NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The shooter behind the 2023 Nashville elementary school attack that killed six people, including three children, had been obsessively planning it for years while hiding mental health issues from family and doctors, a police report released Wednesday reveals.
The nearly 50-page investigative case summary includes long-sought-after details of the shooting at the Christian, private Covenant School, many of which had been tied up in a lengthy legal battle over whether the shooter’s writings should be publicly released. At least some of the documents have been leaked, and while Wednesday’s report closes the Metro Police’s probe into the March 2023 shooting, the fight over what else should be released — concerning that attack and others — is ongoing.
The investigation found that no manifesto existed. Instead, the 28-year-old shooter, Audrey Hale, left behind “a series of notebooks, art composition books, and media files created by Hale,” documenting plans and preparation for the attack, as well as life events and other motivations, police determined. Hale, who once attended Covenant, was killed by police.
Hale wanted to kill at least 40 people, hoping to inspire books, documentaries and movies, have the weapons placed in museums and his bedroom preserved as a memorial, police found.
Hale sometimes used male pronouns, but the police report uses female pronouns, citing a state law definition of “sex” as “determined by anatomy and genetics existing at the time of birth.” Police said Hale identified as male.
The report acknowledges but dismisses longstanding speculation that those who helped and treated Hale’s mental health disorders could be criminally culpable for not intervening before the shooting.
The report says Hale’s parents and therapist had been concerned about his mental health for years. Psychological assessments conducted by Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2019 and 2021 concluded Hale wasn’t suffering from psychosis and recommended outpatient treatment.
“It’s well documented in the material Hale left behind she had no intention of ever telling her providers everything she was experiencing, no matter how harmful,” the report states.
“She had enough experience with the mental healthcare system to understand which topics to avoid with her providers and how to manipulate them into believing her documented issues with homicidal and suicidal ideations were well in her past,” it says.
Police found that as Hale’s parents and therapists became more concerned, Hale became more manipulative. At one point Hale “seriously considered and planned to kill her mother to prevent her attack plans from being foiled, despite her strong emotional attachment to her mother,” according to the report.
Hale selected The Covenant School for a few reasons, police said. He feared he would be overpowered and the staff and students there would likely not put up much of a fight. He figured he would gain notoriety for attacking a Christian school. And, he had happy memories of the school, the report found.
“Hale often remarked her time at The Covenant was the happiest she was during her childhood education,” police wrote.
Police also dismissed speculation about racial, religious or economic motives in the shooting.
“It is certainly true she raged over these topics at times in her writings,” the report says. “But none of those motives impacted her decision to attack The Covenant.”
The report says Hale researched other shooting locations, including highly traveled roads and shopping malls.
Beginning as early as 2018, Hale planned an attack on Creswell Middle, a Nashville public school that Hale attended after Covenant. Hale created detailed plans including a timeline. However, by March of 2020, Hale started to have doubts about the target. Most of Creswell’s students were Black and Hale worried about being labeled a racist, though he 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.
