The dad of 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel, one of the two child victims of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis, asked that people remember his son “for the person he was and not the act that ended his life.”
“A coward decided to take our 8-year-old son Fletcher away from us. Because of their actions, we will never be allowed to hold him, talk to him, play with him, and watch him grow into the wonderful young man he was on the path to becoming,” Jesse Merkel said in a tearful statement outside the school Thursday.
He thanked the children who acted as heroes to try to save their friends, as well as the adults whose “swift” actions he says prevented the tragedy being “many magnitudes” worse.
“We ask not for your sympathy but your empathy, as our family and the Annunciation community grieve and try to make sense of such a senseless act of violence,” the grieving father said.
Fletcher Merkel and 10-year-old Harper Moyski were killed when a shooter opened fire on the school’s church Wednesday morning. Eighteen other people, including 15 children, were also injured in the shooting but are expected to survive, police said.
