MINNEAPOLIS OSV News – Ellie Mertens huddled under a pew at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis on the morning of Aug. 27 as a barrage of bullets screamed past her, mere inches from her head.
She had arrived a few minutes late for the 8:15 a.m. all-school Mass as the new school year began at Annunciation Catholic School.
After walking in, she went toward the front section of the Church on the left side. As always, she wanted to be with the students, specifically the seventh and eighth graders she works with as the parish youth minister, a job she began right out of college three years ago.
That put her near the row of windows on the east side of the Church, the bottoms of which were at the same level as the pews. The pew where she chose to sit was a few rows back from the first window.
It’s the first window where the suspected shooter, later identified by police as Robin Westman, began to fire from outside the Church upon the students, parents, staff members and other Mass attendees.
After the first four shots rang out, Mertens dropped to the ground and crawled under the pew where she had chosen to sit for Mass. Then, gunfire shattered the windows and bullets began pouring through.
As the gunfire continued for several minutes, she pulled out her phone while still under the pew and called her husband, Matt, whom she had married in December 2024.
She got his voicemail. She sent him a text, telling him what was happening and asking him to “please pray.” Her text included this message:
“I love you.”
She thought those would be her final words to Matt.
They weren’t. After more than 100 rounds tore through a Church completed in 1962 and left violated and desecrated, the shooting stopped and was replaced by a brief and eerie silence. Quickly, school leaders, including Principal Matt DeBoer, rushed to clear everyone out of the Church and to a safe place. En masse, everyone inside the Church ducked and ran out of the Church. In their wake were shards of broken glass, pools of blood and chips of wood from bullet-riddled pews. Mertens described the exit scene as “frantic.” People inside were “confused, in utter shock” and also uncertain about what was happening and where to find shelter.
Like the other survivors, Mertens went to the elementary school’s gym, where traumatized students waited for their terror-stricken parents to find them, whisk them out of the building and take them home.
She watched as cries of joy and relief pierced the air when children and parents reunited. Gradually, the gym emptied. Mertens and a few others stood by, waiting to see if their help would be needed.
Finally, the last of the children made their somber exits from the gym.
Mertens will never forget the next scene: parents alone, without the children they hoped to see. These are things that are seared into her memory forever.
Two students died in the gunfire and 18 students between the ages of 6 and 15 were wounded, as were three adults in their 80s, police said.
But Mertens’ story doesn’t end there; nor does the story of Annunciation as a parish and school. A new chapter is beginning. She clearly sees a message from God in the fact that she survived.
Over the next two days, this 25-year-old woman of deep faith – who attended Catholic elementary school herself – began intensely praying and pouring through her Bible searching for direction about what to do in the aftermath of an unimaginable and hideous act of violence against a school and students she has come to love and care for deeply.
Her search for spiritual and scriptural meaning landed on the Old Testament Book of Esther. One line jumped out at her: “(a woman) for such a time as this” (Est 4:14).
Fueled by this verse, Mertens has solidified her focus in going forward from this tragedy. She believes God wants her to be part of the effort to help lead others to himself and toward healing.
In that mission, she is all in.
“Being here now is an answered prayer because I’ve just been praying to be a vessel and an instrument,” she said. “I know I survived this so I can help other people through it.”
The roots of Mertens being an instrument go back to her time at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where she studied Spanish and psychology until her graduation in May 2022. After attending St. Wenceslaus Catholic School, 45 miles south of Minneapolis, from kindergarten through eighth grade, she went to New Prague High School, graduating in 2018.
By the time she entered college, she was struggling with several serious issues and eventually drifted away from her faith.
“I was a very lost and broken high school and college girl,” she recalled. “Hopeless. I never would have imagined myself as a youth minister. Yet, I’m glad that that brokenness was turned into beauty to walk alongside kids now.”
The turnaround came during her freshman year of college at the University of Minnesota, when she met missionaries of St. Paul’s Outreach, a West St. Paul-based outreach for college students in Minnesota and across the country. She was drawn to Christ by SPO’s “model of relational ministry, incarnational, coming alongside and having missionaries show up where I was, take me out to lunch, just love me for who I was instead of what I had to offer,” she said. “It changed my life.”
Now, she feels called to simply do the same for those who participate in youth ministry at Annunciation. This calling began shortly after returning to her faith at the university. As her faith deepened, she became vice president of Catholic Students United on campus, now called Gopher Catholic. During that time, she received strong support – and prayer – from Father Jake Anderson, the director of Gopher Catholic and pastor of St. Lawrence Catholic Church and Newman Center.
During her senior year in 2021-2022, she was invited to do volunteer youth ministry at Annunciation by Richfield Young Life (now Crosstown Young Life), which has been a partner with Annunciation for youth ministry. Then, the youth ministry job opened, she applied and was hired right after she graduated.
Mertens works with youth programs serving about 500 to 600 students in grades seven through 12 in her ministry. Some are Catholic, others have different faith traditions, including other Christian denominations. She makes no distinction when it comes to faith practice. “They’re all our kids,” she said.
The job description for Mertens and others who do youth ministry at Annunciation, including Crosstown Young Life, an ecumenical ministry, is simple: Go where the kids are and come alongside them. With love. With compassion. With a listening ear to hear their stories.
“We live in an evil world,” Mertens said. “Jesus has put a call on my life to go make disciples of all nations, and kids need hope. I remember feeling like a worthless middle school girl, comparing myself (to others), never feeling like I was enough, not feeling like my life had purpose. There’s nothing kids need more than an adult to show up for them.”
Showing up is exactly what Mertens plans to do in the days ahead as the Annunciation school and Church community forges a path to healing. A healing balm she will bring is her testimony of losing her way, then finding it again in Jesus, who now calls her to help others find him amid the tragedy.
“I was very hurting and broken,” she said of her earlier years, “and trying to fill every void – acceptance, appearance, achievement – in high school and early college days. And due to extremely poor decisions, I totaled my car in an accident at (age) 17. I rolled it five times.”
The only injury was a cut on her elbow that left a scar. On Aug. 27, a piece of glass from the broken window made a cut on that same elbow.
“How could there not be a call on my life?” she said, of her role as youth minister at Annunciation.
She hopes to follow the example of Esther in the Old Testament and has made words from one verse of that book her own.
“I’m called,” Mertens said, “for such a time as this.”
“God doesn’t want me to be scared,” she added. “I survived that (shooting), so I can walk with damaged kids through this.”
Here’s what that will look like for her. “Jesus Christ can give hope and peace. I’m going to show up and tell kids about him more than ever before, about the hope that they can have in him, about the fact that he understands the pain (they are feeling).”
She said that “what sets our ministry apart is (that) we show up where kids are because that is what God did for us. He became human and showed up for us.”
Just two days after the shooting rocked the Annunciation Church and school communities, and rocked the entire Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and beyond, Mertens has crafted a simple resolve and message, one that echoes the sentiment of her pastor, Father Dennis Zehren; her principal; and Archbishop Bernard A. Hebda of St. Paul and Minneapolis:
“Horror is not going to win. We are reclaiming our Church.”
Dave Hrbacek is senior content specialist for The Catholic Spirit, the news outlet of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. This story was originally published by The Catholic Spirit and is distributed through a partnership with OSV News.