New body cam, surveillance videos show police gunning down Nashville school shooter
Bodycam video and surveillance footage recorded at the Nashville elementary school where six people were fatally shot revealed an eerie calm in the moments before the mass shooting began — and the massacre’s violent end.
The swift and decisive response by Nashville police has drawn sharp contrast with the actions of law enforcement who responded to a deadly shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022 that claimed the lives of 19 students and two educators.
Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said they first received calls about the shooter — identified by authorities as 28-year-old Audrey Hale — at around 10:13 a.m. local time. When authorities arrived on the scene, they could hear shots ringing out from the second floor of the school.
The footage released Tuesday shows some officers clearing classrooms on the first floor while others race upstairs, where they are immediately met with gunfire. The six-minute video compiles clips from a camera worn by Officer Rex Engelbert, who returns fire.
Police said Hale was pronounced dead just 15 minutes after they received a call about the shooting.
The newly released footage also includes video from a camera worn by Officer Michael Collazo.
“We’ve got one down,” he says, before rounding the corner and exiting the stairwell.
Collazo can also be seen firing four shots at Hale before saying: “Suspect down, suspect down,”
On Monday night, MNPD released approximately two minutes of edited clips taken from security cameras in and around the Covenant School. It starts with the shooter driving a Honda Fit through campus shortly before 10 a.m., authorities said in a statement.
Around 10 minutes later, the video shows Hale shooting the glass out of the school’s front door. Sporting a red baseball cap and camouflage pants, Hale climbs through the hole. The shooter was armed with two assault-style rifles and a handgun, according to authorities.
Once inside, Hale slowly stalks through hallways, entering and exiting different rooms.
Three 9-year-old students, identified by authorities as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, and three adults — Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61— were killed in the massacre.
Koonce was Covenant’s head of school, Hill was a custodian.
With News Wire Services
