10/11/2026
A message from Gannon President Dr. Keith Taylor following Friday evening's tragedy in our city. Please keep the victims, their family, and all of Erie in your prayers. 🙏
To the Gannon University family and our neighbors throughout Erie,
Friday evening, our city suffered a loss unlike anything in its memory. Eight people, among them two small children and a mother expecting a child, were killed in a home on Erie's east side. Our police chief has said that Erie has likely never witnessed such devastation, and many of us woke up this morning carrying that same shock and grief.
Erie is not a large city. Tragedies like this do not happen to strangers here; they happen to people our neighbors know, whose children attend our schools, who worship in our churches and shop in our stores. Today the whole city mourns together, and Gannon mourns with it.
As a Catholic university, we hold every human life as sacred, and we believe that no life, however brief, is ever lost to God. We grieve especially for the children whose lives had barely begun, and for the family and friends whose world was shattered in a single evening. We pray as well for the police officers and first responders who answered the call last night, and who will carry what they saw for a long time.
Gannon has always understood itself as part of Erie, not apart from it. Their loss is our loss, and we hold in prayer all who serve our city, especially those now caring for the people most affected.
For now, I ask that we be gentle with one another, hold our own families a little closer, and keep this family and our city in prayer.
We also pray for this grieving family, who must now bear a sorrow few of us can imagine, and we commend all who died last night to the mercy of God, who alone knows every heart.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.
In God’s peace,
Keith Taylor, Ph.D.
President, Gannon University
