YouTube video shows ‘Annunciation’ church sketchpublished at 11:02 British Summer Time
Olga Robinson and Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify
Earlier we outlined how BBC Verify found a YouTube account associated with Minneapolis shooting suspect Robin Westman and downloaded two videos before it was taken down.
The videos show someone’s hand leafing through the pages of several notebooks.
They are filled with notes written in English but using both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, along with a number of sketches and drawings.
These notebooks, which are dated, reveal the attack was planned weeks in advance and indicate a consistent interest in a school and a church called “Annunciation”.
One page, titled “Annunciation from memory” in Cyrillic, includes a rough sketch of the layout of a church, which the person in the video points to before stabbing the sketch with a knife.
The shooting took place at the Annunciation Roman Catholic Church, where children had been attending Mass during their first week of school.
While we were not able to access a floorplan of the church immediately a search for images available online indicated multiple similar features to those in the sketch.
In some of the notes analysed by BBC Verify, the writer weighs options of when and where it might be best to carry out an attack on “a large group of kids”.
At one point, the writer expresses a desire to “catch a big assembly on the first day of school” and the intention to avoid parents as they may be armed.