A shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic School left two children dead and 17 others injured during Wednesday Mass, authorities said.

Fletcher Merkel, 8, and Harper Moyski, 10, were killed when a gunman opened fire at Annunciation Catholic School during 8 a.m. Mass.
“Yesterday a coward decided to take our 8-year-old son, Fletcher, away from us,” his father, Jesse Merkel, said to ABC News.

14 other students and three elderly parishioners were wounded during the attack and rushed to Hennepin County Medical Center. One of the students, 12-year-old Sophia Forchas, is still in critical condition.

The gunman was identified as 23-year-old Robin Westman, a former student of the school. Westman took his own life at the scene.

“The gunman approached on the side of the building and began firing a rifle through the church windows toward the children sitting in the pews at Mass,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said in a news conference. “The sheer cruelty and cowardice of firing into a church full of children is absolutely incomprehensible.”

The shooting at the school marked the fourth deadly shooting in Minneapolis in 24 hours, and the 44th school shooting this year in the U.S., according to CNN.

The tragedy has resonated with students at EHS.

“… I was extremely upset. These are young children who have nothing to do with anything, being targeted for extreme acts of violence,” senior Leticia Faria-Oliveira said. “It fills me with intense disgust that another human being could do that.”

With the frequency of violent events like this dramatically increasing over the last several years, many students worry about having to face a similar situation.

“I am concerned that we will experience violence like so many other schools have…,” senior Sawyer Heck said. “I am thankful for the procedures that District 7 enacts, as in the school shooter drills that we undergo to prepare the students for if we have to go through what so many others have gone through.”