A school somewhere in the United States and someone opens fire on helpless victims. The story, painfully familiar in a country ravaged by an epidemic of gun violence, repeated itself on Monday. Audrey Hale, “a woman who identified as transgender,” according to the police chief, murdered six people at a private religious school in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this morning. The officers shot Hale. Three of the victims are children from the Covenant school where the attack took place, whose students range from preschool through sixth grade (12 years old). The other three deceased are adults.
We are responding to an active attacker at 33 Burton Hills Blvd Covenant School.
We can confirm that we have several patients.
Parents coming to school should go to 20 Burton Hills at this time. This is an active scene.— Nashville Fire Department (@NashvilleFD) March 27, 2023
Hale had studied at this center. According to police, he had plans from school and before embarking on his macabre mission he authored a manifesto, the contents of which were not disclosed by the end of the day.
The names of the dead came slowly. They were provided by Nashville authorities via Twitter around 5:00 p.m. local time. They are Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and nine-year-old William Kinney. Mike Hill, Katherine Koonce and Cynthia Peak were aged between 60 and 61. Koonce was the principal of the school.
Don Aaron, the police officer in charge of updating information to the media that morning, explained that Hale entered the school through a side entrance of the building. He carried at least “two assault rifles and a pistol,” he said. At the time, authorities had not established his identity. They also didn’t know what his motivations might be or if he was related to the school.
When officers showed up at the school in response to an 911 call at 10:13 a.m., they heard gunshots on the second floor, Aaron said. Once at the top, two of the officers opened fire, killing Hale. Only 14 minutes had passed.
Subscribe to EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
subscribe to
The news, which quickly became a national issue, broke in the late morning thanks to a tweet from the country’s central city fire department. “We are responding to an active offender at Covenant School,” it said. The message urged parents not to show up at the scene, where events were “still ongoing.” In the same way, the firefighters later told the parents that a “meeting place” had been set up with their children at a Baptist church near the school. The center has 209 students.
It was the local police account on the same social network that confirmed shortly thereafter that the attacker had died.
A little over an hour later, three children were admitted to Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital in Vanderbilt with gunshot wounds. Doctors could only certify her death, said Craig Boerner, a spokesman for Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
An ambulance left the school after the shooting this Monday Associated Press/LaPresse John Amis (APN)
According to the website of the Gun Violence Archive, a guardian of armed violence in the United States, 129 mass shootings have been recorded in the country since the beginning of the year. The bill is almost 1.5 a day. According to its parameters, a gunfight must cause more than four deaths or injuries to be considered massive. In 2022, the account grew to 647.
The tragedy that devastated the elementary school in the small town of Uvalde, Texas is fresh in the American collective spirit. Then 19 children and two teachers died at the hands of Salvador Ramos, an 18-year-old man from the city. He emerged armed with a pistol and semi-automatic assault rifle and began shooting indiscriminately before being killed by police.
The deadliest shootings so far this year have come in places like Tate County, Mississippi, where a 52-year-old man killed six people; Michigan State University in East Lansing (three dead and five injured) or Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park, both in California, where 18 people died two days apart at the hands of two heavily armed attackers.
Follow all international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.