you don't hear about a lot of children who were injured by gunfire. Usually if they struck, they die. And that's just like the horrible reality of this. So it is amazing that those two are alive and still around.

Michelle Krupa

00:16:51

It is, it is amazing. David's mom said something to me a few weeks ago. She said he's doing better and the level of lead in his body has plateaued. We don't think he's gonna need surgery. We think we can kick that down the road a little bit. That sounds good. But then she stopped and said, you know, when things like this happen, people want it to be inspiring. They want a storybook ending, right? They want. They want everyone to be happy that the kids survived. And she said, it's not. It's hard for my kid every single day. And it's hard for all these kids every single day in a way that nobody asked for, nobody planned for. And it was just what they have to deal with now.

David Rind

00:17:42

'We'll be right back. So Michelle, we do have those survival stories, which are just gut-wrenching to hear about. But of course, two kids did die in this shooting. 10-Year-old Harper Moiskey and eight-year old Fletcher Merkel. It's obviously been a whole nother level of pain and trauma for those families. What did they tell you?

Michelle Krupa

00:18:09

Yeah, it was a real honor to be able to spend time with Fletcher's family and Harper's family. They have approached this in sort of ways that on paper maybe look different.

Mike Moyski

00:18:24

I don't think I ever spent a second thinking that any of this could even have been him. Like even that day in that morning, I still...

Jackie Flavin

00:18:32

'My nightmare was that she was going to be rock-climbing in college and something would happen.

Mike Moyski

00:18:37

Cause she was the wild one, you know?

Jackie Flavin

00:18:38

I really felt like it was going be an adventure somewhere and we would get a call and that, I have had that nightmare often.

Mike Moyski

00:18:44

But a school incident or even for the first few hours before we knew Harper was there.

Michelle Krupa

00:18:49

Harper was 10, she wanted to be a veterinarian, she was super adventurous and her family never went back to the house that she lived in.

Jackie Flavin

00:19:03

And so intensely at our house. And like everything about her was still there. And I mean, she wrote her initials.

Michelle Krupa

00:19:12

Everything in life. They went to a hotel. They lived there for a little while. They went to an apartment. They packed up their old house. They had help packing up Harper's room. They moved to a new house. Harper's urn is on the fireplace mantle.

Michelle Krupa

00:19:31

Fletcher's family. He has an older brother and two younger siblings.

Michelle Krupa

00:19:37

Are you in Fletchers bed right now? Can I see his room?

Jesse Merkel

00:19:44

We got his, well, he got his animal bowl. Is that from Cam? I was little. Pillow. And his pillow. And his friends made it. They had a sleepover planned for like two weeks after the shooting.

Michelle Krupa

00:19:57

His room is more or less exactly like he left it on the morning of the 27th. His shirts are hanging in the closet. He and his mom like to propagate plants. And so his garden is still growing, including a plant that he had planned to grow until it could reach the ceiling. And take with him to college?

Mollie Merkel

00:20:21

And so it's just, it's felt joyful for me to like bring in some more plants and then continue to propagate the babies. And like Tim Walls has one of Fetcher's plants on his desk.

Michelle Krupa

00:20:34

His parents feel very strongly about keeping his memory alive, keeping him relevant is how they've said it to me.

Michelle Krupa

00:20:41

In this conversation a few times and also at the end of the last one that we had. Sometimes you say that Fletcher was these things and then sometimes you say he is these things. In what tense do you think of him?

Jesse Merkel

00:20:58

Well, is he eight or is he nine? His birthday was two months ago. How old is he?

Mollie Merkel

00:21:06

Yeah, it definitely changes.

Jesse Merkel

00:21:12

Yeah, is he or was he? I'm not sure.

Mollie Merkel

00:21:16

Like he is, like his presence is always here.

Jesse Merkel

00:21:25

Yeah.

Jesse Merkel

00:21:28

Yeah, that's a question. There are hundreds of questions that don't have answers, and that's venable.

Michelle Krupa

00:21:37

They held an event for him called Fletcher Fest in the school auditorium in January. It was just a few days after he would have turned nine. And it was all of his buddies just celebrating who he was just, yes, two days ago. His little league retired his jersey number. And, you know, Fletchers family has been like really out front with. Like events to celebrate him and keep him alive. They are also part of this group of parents that the Moiskees are also an important part of, Mike Moiskey in particular, called the Annunciation Light Alliance. It's this parent advocacy group. It's in the mold of much of what we've seen. In prior cases that children were shot at in a place they expected to be safe, every town for gun safety, Sandy Hook Promise, they are advocating for ways to make mass shootings less likely.

Jackie Flavin

00:22:46

All the offense deserves.

Michelle Krupa

00:22:48

So much more, and not just gun violence too, but yeah.

Jackie Flavin

00:22:51

Let's start. We're starting there

Michelle Krupa

00:22:52

There's a gun piece, but there's also sort of a threat reporting piece and a mental health piece. And Mike Moiskey and his wife, Jackie Flavin, have been instrumental in putting that together along with other members of their community.

Mike Moyski

00:23:08

There's a local community district building that needs, like, involved all floors.

Jackie Flavin

00:23:14

And then like do it outside space for community gatherings.

Mike Moyski

00:23:18

Like a garden.

Michelle Krupa

00:23:19

You know, more than one person in Annunciation's community has said to me in this sort of metaphorical way, like it is still August 27th. We have moved on and we feel like, right, the rest of the world that happened at the very start of the school year, here we are at the end of the year, so much time has gone by. But plenty of people there have said to me like it's still August, 27th, people are still in shock. Like this is still really new and fresh and And I think, you know, everyone has come around to the idea that this is the turning point of their lives, that this the thing, right? But it's still super new.

David Rind

00:24:00

I mean, you mentioned the advocacy, and that's part of the disturbing reality of these things, that it's just kind of part of that cycle that we all hear about. So I guess I'm wondering, has there been any movement on gun regulations or any of the other aspects that these parents are trying to change here in the wake of this?

Michelle Krupa

00:24:23

The Minnesota State Senate passed a package of bills along party lines that represented, you know, much of what this alliance of parents has been pushing for. And I talked to some leaders of that group and right after the vote, they texted me and we got on the phone and they were completely and Michael sent me a you know, snapshot of like the vote tally in his hand. And Kristen told me that they went home to their kids and they didn't really have a sense of how closely the kids were following like the machinations at the state house. And when they got home and they told them that it had passed, she said the kids we're like jumping up and down and hugging and so happy. The reality of it is that this thing. Is I think the way the local paper put it was like, it's just gonna hit a brick wall in the state house. It's not gonna go anywhere. There's just, it just doesn't have a chance. And I found the excitement and celebration around what effectively is a nominal victory to be emblematic of where we are as a country when it comes to issues related to this kind of gun violence.

David Rind

00:25:43

I want to ask about Minneapolis because obviously in the months after this shooting, it kind of became the epicenter of this immigration enforcement crackdown, the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Preti. We've covered it on the show a bunch, and I'm just wondering how that spotlight and kind of that federal presence of armed agents in the city impacted any of these families as they were trying to recover from this horrible tragedy.

Michelle Krupa

00:26:09

Yeah, so, um, Renee Goode was killed on Fletcher Merkle's birthday. And that was a real stunner for this community. It was a day that was already going to be very, very sad. And then for this different, but sort of seemingly similar kind of violence to happen was just another shock within a few weeks of the shooting. Kids came back to school and there was a field day where kids could like sort of get as close Outdoors to the school building and the church building as they wanted and there's a whiffle ball field at enunciation That's like kind of a it's like a super fun space, right? Between the church and the whiffled ball field was the sidewalk that the shooter fired from and like no kids wanted to go there and On this field day, Annunciation invited first responders, cops who had responded to the school, EMS, firefighters, all those people who had been there in this moment of panic came back and they could interact with them. And by the end of this day, older boys at the school were like running foot races on that sidewalk that the shooter had used with first responders. In a way that the person that, you know, told me about this said like, was reclaiming the power of the sidewalk. And so they did a lot of work early on to reintroduce first responders, people in uniform, to children who had had this traumatic experience and those kinds of adults. There are armed guards at school now. Their firearms are hidden, but they stand all over enunciation. And the kids have like a really terrific relationship with them. And so when federal forces and ICE agents came to Minneapolis, it was jarring, right? It was confusing. Like, why are these people in uniform acting this way? And why are with these people in uniform, acting that way? And there was a whole new set of talking points that the trauma counselors... Came up with to explain just that dichotomy to these kids who had worked so hard to reframe first responders in the first place.

David Rind

00:28:45

What did you learn in this process that you might take away with you as you undoubtedly have to cover more of this?

Michelle Krupa

00:28:55

I think sticking with survivors should be higher on our priority list as journalists. I think the continuing experience of people who have had this kind of trauma should be is as newsworthy as the events themselves. I have heard and really been motivated in this reporting by the story of one boy, he's a seventh grader named John. He went to a spring break camp. He came home after the first day and he was sort of quiet and his dad was like trying to kind of feel it out. And he said, you know, I went to this camp with all these other kids who are like from Minneapolis, who didn't know what happened to me and my friends. I think that's a result of lots of parents don't want their kids to know anything. About these kind of events. And I think it also could be a result of like just how quickly we move on. And this boy came home and he said like, how's that possible, right? It changed his entire life, the lives of everyone in his family, all of his friends, all of teachers, his entire school community. Like how is it possible that kids who live just right around the corner from me, like didn't know. This happened or didn't recognize how big a deal this was and he was just very deeply hurt by that. And that's been a motivating part of my exploration of this and just wanting to talk to lots and lots of people is that I don't think we should look away.

David Rind

00:30:37

Well, Michelle, thank you very much for doing this reporting. I really appreciate it.

Michelle Krupa

00:30:42

Thanks David, I appreciate it too.

David Rind

00:30:47

All right, that's all we've got for today. I highly encourage you to check out Michelle's full feature piece. It's up now at cnn.com. It's filled with lots more reporting, tons of detail and some really amazing photos that I think are really worth looking at. We'll leave a link to the story in our show notes and I'll talk to you next time.

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