WASHINGTON – Police were still on the scene of the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church when FBI Director Kash Patel announced that the horrific violence would be investigated as a hate crime against Catholics and an act of domestic terrorism.
That rush to judgment has perplexed some legal experts who say we may never know the motivation of Robin Westman, who killed two children and wounded 21 others by shooting through a window of the church, which was holding a mass for the students at its affiliated school.
Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that studies hate crimes and extremism, said a motive “may not fit neatly in a box.”
“It’s too early to fully assess what may have brought about this horrific violence. But early indications show a young person expressing a mix of ideologies, politics and inspirations,” she said.
Related: D.C. Memo: Sandy Hook and now Annunciation
In another horrifying school shooting — the slaughter of 20 first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut — an intensive investigation by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies found no conclusive motive for shooter Adam Lanza.
That shooting has eerie similarities to the Annunciation shooting. Both Lanza and Westman had attended the school they targeted, their mothers had worked at the facilities and both shooters were fascinated with mass murderers. And both died of self-inflicted gun shots so could never be asked why they committed their crimes.
So, Patel’s determination that the Annunciation shooting be investigated as a hate crime against Catholics may be premature.
But it aligns with the Trump administration’s refocus of the Justice Department to redirect resources to ferret out antisemitism and what President Donald Trump has determined to be an “anti-Christian bias.”
Trump signed an executive order in February that blamed the Biden administration for “an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses.”
Specifically, the order cited arrests of “peaceful, pro-life Christians” at abortion clinics and allegations the FBI had used undercover agents to spy on Catholic parishioners.
That charge came from a memo leaked in February 2023 by a former FBI agent that revealed plans to spy on a Catholic denomination in Richmond, Virginia, as part of an effort to protect people from the threat of white supremacy that may be appealing to ultraconservative Catholics.
Terrorizing children
“There’s a focus on anti-Christian bias, but that’s not reflected in the data,” said Emmanuel Mauleón, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and an expert on domestic terrorism and hate crimes.
Mauleón said federal hate crime statutes were born of the Civil Rights Movement and aimed at protecting minorities, then expanded to include those “more marginalized within the general public.”
Westman attacked a Catholic church filled with students of the school he once attended. But videos posted on social media show ammunition magazines that say “Kill Donald Trump” and anti-Black, antisemitic, anti-Hispanic and anti-God slogans.
Other postings also include a wide variety of hate messages, including some against children, and writings that praised mass murderers who targeted children.
Joseph Thompson, the acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, said at a news conference this week that the evidence includes hundreds of pages of writing in which the shooter detailed plans for the attack, praises other mass shooters and expresses “hate towards almost every group imaginable.”
Thompson also hinted at a possible motive.
“The shooter wanted to kill children — defenseless children,” Thompson said. “I won’t dignify the shooter’s words by repeating them. They are horrific and vile. But, in short, the shooter wanted to watch children suffer.”
And Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said at a news conference last week that “there is no question in this case that the shooter intended to terrorize children.”
Aligning with Trump’s priorities
Still, FBI director Patel continued to focus on the assailant’s anti-Catholic and anti-religious references.
And the Justice Department has cut off funding for department programs that U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said “do not align with the administration’s priorities.”
To that end, the Justice Department ended all grants in its anti-hate crimes program. The money was being used by nonprofits for things like bystander intervention training, know your rights seminars, better incident tracking and therapy for victims of hate crimes and had been aimed at helping people of color, LGBTQ people and sex trafficking victims.
There has also been a mass exodus of attorneys at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division as it shelved its traditional mission to combat discrimination and protect the constitutional rights of all Americans and replaced it with one focused on enforcing the president’s executive orders.
Still, it’s quite possible that Westman had animus toward the Catholic Church.
According to the FBI’s hate crime statistics, there were 11,914 hate crimes attributed to attacks on religion last year. But there were 32,946 based on race and/or ethnicity and 13,185 based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Although there was once rampant and extreme anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States, especially before the Civil War, hate crimes against Catholics and Catholic institutions are far fewer now.
Related: America needs an anti-terrorist act for the terrorism in our midst
The FBI’s hate crime statistics have logged only 25 such incidents across the nation so far this year.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has tracked 22 attacks on Catholic churches this year — before the shooting at Annunciation. Most of those attacks involved vandalism — the spray painting of anti-Catholic messages and swastikas and the beheading of religious statues. But one incident involved the fatal shooting of a priest in Kansas by a parishioner who was incensed that his church was not conservative enough.
Still, Carroll Rivas said if Westman “was motivated by or specifically targeted a group for their religious affiliation, in this case Catholicism, then we hope the FBI and local law enforcement will do a full investigation and work with the community to address the impact on the community at large and the families who had loved ones murdered.”
“We must also not just focus on the aftereffects … but on preventing this violence from ever happening again,” Caroll Rivas said.
That, she said, requires action by lawmakers and community leaders to focus on halting the radicalization of youth online.
“This is a public health crisis, and it will take a whole-of-community public health approach to stop it, once and for all,” she said.
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