Heartbroken Nashville community grapples with school shooting as police uncover more details about the shooter
Nashville #Nashville
Nashville police release security footage in school shooting
Click to expand
UP NEXT
Grief-stricken Nashville residents will unite at a vigil Wednesday evening to mourn three children and three adults killed at a private Christian school by a mass shooter who police say had been under care for an emotional disorder and legally bought seven guns in the past three years.
The deadly rampage Monday morning at The Covenant School lasted 14 minutes. The assailant killed three 9-year-olds – including the Covenant Presbyterian Church pastor’s daughter – as well as a custodian, a substitute teacher and the head of the school. The killer targeted the school, but it’s believed the victims were fired upon at random, police said.
The massacre marked the 19th shooting at a school or university in just the past three months that left at least one person wounded, a CNN count shows. It was among 130 mass shootings this year in the US – with at least four wounded, excluding the shooting – and the deadliest US school shooting since last May’s massacre in Uvalde, Texas, left 21 people dead.
The quick law enforcement response in Nashville stands in notable contrast with the delay in Uvalde of more than an hour before authorities confronted and killed the gunman – a lag that revived a nationwide conversation about use of force during shootings in public places, especially schools.
Meantime, this week’s bloodshed again reignited debates about gun control, though some lawmakers have already acknowledged immediate reforms once more appear unlikely.
“I can’t do anything except plead with the Congress to act reasonably,” President Joe Biden said Tuesday.
The shooter’s social media posts give more details
The shooter, 28-year-old Audrey Hale, had legally bought seven firearms – including an AR-15 and two others used in Monday’s attack – and hidden them at home, Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake said Tuesday. The guns were purchased between October 2020 and June 2022, police spokesman Don Aaron said.
Hale’s parents told police they knew Hale had bought and sold one weapon and thought that was the extent of it, Drake said.
Hale had been under care for an emotional disorder, he said, without giving further details.
The killer also had posted on Facebook sometime in the past two years about the death of a romantic partner, a former teacher told The New York Times.
Hale wrote about missing the partner and posted photos of the two playing basketball together, said Maria Colomy, who taught Hale in 2017 at the Nossi College of Art & Design in Nashville.
“She had been openly grieving about that on social media, and during the grieving is when she announced that she wanted to be addressed as a male,” Colomy told the Times on Tuesday.
Police have said Hale was transgender. The shooter’s Facebook account has been taken down.
A ‘calculated’ attack and disturbing messages
The motive in Monday’s attack remains under investigation, police say.
Hale had detailed maps of the school and writings related to the shooting and had scouted a second possible attack location in Nashville, they said. Hale’s childhood friend revealed the killer sent her disturbing messages minutes before the attack.
The shooter sent a disturbing Instagram message to the childhood friend, a former basketball teammate, just before 10 a.m. Monday, saying “I’m planning to die today” and it would be on the news, Averianna Patton told CNN on Tuesday.
Writings left behind by Hale revealed the attack “was calculated and planned,” police said. The shooter had a drawing of how to enter the building and “assaults that would take place,” Drake said at a Tuesday news conference.
The attacker was “prepared for confrontation with law enforcement, prepared to do more harm than was actually done,” Drake said Monday.
“This school, this church building was a target of the shooter, but we have no information at present to indicate that the shooter was specifically targeting any one of the six individuals who were murdered,” police spokesman Aaron added Tuesday.
Hale graduated from Nossi College of Art & Design last year, the president of the school confirmed to CNN. Hale worked as a freelance graphic designer and a part-time grocery shopper, a LinkedIn profile says.
Police have referred to Hale as a “female shooter,” and later said Hale was transgender. Hale used male pronouns on a social media profile, a spokesperson told CNN when asked to clarify.
Police confront shooter, bodycam footage shows
Armed with three firearms, the shooter got into the school by firing through glass doors and climbing through to get inside, then walked through the hallways and pointed an assault-style weapon, surveillance video released by Metro Nashville Police shows.
The first call about the shooting came in at 10:13 a.m., and police rushed to the school, arriving at 10:24 a.m., according to the police chief.
Police on Tuesday released body-camera footage from the two officers who opened fire on the shooter after rushing into the school on Monday.
The footage, from the body-worn cameras of officers Rex Engelbert and Michael Collazo, begins with Engelbert arriving at the school to find a woman outside who says the school is on lockdown and two children are unaccounted for.
After the officer is given a key to open a door into the building, a group of five officers enters the school amid wailing fire alarms and immediately goes into several empty classrooms rooms to look for the suspect.
As they clear the rooms, officers hear gunfire from upstairs and rush up to the second floor, where Engelbert, armed with an assault-style rifle, fires multiple times at a person near a large window, who drops to the ground, the video shows.
Collazo then appears to shoot the person on the ground four times with a handgun, yelling, “Stop moving!” The officers then approach the person, move a gun away and radio, “Suspect down! Suspect down!”
The shooter was dead at 10:27 a.m., Aaron said.
As a private school operated by a church, there was no school resource officer assigned by the city to guard the school, according to Aaron.
Asked about the roughly 11-minute gap between when police received the first call of an active shooter and when officers arrived at the school, the police chief told reporters, “From what I’ve seen, I don’t have a particular problem with it. But we always want to get better. We always want to get there in 2 or 3 minutes, and so there’s a lot of things that could have happened – traffic was locked down, etc.”
The 6 lives lost
The victims of the shooting included three 9-year-old students: Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs, the daughter of lead church pastor Chad Scruggs. Also killed were Cynthia Peak, 61, a substitute teacher; Katherine Koonce, the 60-year-old head of the school; and Mike Hill, a 61-year-old custodian, police said.
“Our community is heartbroken,” The Covenant School, a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church, said in a statement. “We are grieving tremendous loss and are in shock coming out of the terror that shattered our school and church.”
Sissy Goff, one of Koonce’s friends, went to the reunification center after the shooting and suspected something was wrong when she didn’t see Koonce there.
“Knowing her, she’s so kind and strong and such a voice of reason and just security for people that she would have been there in front handling everything, so I had a feeling,” Goff said.
Peak, a substitute teacher, was best friends with Tennessee First Lady Maria Lee and was supposed to go to the Lees’ home for dinner Monday evening, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said in a video statement Tuesday.
“Maria woke up this morning without one of her best friends, Cindy Peak,” the governor said. “Cindy and Maria and Katherine Koonce were all teachers at the same school and have been family friends for decades.”
Some families of the victims have released statements as they mourn their loves ones. Hill was a father of seven children and grandfather to 14 who loved to cook and spend time with his family, his family said in a statement obtained by CNN affiliate WSMV. Evelyn’s family called her “a shining light in this world.”
The city has set up a fund to help support the survivors of the shooting, Mayor John Cooper said.
CNN’s Melissa Alonso, Amara Walker, Tina Burnside, Amanda Jackson, Sara Smart, Jamiel Lynch and Michelle Krupa contributed to this report.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com