St. Louis Park, Minn. (AP) – The shooter who killed two schoolchildren and injured 21 other people in a Catholic church in Minneapolis visited a suburb of weapons business on the weekend before the attack, but the owner of the business said on Thursday that his employees had not seen any warning signs in their interactions.
The owner of the weapon business, Kory Krause, said The Associated Press that Robin Westman had spent about 40 minutes in Frontiermann Sports in St. Louis Park on August 23 and seemed to be completely relaxed. A surveillance video showed that Westman examined several weapons before ultimately bought a revolver.
Westman had already passed the necessary background exams and had a valid approval to buy the weapon, said Krause.
But the revolver was not the weapons that Westman used on August 27 in the shootings in the Church of the Annunciation when he was full of students in the affiliated Catholic school who had gathered at their first trade fair of the academic year. At the scene of the crime, the investigators have restored a semi -automatic assault rifle, a shotgun and another pistol and said Westman legally entitled to buy it. Krause said nobody came out of his shop.
The 23 -year -old Westman attended the school for the eighth class and Westman’s mother used to work for the community, but the investigators are still trying to determine a motif. Westman died of suicide after having fired 116 rifles through the stained glass windows of the church.
As reported by KStP-TV for the first time, the security video Westman shows, which handles several firearms and speaks to employees and other customers. Krause was not in the shop at the time, but he said he immediately shared the video with the investigators and worked with them.
Krause emphasized that nothing in Westman’s behavior had made concerns aware of his employees, of which he said they were trained to pay attention to warning signs.
“This person said the right things, they checked the right box, asked all the questions, they were cordial, talkative, made jokes, laughing, knows about weapons, edited many weapons that were not the kind of weapons that are thinking of the interest that someone is interested
Krause said his employees have extensive experience in the selection of bad actors, straw buyers, people who are murderous, suicide, mentally unstable or under the influence of alcohol or drugs. But he said nothing noticed with Westman.
(*2*) said Krause. “We still scratch the minds and think: ‘What did we miss? What could we have done?’ But it always ends with “nothing”.
Tim Walz, the democratic governor, said on Tuesday that he intended to call a special meeting of the legislature in Minnesota in order to address the security of weapons and school, and he suggested that an attack weapon ban would be on his list of suggestions that he was still developing. But it would be very hard to say goodbye to the closely shared legislator without some cross -party support.
House Republicans published a list of suggestions on Thursday that have no restrictions on access to firearms. It requires increased funding for school security and for school resource officials, also for private schools. They would also ban the districts to ban school resource officials, as Minneapolis and some other districts did. The house gop also called for more mental treatment beds and mandatory minimum misaligned for repeated criminals that employ weapons and for straw buyers of firearms that are used in violent crimes.
The students require action, an arm from everytown for weapon security, organized school leaders across the country on Friday to demand that state and federal legislature prohibit attack weapons and magazines with a high capacity.
___
Steve Karnowski, Associated Press Writer, reported from Minneapolis.
