It was Independence Day, and the plan to kill children inside Annunciation Catholic Church was coming together.
“Oh my God! I got it! I have a shotgun!” the attacker wrote in a diary entry dated July 4, adding that a high-powered rifle was next on the shopping list. “It was not too difficult at all!”
For much of this year, Robin W. Westman described in three secret diaries how she planned to commit mass murder. On Wednesday, the authorities identified her as the person who had opened fire on an all-school Mass in Minneapolis and killed two children and injured 18 other people.
It was unclear whether the attacker had shared her plans with family or friends before the shooting. Messages to parents and other family members were not returned.
The videos of the diaries were posted on Ms. Westman’s personal YouTube channel and included specific details about the shooting. They also included biographical information that The Times has corroborated. The Times captured the videos shortly after the attack, before YouTube shut down the channel.
Early indications suggest that the shooter worked to keep the plot hidden. Diary entries were written in English, but using Cyrillic letters. The entries indicated that weapons and ammunition were carefully concealed from friends, roommates and a romantic partner. A small circle of confidants appeared to have shrunk further in the last several months.
And safeguards such as background checks were easily navigated, even in Minnesota, a state that has in recent years made it more difficult to buy a gun.
In the diaries, Ms. Westman, 23, wrote of an early fascination with school shooters that she had nurtured since a young age. She pondered the cost of guns and ammunition and debated whether to fire upon a concert venue or political rally, eventually settling on her former elementary school’s church, Annunciation.
Earlier this year, Ms. Westman wrote, she had been watching so many mass shooting videos online that she worried about being placed on a Federal Bureau of Investigation watch list. But in early July, she was thrilled to discover that a state-issued gun permit had arrived in the mail.
The F.B.I., she wrote, “had NO idea what they just did.”
“That also means they have no suspicion of me or at least not enough to deny my application!” she wrote. “What a wonderful treat to come home to.”
She visited the church on a test run this summer during one Sunday Mass and wondered if a few male churchgoers were gun owners.
Excursions to buy guns were fraught with anxiety, followed by jubilation.
When shopping for a gun at a pawnshop, Ms. Westman pretended to be a “normal gun buyer,” inventing a story about wanting a firearm for home defense.
“The person seemed to believe me and was super helpful and even gave me recommendations on guns,” she wrote in a diary.
The assailant obtained the guns legally, the Minneapolis police said this week.
“There is nothing in the investigation so far that would lead us to believe that anything was missed,” Chief Brian O’Hara of the Minneapolis Police Department said.
But there were warnings that Ms. Westman, who was born Robert Westman, was leading a troubled life from an early age, filled with grievances, hatred and self-harm.
A high school art teacher, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations, said that the attacker — who was called Bob at that time — had been polite and friendly to her but was an odd, quirky young person who had sat alone in class.
The teacher noticed that the student had forearm wounds that appeared to be self-inflicted. She reported it to the school guidance counselor but was unsure what had happened next.
“It’s either a cry for attention or self-hatred or both,” she said. “That was something that slipped through the cracks.”
After moving around to several high schools as a teenager, in 2020, Ms. Westman legally changed her name to Robin M. Westman in 2020. According to court records, Ms. Westman’s mother, Mary Grace Westman, sought the change because her child “identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”
Ms. Westman graduated from Southwest High School in Minneapolis in 2021 but did not walk across the stage, a video from the graduation shows.
As an adult, Ms. Westman recently lived in a working-class apartment complex in the Minneapolis suburb of Richfield. At a busy medical cannabis dispensary in Eagan, a nearby suburb, an employee confirmed that Ms. Westman had worked there and expressed shock that she had been identified as the shooter, but the employee had also been instructed not to speak with the media.
Late last year, Ms. Westman was known to artists in Minneapolis’s L.G.B.T.Q. community, as she sold handmade skateboard accessories at markets.
Savannah Halverson, one of the organizers of a market, remembered seeing Ms. Westman with her girlfriend, selling her items, smiling and making friendly chitchat, her hair tucked under a cap.
“They had friends who would come there and sit with them,” she said. “I had a couple good conversations with Robin and never really noticed anything off.”
Ms. Westman’s diaries indicate that she ended her relationship with the girlfriend in the final weeks before the shooting. She moved in with a friend in another suburb, St. Louis Park, and carefully hid her guns from him.
On July 27, she wrote in her diary that she had solidified her plan to attack Annunciation. Roughly 500 children and 50 adults would be attending the all-school Mass on Aug. 27, she wrote.
It was a Mass she had attended many times as a child, when she was a student at Annunciation.
“One more month!” she wrote in a diary entry. “I must finish anything I have left.”
Julie Bosman is the Chicago bureau chief for The Times, writing and reporting stories from around the Midwest.
Aric Toler is a reporter on the Visual Investigations team at The Times who uses emerging techniques of discovery to analyze open source information.
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