Former student kills three children, three adults at Nashville elementary school; cops gun down attacker

A former student of a Nashville elementary school stormed her alma mater Monday, gunning down three young children and three adults before responding police officers fatally shot her.

Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, attacked the Covenant School, a private Christian institution, with two assault-style rifles and a handgun, local cops said.

In the latest mass shooting to afflict the nation, the student victims — identified as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney — were all just 9 years old.

Katherine Koonce, the 60-year-old head of school, Mike Hill, a 61-year-old custodian, and Cynthia Peak, a 61-year-old substitute teacher, were also killed, Nashville police officer Don Aaron said at a press conference.

“I was literally moved to tears to see this and the kids as they were being ushered out of the building,” said Nashville Police Chief John Drake.

Local police responded to the school in south Nashville after an active shooter call came in at 10:13 a.m., according to Aaron. When officers arrived, the shooter was spraying bullets on the second floor.

The five cops who arrived first on the scene rushed upstairs and engaged Hale, Aaron said. Two officers opened fire and killed her.

Children holding hands walked to safety at a nearby church as police cars surrounded the school.

“People were involuntarily trembling,” said Rachel Dibble, a woman who was at the church at the time. “The children … started their morning in their cute little uniforms, they probably had some Froot Loops and now their whole lives changed today.”

Hale had entered the school by shooting through a side door, according to Aaron. She was dead by 10:27 a.m., 14 minutes after the initial call came in.

At least two of the killer’s three weapons were legally purchased in the Nashville area, Drake said. Officers searched Hale’s home and found a manifesto, a map of the school and evidence that she’d been staking it out.

The contents of the manifesto were not immediately disclosed.

“We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” said Drake. “We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.”

It was a targeted attack, according to the chief.

The Covenant School is a private Presbyterian school for children in preschool through sixth grade. On a typical day, the school has 209 students and 42 staff members inside, Aaron said. All surviving students were escorted from the grounds by faculty and staff.

A responding police officer cut his hand on glass at the scene, but there were no additional injuries, according to Aaron.

President Biden called the shooting a “family’s worst nightmare.”

“It’s ripping at the soul of this nation, ripping at the very soul of this nation,” he told reporters before once again asking Congress to pass an assault weapons ban.

Those cries have gone unanswered for years, including after last May’s massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

Hale’s ties to the Covenant School had echoes of the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., in which a former student fatally shot 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Out of 172 mass public shootings from 1966 to 2021, only four attackers were women, according to the Violence Project, a nonprofit research center. Two of those women acted alongside men in their attacks.

The Violence Project defines a mass public shooting as one that leaves at least four victims dead and takes place in a generally public space, like a school.

Before Monday’s bloodshed, two shootings in 2023 had already met that definition: the Lunar New Year shooting at a dance hall in Southern California, where 11 people were killed, and the Half Moon Bay workplace shooting in Northern California, where severn were fatally shot.

With News Wire Services