When 12-year-old Sophia Forchas arrived at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis on August 27 after a shooting at her Catholic school, doctors told her family she was near death. A bullet sat lodged in the right occipital lobe of her brain. The pressure inside her skull was rising to dangerous levels. Her neurosurgeon said later that survival would take a miracle.
Now, nearly a month later, Sophia is preparing to leave acute care and begin inpatient rehabilitation. Her family calls it a miracle. Her doctors remain cautiously optimistic. The 7th grader is breathing on her own and showing signs of neurological recovery.
The Shooting at Annunciation
The shooting happened during a school-wide Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning, August 27. Students from the attached Catholic school had gathered for worship when 23-year-old Robin Westman opened fire through the church windows. Westman was a former student who had posted videos online describing what authorities called a deep fascination with mass shooters. He died by suicide after the attack.
Eight-year-old Fletcher Merkel and 10-year-old Harper Moyski were killed. Another 15 children and three adult parishioners were injured in the gunfire.
Sophia’s mother works as a healthcare assistant at Hennepin Healthcare. She had just arrived for her shift when victims from the shooting began coming into the same hospital. She didn’t know yet that one of them was her daughter. Sophia’s 9-year-old brother was in the church during the shooting. He escaped physical harm but watched his sister get shot.
The Annunciation shooting was one of 53 school shootings across the United States through September 23, according to CNN’s analysis of reports from the Gun Violence Archive, Education Week, and Everytown for Gun Safety.
The Medical Crisis
When Sophia arrived at the hospital, Dr. Walt Galicich faced an immediate crisis. The pressure in her brain was climbing fast. The bullet had lodged in the right occipital lobe on the left side of her head. Reaching it would mean cutting through healthy brain tissue and risking more damage. But the swelling was going to kill her first.
Sophia underwent emergency surgery called a decompressive craniectomy, in which surgeons removed the left half of her skull to allow her brain to swell. The team kept her in a medically induced coma for most of the following days, counting on the ability of young brains to heal.
Ten days after the shooting, Galicich stood before reporters and grew emotional. The bullet was still there. The same terrible calculation remained. He said if someone had told him 10 days earlier that they would be standing there with any hope at all, he would have said it would take a miracle.
Her Recovery Begins
Two weeks after the shooting, doctors upgraded Sophia’s condition from critical to serious. She came off the breathing tube and could breathe on her own. The family said doctors had warned them she was on the brink of death, but rays of hope were emerging.
The medical team at Hennepin Healthcare kept watching for signs that her young brain was healing. By late September, those signs were clear enough to move Sophia from acute care to an inpatient rehabilitation program. Her doctors remained cautiously optimistic about what they were seeing.
Tom Forchas told reporters his daughter is kind, brilliant, and full of life. He said Sophia is an innocent child who was attacked while in prayer.
The family described what they were witnessing as nothing short of miraculous. Their September 22 statement opened with the words “Sophia is winning” and said she continued to make steady progress with promising signs of neurological recovery.
The statement thanked people around the world for their prayers and mentioned prayer support from Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Leo XIV. It credited God’s mercy and intervention for each new development. The family wrote that each day they uncovered new moments and circumstances that kept her alive and made her recovery possible.
A GoFundMe campaign set up to help cover medical expenses has raised more than 1 million dollars. The page describes the trauma her brother also faces from witnessing such a terrifying event and knowing his sister was critically injured, as something no child should ever experience.
Sophia faces months of rehabilitation and therapy ahead.
She Starts Rehab This Week
This week, Sophia will move to inpatient rehabilitation. Medical professionals at Hennepin Healthcare call it exceptional progress. Her family calls it a miracle. She arrived at the Minneapolis hospital in critical condition after the school shooting, with a bullet lodged in her brain tissue. Her neurological function now shows an outcome her neurosurgeon didn’t dare predict.
Her family’s latest statement asks people to continue praying and to move their feet, to worship together and walk forward in faith. “Sophia is strong, brave, and unwavering in her fight toward healing,” the family said.
August 27 nearly killed her. She spent weeks unconscious while doctors waited to see if her young brain could heal itself. It did. She’s off the ventilator now, and her nervous system is recovering. The left half of her skull will need surgical replacement once the swelling goes down.
This is what surviving a school shooting looks like. There have been 53 school shootings in America this year. Sophia made it. That matters. But it shouldn’t have to.
