The shooter who killed three students and three staff members at a Christian school in Nashville legally bought seven weapons in recent years and hid the guns from their parents before carrying out the attack by firing indiscriminately at victims and spraying gunfire through doors and windows, police said Tuesday.
The violence Monday at The Covenant School was the latest school shooting to roil the nation and was planned carefully. The shooter had drawn a detailed map of the school, including potential entry points, and conducted surveillance of the building before carrying out the massacre, authorities said.
The suspect, Audrey Hale, 28, was a former student at the school. Hale did not target specific victims \u2014 among them three 9-year-olds and the head of the school \u2014 but did target \u201cthis school, this church building,\u201d police spokesperson Don Aaron said at a news conference Tuesday.
Hale was under a doctor\u2019s care for an undisclosed emotional disorder and was not known to police before the attack, Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake said at the news conference.
If police had been told that Hale was suicidal or homicidal, \u201cthen we would have tried to get those weapons,\u201d Drake said. \u201cBut as it stands, we had absolutely no idea who this person was or if (Hale) even existed.\u201d
Tennessee does not currently have a \u201cred flag\u201d law, which lets police step in and take firearms away from people who threaten to kill.
On Tuesday night, Tennessee\u2019s governor said one of the victims, 61-year-old substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, was a close friend of his wife, Maria, and that the two had been scheduled to have dinner after Peak taught that day.
\u201cMaria woke up this morning without one of her best friends,\u201d Gov. Bill Lee said, adding that his wife once taught with Peak and another victim, Katherine Koonce, and the women and \u201chave been family friends for decades.\u201d
Hale legally bought seven firearms from five local gun stores, Drake said. Three of them were used in Monday\u2019s shooting. Police spokesperson Brooke Reese said Hale bought the guns between October 2020 and June 2022.
Hale\u2019s parents believed their child had sold one gun and did not own any others, Drake said, adding that Hale \u201chad been hiding several weapons within the house.\u201d
Hale\u2019s motive is unknown, Drake said. In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Drake said investigators don\u2019t know what drove Hale but believe the shooter had \u201csome resentment for having to go to that school.\u201d
Drake, at Tuesday\u2019s news conference, described \u201cseveral different writings by Hale\u201d that mention other locations and The Covenant School.
Asked at a Senate hearing whether the Justice Department would open an investigation into whether the shooting was a hate crime targeting Christians, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said federal officials were working with local police to identify a motive.
Police have released videos of the shooting, including edited surveillance footage that shows the shooter\u2019s car driving up to the school, glass doors being shot out and the shooter ducking through one of them.
Additional video, from Officer Rex Engelbert\u2019s bodycam, shows a woman meeting police outside as they arrive and telling them that all the children were locked down, \u201cbut we have two kids that we don\u2019t know where they are.\u201d
The woman then directs officers to Fellowship Hall and says people inside had just heard gunshots. Three officers, including Engelbert, search rooms one by one, holding rifles and announcing themselves as police.
The video shows officers climbing stairs to the second floor and entering a lobby area, followed by a barrage of gunfire and an officer yelling twice: \u201cGet your hands away from the gun.\u201d Then the shooter is shown motionless on the floor.
Police identified Engelbert, a four-year member of the force, and Michael Collazo, a nine-year member, as the officers who fatally shot Hale. The White House said President Joe Biden spoke Tuesday with Drake, Engelbert and Callazo to thank them for their bravery.
Police response times to school shootings have come under greater scrutiny after the attack in Uvalde, Texas, in which 70 minutes passed before law enforcement stormed the classroom. In Nashville, police said about eight minutes passed from the initial call to when officers arrived at the scene.
Surveillance video shows a time stamp of just before 10:11 a.m., when the attacker shot out the doors. Police said they got the call about a shooter at 10:13. Aaron said in an email Tuesday that dispatch records show officers arrived on campus shortly before 10:22.
At about 10:24, officers engaged the suspect, the chief said during the news conference. Within two minutes of that, the suspect was down, according to the dispatch records.
\u201cThere were police cars that had been hit by gunfire. As officers were approaching the building, there was gunfire going off,\u201d Drake said.
\u201cWe feel, our response right now, from what I\u2019ve seen, I don\u2019t have a particular problem with it. But we always want to get better. We always want to get there in two or three minutes,\u201d he said, adding that traffic was \u201clocked down\u201d at the time.
Traffic was indeed stopped along a nearby two-lane road with a turning lane as police tried to weave their way to the school.
Police have given unclear information on Hale\u2019s gender. For hours Monday, police identified the shooter as a woman. Later in the day, the police chief said Hale was transgender. After the news conference, Aaron declined to elaborate on how Hale identified.
In an email Tuesday, police spokesperson Kristin Mumford said Hale \u201cwas assigned female at birth. Hale did use male pronouns on a social media profile.\u201d Later Tuesday, at the news conference, Drake referred to Hale with female pronouns.
Authorities identified the dead children as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney. The adults were Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.
The website of The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school founded in 2001, lists a Katherine Koonce as the head of the school. Her LinkedIn profile says she has led the school since July 2016. Peak was a substitute teacher, and Hill was a custodian, according to investigators.
Koonce was remembered as someone who would run toward danger, not away from it.
\u201cI guarantee you if there were kids missing (during the shooting), Katherine was looking for them,\u201d friend Jackie Bailey said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s probably how she got in the way \u2014 just trying to do something for somebody else. She would give up her own life in order to save somebody else\u2019s.\u201d
Founded as a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church, the school is in the affluent Green Hills neighborhood just south of downtown Nashville. It has about 200 students from preschool through sixth grade and roughly 50 staff members.
Before Monday\u2019s violence in Nashville, there had been seven mass killings at K-12 schools since 2006 in which four or more people were killed within a 24-hour period, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. In all of them, the shooters were males.
The database does not include school shootings in which fewer than four people were killed, which have become far more common in recent years. Last week alone, for example, school shootings happened in Denver and the Dallas area within two days of each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n