Back in December, Stewartville High School in Minnesota became the site of yet another shooting that left an entire community trying to piece together what had happened before the sun had even come up.
A student was shot in the school parking lot while heading toward a wrestling team bus before dawn. Nearby, 19-year-old Logan Moyer, a 2024 graduate of the school and former wrestler, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after using a .223-caliber bolt-action rifle to shoot the student and then himself. The victim thankfully survived.
At the time, authorities released very little information beyond the basic timeline, repeatedly asking the public not to speculate while the investigation continued.
Now, nearly five months later, the Post Bulletin from Rochester, Minnesota, has obtained more than 100 pages of law enforcement documents through a public records request. Those documents paint a much fuller and sadder picture of what led up to the shooting.
According to the newly released reports, Moyer and the victim had become close sometime after Christmas of 2024 while Moyer was still helping around the wrestling program as a volunteer coach. Coaches and other students described the two as spending a large amount of time together over the following months.
By the summer of 2025, concerns about the relationship between the two had reportedly been raised with the wrestling coach and the school’s activities director. The exact nature of those concerns is heavily redacted in the documents, and importantly, we still do not know the age of the victim at the time of the shooting because law enforcement has continued to withhold identifying details.
What is known from the reports is that the friendship eventually deteriorated badly. The victim later told investigators that Moyer seemed to believe the friendship was deeper than it actually was. When the victim began spending more time with other friends, Moyer reportedly became increasingly upset and repeatedly threatened to harm himself. Eventually, the victim told the wrestling coach that he would not participate in wrestling if Moyer continued being involved with the team. That apparently led to Moyer being removed from the program.
One of the more painful details in the documents comes from Moyer’s father. According to investigators, sometime during the fall, the family received word that Logan might harm himself. His father rushed home from a football game to find his son crying hysterically. In the interview transcript, Moyer’s father recalled telling his son that they could fix anything “as long as he’s here,” adding that the one thing he could not fix was Logan dying. Later in the same interview, his father reportedly told investigators, “Maybe I should have done more. I don’t know what else I could have done.”
The documents also reveal that investigators found conversations between Moyer and ChatGPT on his phone. According to the reports, Moyer asked the chatbot questions about killing, suicide, forgiveness, heaven, hell, and what would happen if someone committed what he described as a “crime of hatred” before repenting and taking their own life. His browser history also reportedly included searches about ammunition and the rifle later used in the shooting.
This has the potential to become the detail that gets the most attention online. Because apparently every societal failure now needs to be filtered through whether AI somehow “caused” it. There will absolutely be people trying to turn this into another story about chatbots pushing vulnerable people toward violence.
A teenager or young adult repeatedly using AI like a therapist is usually a sign that something else has already broken down long before the chatbot entered the picture. Either they do not trust the people around them enough to talk honestly, or they do not believe those people will understand what they are feeling. Sometimes it’s both.
None of that means AI conversations are healthy substitutes for real support systems, because they are not. Still, focusing exclusively on the chatbot risks ignoring the much larger tragedy sitting underneath all of this.
There is also another detail in the reports that deserves attention. Investigators learned that the rifle and ammunition used in the shooting came from Moyer’s family home. Two rifles and ammunition had reportedly been stored untouched in a basement storage area for years. Moyer’s father told investigators he did not believe the firearms had been accessed since the family moved into the house several years earlier.
Now I know this is a delicate situation, and I’m trying to be as respectful as possible. But if you have a kid with a documented history of talking about killing themselves, maybe think about getting rid of any guns in the house, or at least locking them up. Like actually locking them up and not putting them in a safe where the kids know the combination, as we’ve seen in past shootings.
These newly released records really provide a picture of a deeply troubled young man whose mental health appears to have been unraveling for months while the people around him struggled to figure out how serious the situation actually was. The tragedy is that by the time everyone fully understood the danger, it was already too late.
(Source)
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