David Haeg, a young victim of last week’s church shooting, is home after surgery.
MINNEAPOLIS — One of the youngest victims in last weeks shooting at Anunciation Church, David Haeg, returned home after a successful surgery on Monday. His parents are grateful for an outpouring of community support for he and their two other children, who were unharmed in the shooting. But that’s not the only reason they’re speaking out.
“Someone brought me down to the gym where the kids were and I found my older two kids and neither of them knew where their little brother was,” said Brittany Haeg. She said the next 15 minutes were the longest of her life as she waited to find out which hospital her son was at.
Brittany and her husband Joe say 6-year-old David had surgery to repair a lacerated spleen and remove shrapnel throughout his body.
“I think he might have been there before I got the first text message, is how fast they moved,” Brittany said.
And though he went home on Monday, graze wounds from additional bullets are reminders of how much worse it could have been.
“He has had trouble finding words for what happened to him,” she said. “He talks about there being a bad guy.”
They struggle with words too, to comfort their three kids through the confusing mix of gratitude, fear and trauma.
“It’s like a wave of relief and a wave of — what comes next?”
What has come is the parade of elected leaders. They felt compelled to speak out after seeing the visit and departing comments from Vice President JD Vance.
“I think all of us, Democrats, Republicans and independents want these school shootings to happen less frequently, and hopefully there’s some steps that we can take to make that happen,” JD Vance told reporters in Minneapolis Wednesday.
“If this is such a problem, and you are praying for action, and you have been given a source of power to make a change, how is that not an answer to your prayer?” Joe said.
Below is a full statement from the family:
The longest fifteen minutes of my life were the fifteen minutes I waited to learn what hospital my six-year-old had been taken to after a shooter opened fire on him, his siblings, and their classmates at the first school Mass of the year.
The day had started like an ordinary morning. It was a little chaotic. We weren’t fully back in the school routine. But lunches got packed, backpacks grabbed, and my first grader’s brand-new school shoes double-knotted because he hasn’t yet mastered tying them himself.
By 9:01 a.m., I knew there had been a shooting.
By 9:25, I was parking near the school.
By 9:38, I was calling my father—a nurse at Children’s Minneapolis—to check the ER because no one could tell me where David was, only that he had been put in an ambulance.
By 9:52, we were reasonably certain he had been taken to Hennepin County Medical Center.
In many ways, my family is extraordinarily lucky. Emergency services reached David so quickly that he was likely in the operating room before I even arrived at the school. HCMC delivered world-class care to my son, who had a lacerated spleen, shrapnel scattered through his body, and a graze across his head from a bullet.
They saved his life. They saved my whole world.
I was raised Catholic, taught to believe that every human life carries inherent dignity. No one earns it. Everyone has it. It is our job to protect it.
Our leaders—you—have failed to do that.
You have failed to protect our children from weapons that kill and maim. You have failed to protect the very institutions that keep them alive when the unthinkable happens.
The weapons that pierced my son’s body have no place in a society that values human dignity. No one’s gun is more important than the children in that church on Wednesday. No one’s gun is more important than any human life.
Every moment that passes without greater regulation is a gross failure of moral leadership.
And while Hennepin County Medical Center saved my child, the hospital itself is under threat. Cuts to Medicaid and federal public health funding have already compromised essential institutions like HCMC. A society that values life invests in protecting it—not only from bullets, but also by guaranteeing care when tragedy strikes.
No one deserves what happened to my family, but without action, it will happen again and again and again. And without investment in medical care, the next families may not be as “lucky” as mine.
If you seek a position of public trust, you have a duty to protect the people you represent. I am begging you:
• Ban the sale of assault weapons, bump stocks, high-capacity magazines and end immunity for the gun industry.
• Implement universal background checks and stronger licensing requirements.
• Fund school safety measures like school threat assessment teams, that protect children without turning classrooms into prisons, and commit to keeping all guns out of K-12 schools.
• Protect and expand Medicaid and public hospital funding so victims of gun violence can receive lifesaving care regardless of income.
If you cannot protect our children from being shot, and you cannot protect the hospitals that save them when they are shot, then you have abandoned your most basic duty as a leader.
David, thankfully, is home and recovering. He is six, and has survived the unimaginable. Not all families in our community were so “lucky.”
You must do better. Our children cannot wait.