Nashville Police said that Audrey Hale, 28, left behind notebooks, art books, and documents about her plot to attack the Covenant School. Hale, a female, was in part inspired by the 1999 Columbine mass shooting, according to the report.
The police department made mention of a highly anticipated manifesto but said that “in this case, a manifesto didn’t exist.”
“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,” the report stated.
“No single document, notebook, or digital device contains the answer to those questions. The answer is scattered throughout all the assembled material.”
Hale opened fire at the Covenant School “due to the notoriety she would obtain” and also “because she had a personal connection to the school from earlier in her life and felt she had to die somewhere that made her happy,” according to the report.
On March 27, 2023, Hale entered the school with a rifle and shot and killed six people before police shot and killed her inside the building. The murder victims were Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, all 9 years old; Cynthia Peak, 61; Katherine Koonce, 60; and Mike Hill, 61.
“Notoriety was the motive,” the report summary stated. “It is known that Hale, and other mass shooters, studied material from Columbine High School prior to committing their attacks.”
Authorities described Hale as female in the report, stating further that she “identified as a male and used he/him as preferred pronouns.“ However, the report stated, ”Under Tennessee law, a person’s gender identity must correspond with their biological sex or with information present on their certificate of live birth.”
Hale had researched other shooting locations, including highly traveled roads and shopping malls, according to the report. By December 2018, Hale also began planning an attack at a different middle school where she had once been a student, according to the report.
However, Hale worried about being labeled a racist because a large portion of that school’s student population was black, even though Hale had “no qualms about killing anyone regardless of specific demographical categories,” police stated.
Hale’s parents and a therapist attempted to help her, but she did not tell them anything about her plans to carry out a mass shooting, according to the report. Investigators also determined that she was sane.
Based on her notebooks, “Hale chronicled that she withheld information from providers to prevent her from being stopped,” the authorities said.
Hale’s issues with career aspirations and various relationships “fueled her depression, and even though this depression made her highly suicidal, this doesn’t explain the attack,” the report stated.
“As Hale wrote on several occasions, if suicide was her goal then she would have simply killed herself,” the report stated. “Throughout the writings and videos, Hale frequently commented that her death needed to matter and be remembered.”
