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The videos were taken by the body cameras of two officers of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department and show the police raid that ended with the death of Audrey Elizabeth Hale, perpetrator of the shooting inside a private Christian school. The shooter identified as a transgender man and wrote a “manifesto” prior to committing the massacre.
The six-minute images show a police team outside the school preparing their raid to stop the shooting inside the institution. Security forces are later seen entering the building and securing every classroom in the school.
“The children are all locked up, but we have two children that we don’t know where they are…”, an alleged school teacher mentions to officer Rex Engelbert, as can be seen in the video taken from his body camera.
Moments after the police search inside the Coventant School began, officers went up to the second floor of the building upon hearing gunshots. It is on the second floor that they find Hale and the images show the armed confrontation between both parties that ends with the death of the shooter.
Hale was armed with an assault rifle and a 9mm handgun with which he entered the building after shooting a front window.
Images taken from the school’s security camera show the suspect entering the building, wearing a black bulletproof vest and a red cap, then progressing through the corridors as the school’s alarms sounded.
The shooting had a balance of six fatalities, three children part of the student body and three adult members of the school community of the institution.
A “manifesto” foresaw the tragedy
Nashville authorities, in conjunction with FBI agents, report having collected multiple pieces of evidence about Hale’s plans. Among them, a text detailing the reasons for the shooting and a handmade map of the school.
The head of the Nashville Police Department, John Drake, commented to local media that the text found “indicates that there were going to be shootings in multiple places and that the school was one of them.”
Drake also commented that the research team believes Hale “had some resentment about having to go to that school when he was little.”
Active shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, drove this Honda Fit to the Covenant Church/school campus this morning and parked. MNPD detectives searched for it and found additional material written by Hale. pic.twitter.com/ftGX74ecKr
— Metro Nashville PD (@MNPDNashville) March 28, 2023
Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, identified with male pronouns on her social media. She was a student of the Covenant College as a child and although she had premeditated the attack on the educational institution, her exact motives have not been revealed as of yet.
90 school shootings in the United States so far in 2023
According to information from the K-12 Shooting Database, the tragedy at Covenant School marks the 90th school shooting on US soil this year alone. The same source collected 303 incidents with a firearm within school institutions in 2022, a historical peak since 1970.
The United States has a serious problem with massacres in the country’s educational institutions. In reaction to Monday’s event, President Joe Biden called on US congressmen to toughen gun control laws.
With Reuters and AP
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