The transgender school shooter who gunned down nine people in an attack on the Covenant School in Nashville in 2023 picked her target because she feared being overpowered and thought the little kids at the school couldn’t stop her, a disturbing report from police shows.
Audrey Hale — a Nashville woman who identified as male — was terrified a “hero” might intervene and disarm her when she opened fire in the long-planned attack, so she chose the Christian elementary school, which was full of victims she felt would be least likely to fight back, according to an in-depth analysis of Hale’s diaries and other writings by investigators.
The report also found that Hale was motivated by her own mental illness and a desire for fame.
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“Most disturbingly, she wanted the things she left behind to be shared with the world so she could inspire and teach others who were ‘mentally disordered’ like her to plan and commit an attack of their own,” the report said.
In her March 2023 attack on the Covenant School, where Hale used a 9mm carbine to gun down three 9-year-olds – Hallie Scruggs, William Kinney and Evelyn Dieckhaus – along with three faculty members – 60-year-old school head Lathering Koonce, substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, 61, and custodian Mike Hill, also 61.
Hale specifically chose the Covenant School to attack because she’d attended as a child herself and had happy memories from her time there.
She also believed the school’s religious affliliation would further make her sickening crime even more famous, according to the rerport.
“Because of this, Hale felt The Covenant was the perfect place to commit an attack, as it was the perfect setting for her death,” the report, released Wednesday by the Metro Nashville Police, read.
She left behind 16 notebooks filled with barely-coherent raging screeds dating back to August 2017. Investigators found that Hale was obsessed with the Columbine shooters and hoped to gain notoriety with a massacre over her own.
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Among her hopes for the shooting were that the guns she used would be placed in a museum, her “writings” published, and that her bedroom would be preserved as a memorial – all of which she hoped would inspire future shooters.
Hale was insistent that she was autistic, though numerous psychological assessments reviewed by police concluded that she was not – only that she was “highly depressed” and suicidal.
Plans to carry out a shooting began fomenting around 2018 when she first targeted Creswell Middle School — which she’d also attended – but she abandoned that plan over fears she might be perceived as racist because of the school’s large minority population.
Over the next few years she legally purchased guns, planned and cancelled several shootings at local schools, malls, colleges and busy intersections before finally settling on the Covenant School as a target.
Hale hoped to kill upwards of 40 people in the shooting and felt she would be a “failure” if she amassed fewer than 10 victims, the report found.
She was shot dead by police within 15 minutes of opening fire at the school.
