Legislative Testimony Of First Physician On The Scene At The Annunciation Shooting

By Tim Kummer, Minnesota Reformer

September 18, 2025

My name is Dr. Tim Kummer, I’m an assistant medical director of Hennepin EMS and an emergency physician at Hennepin Healthcare.

I was the first physician on scene at the Annunciation school shooting. When I arrived, I joined our paramedics in assessing children who had been shot in the back, in the arms, in the head. As we took in the immense pain and fear in those children’s eyes, we tried to comfort them as they were rushed to the hospital.

Once all critical patients had been transported, our focus shifted to the children who said they were uninjured, despite having blood on their clothes. We had to confirm that the blood on them was not from their own wounds, but from the classmates they had tried to shield.

At the same time, we began the reunification process, matching parents to their children, which included the painful task of telling some parents their child had been shot and was at the hospital. Finally, we carried out the devastating task of telling parents their child had been killed while singing in church during the first week of school.

I’ve seen many difficult things in my career, but what I witnessed that morning was unlike anything else. I saw the horror in the eyes of innocent children, the fear of parents desperate to know if their child was alive, and I heard the screams of mothers and fathers when they were told their child had been murdered.

I still see those faces when I close my eyes and I hear their voices when I try to go to sleep.

But gun violence is nothing new to our communities. The Black and brown communities we serve have lived with this painful reality for decades. It angers me that it took a church full of children for us to gather here today. And yet, even now, you debate if you should act. I don’t know if or what I could have done differently that day, but I do know this: The level of chaos and the depth of suffering was because of the type of weapon used.

At Annunciation, the shooter fired more than 100 rounds with a high-powered rifle. That is why there were so many victims. That is why the injuries were so severe. The type of gun matters.

At Annunciation I cared for a 12-year-old girl who had what looked like a very small graze wound to the top of her head – an abrasion, nothing else. But despite that bullet never entering her brain, the energy from the rifle was so powerful it caused severe bleeding in her brain, and she had to have part of her skull removed.

From a handgun, that wound would likely have only been a graze wound, but from a high-powered rifle, it became a life-threatening brain injury.

Assault rifles turn survivable injuries into fatal ones. They turn small tragedies into mass tragedies.

I know some will say that most gun violence involves handguns, not high powered rifles, and that might be true, but in an event like Annunciation, the rifle made everything worse. It turned potentially minor wounds into life-threatening ones. It multiplied the number of children shot, and it amplified the trauma for families, for first responders, and for health care providers.

I am not a gun expert, but I am an expert in the aftermath. The suffering these weapons inflict and the PTSD they leave with my colleagues and me. I see firsthand how the type of gun determines the destruction. Not banning these weapons compounds our suffering.

For victims, for families, for first responders, and for health care providers, your inaction is not neutral. Your inaction is acceptance. You have the power to save lives and to decrease suffering.

Please take meaningful action and swift action to limit access to weapons designed for maximum and permanent damage to life. Thank you.

The Minnesota Reformer is an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to keeping Minnesotans informed and unearthing stories other outlets can’t or won’t tell..