Nashville school shooting: CCTV footage released

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The suspect who killed three children and three adults at a Nashville elementary school was captured on school surveillance cameras, footage released by the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department on Monday.

Audrey Hale can be seen shooting through the glass doors of The Covenant School, entering with her assault weapon in hand. 

Just before, we see her arriving in the school parking lot, passing very close to a park crowded with children.

The shooter is wearing camouflage pants, a tactical jacket over a white t-shirt, a red cap and goggles. 

She walks at first with a rather nonchalant step and tour of the premises without being intercepted. 

She does not meet anyone on the images of the surveillance cameras made public. 

Light flashes are visible, which suggests that an alarm was raised.

The author of the bloodbath, a former student, killed three children and three adults.

She was quickly killed by officers who arrived on the scene.

She was identified by police as a 28-year-old transgender person, going by the name of Audrey Hale.

The assailant, who was in possession of school maps indicating entrances and exits and who left a “manifesto” discovered at her home, was “prepared for a confrontation with the police”, said to the press Nashville Police Chief John Drake.

Well-planned attack

In an interview with NBC News, the police chief added that the suspect was likely planning a larger attack, with her letter “indicating there were going to be shootings in multiple places, one of which was the school”.

The assailant entered a small private Christian school in the capital of Tennessee, The Covenant School, in the middle of the morning, equipped with two assault rifles and a pistol, firing through a glass door.

She made her way to the first floor of this establishment, which she had attended as a student, firing numerous shots and killing three children, aged 8 to 9, and three adults, aged 60. at 61.

The name of one of the victims, identified as Katherine Koonce, matches that of the principal of the school.

Quickly dispatched to the scene, officers immediately shot her dead and she was pronounced dead fifteen minutes after the first call for help, according to police spokesman Don Aaron.

During the assault, one of the teachers managed to call her daughter. “She told me she was hiding in a closet and it was shooting everywhere,” Avery Myrick told local channel WSMV4.

Anxious parents marched all day through church to collect the children from the shelter.

On Monday evening, flowers were laid at a makeshift memorial outside the facility, where some people knelt in prayer.

Grudge against the school?

The motive, still unknown, could be linked to a “grudge” against this school, noted John Drake.

The school, founded by the local Presbyterian church, is housed on its premises, reported the New York Times. One of the children killed, says the American newspaper , was Hallie Scruggs, the daughter of the pastor of the church, Chadd Scruggs.

President Joe Biden expressed his dismay at the “repugnant” crime and ordered that the White House flags be flown at half-mast.

Gun violence “rips at the very soul of our nation,” he commented, calling again on Congress to ban assault rifles.

The Democratic president has long advocated for the U.S. Parliament to ban – or at least restrict – the possession of these weapons designed to make a maximum of victims, but it stumbles on the refusal of the opposition.

“I am devastated and heartbroken over the tragic news from the Covenant School,” tweeted Republican Senator Bill Hagerty.

About 400 million guns are in circulation in the states United States, where in 2020 they caused more than 45,000 deaths by suicide, accident or homicide, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC).

For the first time that year, guns became the leading cause of death among young people aged 1 to 19, with 4,368 deaths, ahead of car accidents and overdoses, according to the CDC.

Bloodbaths in schools represent only a tiny portion, but mark the spirits more.

Killings in schools

The United States was particularly shaken by the carnage committed in 2012 in a school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut (20 children killed), and in May 2022 in Uvalde, Texas (19 children and two teachers).

Between these two tragedies, a massacre committed in 2018 at a high school in Parkland, Florida, led to a vast mobilization.

But Congress never adopted any significant reforms , fiercely opposed by the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) lobby group.

Joe Biden's calls to ban assault rifles are little more likely to succeed. go. An ABC News/Washington Post poll from February showed that 51% of Americans oppose it and only 47% support it.