In the operating rooms of Minneapolis’s busiest trauma center, anesthesiologist Andrew Engel regularly cares for gunshot victims. He’s used to the adrenaline of assessing patients in critical condition, stopping their bleeding, and rushing them into surgery.
But last week, when Engel got paged with a message saying students from the mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School were on their way to Hennepin County Medical Center, he felt something he never feels at work: fear.
Engel, a Christian and Wheaton College graduate, began to pray, “Not my will but yours” and “Jesus, please be with us. Be near us.”
A shooter had targeted Annunciation, a school of 391 students from preschool through 8th grade, on the first day of classes—firing through stained glass windows where kids and staff gathered for Mass.
The attack killed 2 children and injured another 18 children and 3 adults in their 80s. The shooter died by suicide. The FBI said it is investigating the crime as domestic terrorism and a hate crime against Catholics, though the motive remains unclear. Children from a variety of Christian traditions, including Protestants, attend the school.
On Sunday, priest Dennis Zehren led his first Mass since the one interrupted by gunfire.
“We are in a very low place, a place we never could have imagined even in our worst nightmares,” he said to the congregation, which met in the school’s auditorium instead of the sanctuary that is now a crime scene.
“Jesus says, ‘Can you just sit with me here in the dust?’ That’s the dust where Jesus fell when he was carrying the cross. That’s the dust that soaked up Jesus’ blood as he was on the way to crucifixion,” he said. “That’s where he always can be found, in that lowest place.”
Zehren compared first responders to those who held up Moses’ arms in Exodus 17, saying they were “a rock underneath us.”
Staff at Hennepin County Medical Center were on the frontlines. The hospital shut down all open operating rooms to hold space for the incoming wounded and paged medical staff to come in to help, according to Engel.
OR staff like Engel went down to the emergency room to triage the victims, some in critical condition with gunshot wounds, whom paramedics had rushed from the scene.
That day, Engel worked on victims from ages 6 to 82. Anesthesiologists are highly specialized doctors who make sure patients stay alive during surgeries, monitoring vitals and administering drugs during procedures. Parents who came to the hospital with their children couldn’t go past the door into the operating room. That gutted Engel.
The parents were severely distressed. As a doctor, he had to compartmentalize his feelings. “You can’t let yourself go there emotionally and feel that with them at that time. If you do, you’re not going to make good decisions. You’ll be slow; you won’t be crisp.”
Engel told himself he could process what he was seeing later. He remembered just praying the name “Jesus” under his breath: “God, help us. Help me. Help them,” he prayed.
He recalled a specific prayer from Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest, a devotional book his mother had emphasized to him as a reminder to bring Jesus into every moment of his life.
“Prayer is the practice of drawing on the grace of God,” the devotion reads in part. “Don’t say, ‘I will endure this until I can get away and pray.’ Pray now—draw on the grace of God in your moment of need.”
One of the young victims remains in critical condition, the hospital reported.
“It’s unimaginable,” said Engel.
The hospital is Minnesota’s largest trauma center and is considered a “safety-net” hospital because it serves many patients who have lower incomes or are uninsured.
Before the school shooting on Wednesday, Engel’s OR team had already had a tough week, with two shootings, which he believed to be gang-related, bringing victims to the hospital.
Because he sees patients from a range of nationalities and socioeconomic statuses, Engel sees his work as a “mini mission field.” Minneapolis itself is mostly white but has a growing immigrant population. The hospital has interpreters for all the languages patients speak.
“I love my job,” Engel said. “One of the reasons I love it is because I have a sense of my own mortality every day. It could be any day for any of us that we go meet Jesus.”
Before starting at the county hospital, Engel worked 18 years in private practice, which was more profit oriented. He wished he hadn’t spent so much time there. He thrives on the adrenaline of treating trauma patients.
But six-year-old victims on their first day of school was hard to process even for seasoned trauma-care physicians like Engel.
After work, he had a gin and tonic and listened to Maverick City Music. He lay in bed and prayed. He stopped himself from asking, “Why?”
God “doesn’t promise an easy life or a healthy life or a long life, but he does promise us his peace and sometimes his joy—and most importantly his eternal life,” Engel said. “That’s what I’m banking on.”
The next day, the hospital brought psychologists and counselors into the break room to talk to any of the medical staff. People who had tended to the incoming wounded children were “openly emotional,” Engel said, adding that the hospital staff generally is open to talking about the heaviness of such moments.
Several Protestant churches near Annunciation, including Restoration Anglican, City Church, and The Urban Refuge Church, held prayer services that night after the shooting.
Restoration’s pastor of children’s ministry Emily Collings posted resources on talking to children about violence, including a video from Nashville-based Christian psychologist Sissy Goff that she recorded after the Covenant School shooting.
Over the weekend, Engel prayed and read the Bible between shifts.
“I know I can give testimony that God is faithful,” he said. “It isn’t always in the way we envision it. It’s not always physical healing or prosperity, but in the important ways, meeting us in our hearts and mind.”
