The 28-year-old woman who shot and killed six people at a Tennessee Christian school was primarily motivated by “notoriety” in the 2023 attack, police concluded in a final investigative report released Wednesday.
Audrey Hale “bore no grudge against the school or staff” of The Covenant School in Nashville on March 27, 2023, when three 9-year-olds and a trio of adults were killed, according to the 48-page Metropolitan Nashville Police Department report.
“In short, the motive determined over the course of the investigation was notoriety,” investigators concluded after two years of examining how and why Hale opened fire.
Police officers shot and killed Hale inside the school.
“Hale longed for her name and actions to be remembered long after she was dead. She wanted absolute control of the narrative surrounding the attack, particularly her motives,” the report says.
“She saw herself as a victim in the attack, and even though at times she saw herself equal to those she would kill, there were occasions she considered herself to be ‘the true victim’ in the attack,” it says.
Police detailed Hale’s minute-by-minute actions that day when she left her house at 8 a.m. CT and went to a gun range, carrying “a duffle bag and backpack, which contained three different firearms, ammunition, and equipment.”
- After she loaded weapons and donned a tactical vest, Hale arrived at the school at 9:53 a.m. and “remained inside her vehicle for the next several minutes and sent a goodbye message to her friend.”
- Hale used an AR pistol to blast into the school at 10:10 a.m. and killed custodian Mike Hill a minute later.
- Hale then killed students Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs and substitute teacher Cynthia Peak at 10:12 a.m.
- The first 911 calls from staff were made at 10:13 a.m., about the time headmaster Katherine Koonce left her office to investigate a fire alarm, set off by the smoke of Hale’s shooting. Koonce was killed a minute later.
- Nashville police arrived at 10:19 a.m., and Hale reached a second-floor lobby minutes later to see officers pulling into the parking lot. Hale “took up a firing position at the window and opened fire on the officers exiting their vehicles, forcing them to take cover.”
- The gunfire helped officers identify Hale’s location, and upon “finding her in the second-floor lobby firing upon police officers, they shot and killed her” at 10:24 p.m.
Police credited school staff members and students for quickly hiding in rooms to prevent even more bloodshed.
“Despite all her research, she never realized schools have developed active killer response plans, which include them barricading within classrooms in a manner which would make it difficult for her to kill others,” the report says. “Once she failed to find easy targets, she appeared to wander the hallways of the building, angry and confused about her lack of success in meeting her goals.”
Police spent the last two years talking to school staff members and those close to Hale, in addition to poring over her devices, writings and online activity.
Hale was fascinated by mass shootings, none more than the attack at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Fourteen people were killed when two students stormed the school near Denver on April 20, 1999, a massacre that has inspired a wave of copycat school shootings.
Shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed themselves at the scene of what was then the deadliest K-12 school shooting in U.S. history.
“Yet even though she reviewed information for every mass killing she could find regardless of their motives or the targets they selected, she kept returning to Columbine as her true source of inspiration,” according to the police report.
“She did extensive research into the offenders, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and considered them worthy of emulation. She focused on how their documented mental health history and societal views were similar to her own and how the notoriety they achieved following their deaths led them to becoming ‘gods,'” it says.
Hale appeared to be a happy middle school student but struggled making the transitions to high school and college as old friends developed new interests and social sets, police said.
At the urging of a therapist, Hale began keeping a journal in 2017; it eventually helped police understand her state of mind.
“From 2018 forward, she began to insert her anger more and more into each entry,” police said. “She began to write ‘rage storms,’ which consisted of long, expletive-filled entries devoted to topics that greatly angered her.”
After the shootings, officers found several stuffed animals in the front seat of Hale’s car.
Police would later conclude that the toys might have been, in Hale’s viewpoint, her only trusted pals.
“Her isolation and loneliness led Hale to begin believing the only true friends she could confide in were her stuffed animals, who she felt would never abandon her,” police said.
“She assigned them names and personalities, took them with her whenever she travelled, and began creating cartoons and digital media, including stories where they demonstrated some of the same emotions she felt,” they said.
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