The suspect who killed three children and three adults at a Nashville elementary school was filmed by the school’s surveillance cameras, footage released by the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department on Monday.
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We can see Audrey Hale shooting through the glass doors of “The Covenant School”, to enter it 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 goes around the place without being intercepted.
She does not meet anyone on the images of the surveillance cameras made public.
Light flashes are visible, suggesting that an alarm has been triggered.
The author of the bloodbath, a former student, killed three children and three adults.
She was quickly killed by officers who arrived at the scene.
She was identified by police as a 28-year-old transgender person, going by the name Audrey Hale.
The assailant, who was in possession of school maps showing entrances and exits and left a “manifesto” discovered at his home, was “prepared with a confrontation with law enforcement”, told the press Nashville Police Chief John Drake.
Well-prepared attack
In an interview with NBC News, the police chief added that the suspect was likely planning a larger attack, with his letter “stating that there were going to be shootings at multiple locations, 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, armed with two assault rifles and a pistol, shooting through a glass door.
He headed for the first floor of this establishment, which he had attended as a student, firing numerous shots and killing three children, aged 8 to 9, and three adults, aged 60 at 61 years old.
The name of one of the victims, identified as Katherine Koonce, matches that of the school principal.
Quickly dispatched to the scene, officers immediately shot him dead and he was pronounced dead a quarter of an hour 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 a church to pick up the sheltered children.
On Monday evening, flowers were laid at a makeshift memorial outside the facility, where some people knelt in prayer.
Resentment towards 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, The New York Times reported. One of the children killed, the US newspaper said, was Hallie Scruggs, the daughter of church pastor 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 pleaded for the American Parliament to prohibit, or at least restrict, the possession of these weapons designed to cause a maximum number of victims, but he comes up against 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 firearms are in circulation in the 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 in a high school in Parkland, Florida, had led to a vast mobilization.
But Congress never passed meaningful reforms, fiercely opposed by the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) lobby group.
Joe Biden’s calls to ban assault rifles are hardly more likely to succeed. An ABC News/Washington Post poll from February showed that 51% of Americans oppose it and only 47% support it.