The official narrative surrounding the Minnesota church shooting is already raising questions — but the background of the alleged gunman’s father makes the story even stranger.
Robert Westman, the accused shooter, is the son of James Westman, a man whose résumé reads less like that of a suburban IT worker and more like a who’s-who of defense and intelligence contracting.
For 28 years, Westman held top-level roles as a contractor for both the Department of Defense and the CIA. Most recently, he was a Senior Applications Developer at Esri, the geospatial intelligence giant whose mapping software is used across the Pentagon, DHS, Google, and virtually every major surveillance program in the Western world.
Esri’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology is the backbone of satellite ground mapping, GPS tracking, and defense intelligence.
In simple terms, if the government wants to track movement, map battlefields, or surveil populations, Esri tools are at the center of it. The company even boasts of its deep integration with U.S. intelligence agencies.
This isn’t just “dad worked in tech.” This is dad worked on the exact systems the government uses to monitor and predict human behavior.
