NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The shooter behind the 2023 Nashville elementary school attack that killed six people, including three children, had been planning it for years while hiding their mental health issues from medical providers and hoping the carnage would bring notoriety and fame, a report released Wednesday reveals.
The nearly 50-page investigative case summary by Metro Nashville Police closes the agency’s probe into the shooting at the Christian, private Covenant School in March 2023.
The investigation found that no manifesto existed. Instead, the shooter, Audrey Hale, left behind “a series of notebooks, art composition books, and media files created by Hale documenting her planning and preparation for the attack, the events in her life that motivated her to commit the attack, and her hopes regarding the outcome of the attack,” police determined. Hale, who once attended Covenant, was killed by police.
Hale sometimes used male pronouns, but the police report uses female pronouns.
The report says Hale researched other shooting locations, including highly traveled roads and shopping malls.
By December 2018, Hale also began planning an attack at a different middle school where they had once been a student, the report says. But Hale worried about being labeled a racist because a large portion of that school’s student population was Black, though Hale had “no qualms about killing anyone regardless of specific demographical categories,” police wrote.
The people killed in the shooting at Covenant were: Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, all 9 years old; Cynthia Peak, 61; Katherine Koonce, 60; and Mike Hill, 61.
