The Nashville mass shooter who killed three students and three teachers at an elementary school two years ago was motivated by a desire to become famous, cops wrote in a final report released Wednesday.
Audrey Hale, 28, attended the Covenant School as a child, but loved his time there and “bore no grudge against the school or staff,” Nashville police said in the report.
“Hale considered these years the happiest” of his childhood, according to police. He “felt safe and accepted at The Covenant and made friends with other students.”
Instead, Hale targeted the Covenant School because he previously went there and “would receive more notoriety” since it’s a private Christian school, cops said.
Hale did not write a specific manifesto laying out the entire plot, but he did make copious journal entries from a young age, which “provided a first-person account” of his life. He studied other school shooters, describing the ones who killed the most people and gained the most fame as those worth emulating, investigators said.
Throughout Hale’s teens and 20s, he described extensive mental health issues in his journals but hid them from his family, his counselors, his therapist and everyone else in his life.
Hale wrote several times that if suicide was his goal, he simply would’ve killed himself, according to police. However, he also sought notoriety and was particularly focused on Columbine school shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who he considered “gods.”
Nashville school shooting
AP In this screen grab from surveillance video tweeted by the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, Audrey Elizabeth Hale points an assault-style weapon inside The Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn., on March 27, 2023.
Throughout Hale’s journals, he had a single-minded focus on fame and made all decisions with that in mind, investigators said. He wanted to inspire books, documentaries and movies about his attack.
Hale “managed to attain the notoriety [he] craved simply by self-documenting [his] life and actions in a way no other mass killer has done before,” Nashville police wrote.
However, there’s an ongoing legal battle over the complete release of Hale’s writings. The victims’ families have argued the journals should remain sealed. So far the courts have agreed, saying the journals risk inspiring copycat killers.
Cops concluded Hale acted entirely alone, and no one else could be held criminally responsible for the shooting. Responding officers killed Hale at the scene.
