OAN Staff James Meyers and Brooke Mallory
4:12 PM – Wednesday, April 2, 2025
After an extended waiting period, Nashville police have published their final report on the Covenant School massacre—a deliberate attack in March 2023 on a Christian school by a transgender assailant, resulting in the tragic deaths of three third-grade students and three adult staff members.
Advertisement
The report revealed that the now-deceased shooter, Audrey Hale, 28, a biological woman who identified as a transgender man, going by “he/him” pronouns, had multiple notebooks, art sketchbooks, and computer documents that detailed the future attack plans.
Police noted that Hale had hoped to gain publicity from the tragic shooting, and they also stated that she was clearly inspired by the Columbine school shooting in 1999, as evidenced by her writings.
According to investigators, while she was still alive and in the early stages of planning the attack, Hale had been “fantasizing” about and researching mass shootings since 2017.
A year later, she wrote “detailed fantasies” about shooting up the Isaac T. Creswell Middle Magnet School for the Arts. She also wrote about murdering her father and her psychiatrist.
Additionally, investigators are now seemingly claiming that the previously released manifesto pages, obtained by Steven Crowder, the host of the “Louder with Crowder” podcast, as well as pages that were obtained by the Tennessee Star outlet — were fake.
“Facebook is now censoring the Nashville Manifesto,” Crowder posted in November 2023, and he included a screenshot of a warning he received after attempting to post the content online.
Nevertheless, the authorities’ explanation of their most recent Audrey Hale investigation update continued.
“In this case, a manifesto didn’t exist,” the document claims. “Hale never left behind a single document explaining why she committed the attack, why she specifically targeted The Covenant, and what she hoped to gain, if anything, with the attack.”
However, in June 2024, pages of Hale’s alleged manifesto writings were reported as being obtained by The Tennessee Star outlet. They cited an anonymous source familiar with the investigation.
While shooting down the term “manifesto,” police most recently emphasized that her “motivations” were scrambled across the notebooks, among other writings that investigators found. They revealed an image finding more than two-dozen notebooks seized from Hale’s car and bedroom. They also said she left a suicide note addressed to her parents.
“In short, the motive determined over the course of the investigation was notoriety,” investigators claimed. “Even though numerous disappointments in relationships, career aspirations, and independence fueled her depression, and even though this depression made her highly suicidal, this doesn’t explain the attack. As Hale wrote on several occasions, if suicide was her goal then she would have simply killed herself.”
The shooter wanted people to remember her after her death, according to the document, and was inspired by books and documentaries on the Columbine killers.
“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,” investigators wrote.
Investigators also emphasized that the Covenant School had been attached to a church that Hale once attended before she decided to transition, and she chose the school as a target because of her “connection” to it, since children wouldn’t put up a fight, and because she wanted to gain fame.
However, this “explanation” from the authorities seemingly goes against witness accounts, and remarks said about Hale from students who claimed to have known her.
During the massacre, Hale killed three 9-year-olds: the pastor’s daughter, Hallie Scruggs, another girl named Evelyn Dieckhaus, and a boy named William Kinney. The three adult staffer lives she took were Katherine Koonce, 60, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Mike Hill, 61.
In the report, police also claimed that her biggest worry, while standing at 5-feet-2-inches tall and 120 pounds was being stopped by a “hero” who could overpower her.
Instead, she settled on an elementary school that she described as the setting for her “happiest” childhood memories.
However, this “happiest childhood memories” explanation also goes against Hale’s own parents’ claims, who admitted to the police that their daughter was under a doctor’s care for a severe “emotional disorder.” Nashville Police Chief John Drake spoke about her mental issues at a news conference in 2023.
“Hale’s parents thought their child shouldn’t own any weapons and believed Hale had sold the only gun that Hale owned. They also told police that Hale was under a doctor’s care for an emotional disorder,” NPR reported.
The authorities continued, detailing their “findings.”
“She never remarked of being bullied and ostracized there; on the contrary, she remarked on a couple of occasions how she established friendships, which included play-dates at the homes of other children and a sense of acceptance,” police continued. “She gave no examples of how anyone at the school belittled her or harmed her, as she did in other places she attended school. Because of this, Hale felt The Covenant was the perfect place to commit an attack, as it was the perfect setting for her death.”
Additionally, the shooter had plans for “B” and “C” targets, the Opry Mills Mall and a stretch of Belmont Boulevard near Belmont University campus in Nashville. If her parents were to discover her plans, she decided that she would kill them and attack the Belmont target — according to investigators.
However, the attack was allegedly delayed several times, including once after the death of a close friend in a car accident. Hale, who went by the masculine name “Aiden Williams” in the years before her death, was killed by responding officers during the incident, caught on bodycam video.
“Hale felt she would be a failure if she killed less than 10 people during the attack. In that respect, she did fail, in no small part due to the actions of the faculty and staff at The Covenant,” police wrote. “But she managed to attain the notoriety she craved simply by self-documenting her life and actions in a way no other mass killer has done before.”
Stay informed! Receive breaking news blasts directly to your inbox for free. Subscribe here. https://www.oann.com/alerts
Advertisements below
