Nashville School Shooting: Police Say Perpetrator Carefully Plotted Attack That Killed Six

By Staff, Agencies

A former student killed three children and three adults at a Christian elementary school in Nashville on Monday, armed with two “assault-style” weapons and a handgun after elaborately planning the massacre by drawing a detailed map and conducting surveillance of the building, police said.

Nashville chief of police John Drake told NBC News the shooter had planned to attack several different places, saying a manifesto belonging to the suspect “indicates that there was going to be shootings at multiple locations, and the school was one of them.”

Drake said investigators believed the shooting stemmed from “some resentment” the suspect harbored “for having to go to that school” as a younger person.

The shooting at the Covenant school in Nashville was the latest in a series of mass shootings in a country that has grown increasingly unnerved by bloodshed in schools.

Officers shot and killed the attacker at the Covenant school, which is attached to the Covenant Presbyterian church in the Tennessee state capital.

Nashville police identified the victims as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, all nine years old; Cynthia Peak, a substitute teacher, aged 61; Katherine Koonce, aged 60; and Mike Hill, a custodian, aged 61.

The website of school, a Presbyterian establishment founded in 2001, lists Katherine Koonce as the head of the school. Her LinkedIn online profile says she has led the school since July 2016.

The shooter was named as Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, and from Nashville.

The shooting was just the latest such horrific event. Last May, in Uvalde, Texas, 19 children and two teachers were killed at an elementary school. More recently, a six-year-old shot his teacher in Virginia and a high-school student in Colorado shot two administrators.

According to the K-12 School Shooting Database resource, there have been at least 89 instances of gun violence at kindergarten through 12th-grade schools or during school activities in the US this year.

The Nashville shooting was the 128th US mass shooting this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one where at least four people are wounded or killed, not counting the attacker.

The Covenant School has about 209 students from pre-school through sixth grade and 42 staff members, Aaron said. A woman whose mother teaches at the school told reporters they texted as the attack took place.

In 2020, guns overtook auto accidents as the leading cause of death among children and teens.