Attorneys of Harper Moyski’s family say YouTube could have prevented Annunciation shooting
By Reg Chapman and Web Staff
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MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (WCCO) — The attorneys for an Annunciation Catholic School shooting victim’s family say YouTube could have prevented the tragedy, and a civil lawsuit is being considered.
On Monday, a little more than a year after the shooting, attorneys say the media company and “Garry’s Mod,” a video game owned by Facepunch Studios, have “blood on their hands after their failure to act on information they had led to the tragedy.”
The mass shooting, which occurred during the first Mass of the school year on Aug. 27, 2025, killed 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel and 10-year-old Harper Moyski. Eighteen other children, ranging in age from 6 to 15, were hurt, as well as three adults. The shooting happened at the church, which is connected to a school building.
Moyski’s family is represented by civil rights attorneys Bakari Sellers of The Strom Law Firm and Gregorio Francis of Osborne, Francis and Pettis.
Attorneys say the shooter posted multiple videos to YouTube that promoted “extremely violent ideologies” that glorified racism, antisemitism, firearms and more.
“The videos, scheduled to go public the day of the shooting, included a violent manifesto and an apparent diagram of Annunciation Church,” the attorneys said in a release.
Attorneys accuse YouTube of having this information before the shooting and failing to contact authorities. They did not provide details on the involvement of “Garry’s Mod.”
“Harper was pure joy and hope,” Moyski’s parents, Jackie Flavin and Michael Moyski, said in the release. “Losing her has been a never-ending nightmare. Knowing that YouTube could have saved her life but chose not to is more than any parent could bear. We want to know why they decided that our daughter wasn’t worth the one phone call it would have taken YouTube to save her life.”
The attorneys say their investigation is ongoing, but “they are examining all available options for justice including a civil lawsuit.”
“We want to explore what procedures were followed or not followed by YouTube in this case because we believe that there was sufficient time for the authorities to be contacted and for something to be done to prevent this terrible tragedy,” Francis said.
A spokesperson for Google, which owns YouTube, released a statement to WCCO on Wednesday.
“We have the deepest sympathies for the victims and families of the horrific attack at the Annunciation Church,” the spokesperson said. “We removed the videos after detection, and invest heavily in technology and our teams to remove extremist content. We also work closely with law enforcement, other platforms, and civil society to share intelligence and best practices.”
Craig Sixta, Element’s chief technology officer, said it’s a “needle in a haystack” to catch certain videos. He said 720,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube daily.
“Google has about 10,000 human researchers that review videos that are flagged by AI or flagged by the computers themselves, so 720,000 hours, even with 10,000 people, there is no way that you could review a fraction of that,” Sixta said. “There may be some unintended side effects to this. We want to do the best we can to protect people, but we also don’t want to lose our ability to freely express ourselves.”
WCCO reached out to Facepunch Studios for a statement, but has not heard back.
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