Was Minneapolis school shooter demon-possessed?

On August 28, 23-year-old Robin (formerly Robert) Westman, a transgender-identifying biological male, fired through the windows of Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, killing two children and injuring numerous others. Westman, who died by suicide, left behind a disturbing manifesto in video and written format, revealing his fixation on mass violence and his severe mental health disturbances.

Everyone is talking about his morbid obsession with mass shooters, his racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian statements, and his self-loathing reflected in his manifesto. But are they missing the bigger picture?

What’s clear to Rick Burgess, BlazeTV host of “Strange Encounters,” is that Westman was plagued by demons – not the secular, metaphorical kind synonymous with mental illness and personal struggles. Real demons.

“It's just so obvious that this is demonic possession,” he says.

For starters, Westman killed himself, as many mass shooters do. Rick draws a comparison between this desire to inflict self harm and biblical stories of demons terrorizing and torturing their hosts.

He then plays a short clip from one of Westman’s videos capturing him stabbing a hand-drawn diagram of the church he targeted, whispering “kill myself” repeatedly. Add to that his use of strange symbols, violent sayings, and sinister diagrams and drawings — like the one of him staring at his horned demon reflection in the mirror or a shooting target with a graphic of Jesus' face on it — and it’s easy to see Westman was not merely afflicted by demons but full-on possessed.

“I don't think anybody could convince me that this is just mental illness,” says Rick. “It's of the spiritual realm so clearly.”

While secular society, especially on the left, is going to tell us our prayers are fruitless and push for legislative action for gun control, Rick says prayer is what we need more than ever.

“The prayer that we should pray is not just for protection; we need to pray a prayer of repentance,” he says.

“We are embracing things that blaspheme God. We are opening invitations to darkness throughout our society, throughout our government. We are telling God that we don't want Him ... and when that vacuum is created, it will be replaced with demonic activity,” he warns.

Even the strictest gun laws won’t do a thing to mitigate the forces of evil, he says. When we create a culture that confuses good and evil, promoting things God hates and spitting on His commands, we are inviting evil through the front door.

To hear more of Rick’s analysis and more about the reality of spiritual warfare, watch the episode above.

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