Transgender Nashville shooter Audrey Hale spent years preparing for attack that killed 6 at Christian school
Nashville police have released their final report on the Covenant School massacre – a targeted March 2023 attack on a Christian school by a transgender shooter who killed three third-graders and three adults.Rather than a highly anticipated manifesto, the report found that killer Audrey Hale left behind numerous notebooks, art books and computer documents about her plans to commit the attack and gain notoriety, partly inspired by the Columbine school shooting in 1999.Hale, the 28-year-old attacker and biological female, began “fantasizing” about and researching mass shootings as far back as 2017, according to investigators.A year later, she wrote “detailed fantasies” about shooting up the Isaac T.
Creswell Middle Magnet School for the Arts, killing her father and killing her psychiatrist. “In this case, a manifesto didn’t exist,” the document reads.“Hale never left behind a single document explaining why she committed the attack, why she specifically targeted The Covenant, and what she hoped to gain, if anything, with the attack.”Instead, her motivations were scattered across those many notebooks and other writings, investigators found.
They included an image showing more than two-dozen notebooks seized from Hale’s car and bedroom.They also said she left a suicide note addressed to her parents.“In short, the motive determined over the course of the investigation was notoriety,” according to investigators.
“Even though numerous disappointments in relationships, career aspirations, and independence fueled her depression, and even though this depression made her highly suicidal, this doesn’t explain the attack.As Hale wrote on several occasions, if suicide was her goal then she would have simply killed herself.”Hale wanted people to remember her after her death, according to the document, and was partly inspired by books and documentaries on the Columbine killers.
She wanted similar records of her own life and expected her guns, a...