Mourners gather outside the Annunciation Church, which is a home to an elementary school and was the scene of a shooting the day before that left children dead and injured, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Aug. 28, 2025.

Children yelled to their classmates to drop under the church pews and flung their bodies over their friends'. Adults nearby sprinted toward the loud, banging noises.

Gunfire sprayed through the stained-glass windows of Annunciation Catholic Church in Minnesota on Aug. 27 as children and parishioners prayed during a Mass celebrating the start of a new school year at the associated parochial school.

As details emerge about the shooting that took the lives of two young students and injured 18 others, so have stories about the heroic acts community members took to protect and help one another.

Here are some of the harrowing stories.

Amid shooting, a neighbor ran to the scene

When Patrick Scallen, 71, first heard the booms, he thought it was construction work. Then, his wife screamed, “Somebody's shooting,” and he realized exactly where the sound was coming from.

Scallen, who has lived a block and a half away from Annunciation for most of his life, sprinted toward the church (which has been in the neighborhood since the 1920s).

“I just said I had to go. I had to be there and help, whatever it meant,” he told USA TODAY.

When he got close, he noticed an “eerie quiet” and saw a gun magazine lying on the sidewalk. Scallen ran to the front door of the church just as frantic children began pouring out.

Two little girls walked up to him, one who had been wounded in the head and another who said she was shot in the throat, along with a young boy who had an arm injury.

“I knew I had to take care of those kids until the help came. And so we all stayed together,” Scullen said. “I tried to calm them down, because they were really hurt.”

The girl with the bloodied head asked him to hold her hand and not let go. He promised he wouldn’t. They asked for their moms, and he promised them he would try to contact them. He reassured the children that ambulances were coming and would get them to hospitals where they would be treated.

“I’ve never been as relieved as when I heard the sirens,” said Scullen, whose two children had previously attended Annunciation’s school. He walked the children to the emergency responders and explained what he had observed about their conditions, was able to get in contact with one of the children's parents and then “got out of the way.”

“When you’re in the moment in those situations, you just do it,” Scullen said about his actions. “I kept the focus on helping them and that got me through” Scallen said. “They were so sweet and so brave.”

Eighth grader calms classmates in church

As they prayed inside the church, some of Javen Willis' classmates heard sharp pops they thought were coming from confetti guns or fireworks. The 13-year-old had a suspicion it was something worse and yelled to his friends to dive underneath the pews, he told the "TODAY" show in an Aug. 28 interview.

“Right when I told them that, it was like a state of shock for me, and I knew that I had to try to keep as many people around me as I could safe,” Willis said, wearing an Annunciation Basketball sweatshirt and a backwards hat with his last name printed in uppercase letters.

As he crouched on the ground, the eighth grader, who had been baptized a week earlier, began to pray.

“Then I realized, I can’t just sit here and focus on myself, knowing that, with God on my side, I will be fine,” Willis said. He crawled over to his classmates to keep them safe, calm and quiet.

Later, when Willis’ mother picked him up from the school gymnasium, where parents were instructed to look for survivors of the shooting, he fist-pumped the first responders.

“I didn’t want to just sit there and think about it, so I just thanked the officers, because without them, who knows how much worse this could have been?” he said.

A 10-year-old saved by a classmate

Weston Halsne, 10, was sitting two seats away from the stained-glass windows when the bullets began to rain down, he told the local NBC-affiliate KARE 11.

Like the other students around him, Halsne, a fifth grader at Annunciation Catholic School, dropped to the ground. A friend who tried to shield Halsne was shot in the back.

“My friend Victor, like, saved me, though, because he laid on top of me, but he got hit,” Halsne said, calling his friend “brave.” He told the station he thought his friend went to the hospital and was doing all right.

Halsne’s grandfather told the station the child was handling the situation as well as anyone could.

“There’s only one way to think about it,” he said, “and there's nothing this precious little boy ever did to deserve this.”

(This story has been updated to correct a typo.)

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'I knew I had to help those kids.' Stories of bravery emerge after Minnesota shooting.

Reporting by Karissa Waddick, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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