Audrey Hale didn’t care that The Covenant School was a Christian school.
The 28-year-old woman wanted to kill children and get famous, Nashville police have concluded after a two-year criminal investigation into the March 2023 shooting that left three students and three staff members dead.
Detectives examined 16 notebooks with 1,299 pages of Hale’s writing, including to-do lists, journal entries detailing daily activities, and expletive-filled diatribes that Hale called “rage storms,” according to the investigative report that police released publicly on Wednesday. They looked at eight thumb drives, seven sketchbooks, six cellphones, three laptops, two Google Drive accounts, and a dozen video recordings, some of them up to 40 minutes long.
Investigators did not find a manifesto laying out the motives for the school shooting. But after reviewing all the data and documents that the shooter left behind, they were able to say with confidence that they could explain Hale’s reason for committing mass murder.
“She felt by ‘killing a bunch of children’ she would no longer be ignored,” the report says. “She openly acknowledged none of those she would kill were guilty of anything and denied any personal motivation for targeting them. She felt their deaths were necessary to give her death meaning.”
Hale identified as a lesbian and sometimes used masculine pronouns. Tennessee law requires officials recognize only the gender identity corresponding to a person’s biological sex. Hale had not taken steps to transition medically, police said.
In the days after the shooting, some commentators claimed Hale was likely motivated by gender ideology.
“The modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists,” the popular right-wing YouTuber Benny Johnson said on X. “These are straight facts.”
The hashtag #TransTerrorism trended on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, and several politicians and political commentators aligned with Donald Trump picked up the issue.
“Maybe, rather than talking about guns we should be talking about lunatics pushing their gender affirming bulls— on our kids?” the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. said. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene agreed, tweeting, “Everyone can stop blaming guns now.”
JD Vance, who would go on to become vice president, argued the incident called for “a lot of soul searching on the extreme left”—“if early reports are accurate that a trans shooter targeted a Christian school.”
Police now say those early reports were not accurate. Hale did not target the Christian school because it was Christian or fantasize about attacking conservative Christians specifically.
Hale attended The Covenant School, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America, from kindergarten through fourth grade and always recalled the experience with fondness. Hale’s journals and “rage storms” do not contain any allegations of emotional or physical abuse at the private school, and investigators found no evidence of disciplinary problems or even serious conflict with the staff and administration.
According to police, “Hale considered these years the happiest of her childhood.”
Hale originally planned to attack a public middle school about nine miles away. Hale attended Isaiah T. Creswell Middle School of the Arts from the ages of 10 to 15 and found it difficult to make friends there. When Hale did get close to girls on the basketball team—experiencing romantic feelings for some of them—the older girls graduated and moved away, leaving Hale lonely, depressed, and increasingly angry, the investigators’ report said.
Hale became fascinated with school shootings in 2017, and started watching documentaries and doing additional research on different attacks. The following year, Hale began to develop plans to shoot children at Creswell Middle.
Hale had second thoughts, though. The journals and notebooks record concerns that an attack on the middle school would be perceived as racist since many of the students were Black.
Hale considered other targets. Detectives found research on four additional schools: another private Christian school, a private school with no religious commitments, and two public high schools. Hale also looked at the possibility of committing a mass shooting at Green Hills Mall, Opry Mills Mall, Belmont Boulevard just south of Belmont University, and several busy interchanges in Nashville and the suburb of Mount Juliet.
Hale’s priority, according to investigators, was killing children and becoming a “god.” Hale was inspired by the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, which happened when Hale was four, and came to idolize the perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. They became godlike, Hale believed, through the notoriety achieved through killing.
“She likewise … focused on the notoriety she would attain during a mass killing,” Nashville police concluded. “She sought to become a ‘god’ like Harris and Klebold by killing victims nobody would forget: children.”
The Christian school had children the age that Hale wanted to kill and was remote enough that police response time might be slower than it would be at Creswell Middle or a busy interchange on Interstate 40. Hale also thought that Christians would be less likely to fight back, since their faith makes them “meek and afraid.”
And Hale was drawn to an idea of autobiographical symmetry that death at The Covenant School could provide.
“Hale often remarked her time at The Covenant was the happiest she was during her childhood education,” police said. “Hale felt The Covenant was the perfect place to commit an attack, as it was the perfect setting for her death.”
Hale entered the school on March 27, 2023, carrying an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and two 9 mm pistols. The 28-year-old fired 152 bullets in 14 minutes, including five through a stained-glass window depicting Adam and Eve naked in the Garden of Eden, at peace with the world around them.
Hale killed Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney, and Hallie Scruggs, all nine-year-olds in the third grade, and custodian Michael Hill, principal Katherine Koonce, and substitute teacher Cynthia Peak.
Police found Hale on the second floor of the lobby of the school, shooting through a window. One officer fired at Hale from behind with a rifle. Another fired a 9 mm pistol. The bullets were fatal.
The Nashville shooting was one of 349 at American schools in 2023. But Hale, who had frequently fantasized about being the subject of future documentaries, books, and even museum exhibits, died hoping to become famous, according to police.
“Hale demonstrated a high degree of narcissism,” the report says.
Families of the victims called the report “bleak” in a statement, but said it reflected the reality they’ve been living with for two years.
“This was truly a senseless crime,” the families said, “committed by a deranged, selfish, evil individual who relished the killing of innocent children.”
