At least 3 children and 3 adults dead in Nashville elementary school shooting
Three students and three staff members were among the six victims of a shooting by a former pupil at a school in Nashville, Tennessee, a city in the United States.
Three of the victims were Covenant School students who were nine years old or younger. Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney were identified by the police.
The adult victims were identified as Cynthia Peak, 61, Mike Hill, 61, and Katherine Koonce, 60.
There are roughly 200 students at the private Christian school.
It instructs students from three years old to about twelve.
On that particular day, Ms. Peak was a fill-in instructor at the institution. On Covenant’s website, Ms. Koonce was identified as the Head of School, while Mr. Hill worked as a janitor.
Authorities identified the culprit as transgender individual Audrey Hale, 28.
Hale was shot and killed by police while carrying three weapons, one of which was a semi-automatic rifle.
On Monday morning at 10:13 local time, police got their first report regarding the incident.
The suspect got in by firing through one of the school doors, which were all locked.
Hale moved to the second floor of the building after firing rounds from the ground floor.
Hale opened fire on the approaching police cars from the second floor, hitting one in the windscreen, according to the police.
At 10:27, policemen barged inside and fatally shot the man. Glass fragments injured one police officer.
Police claimed they had “firmly believed” Hale was a former pupil of the school after searching a nearby parked car.
During a check of a nearby house that is listed as the shooter’s address, police met with the attacker’s father.
A manifesto and “a map of how all of this was going to play out,” including entry and departure points at the school building, were discovered there, according to Nashville Police Chief John Drake.
He added that the shooter had been under monitoring as the incident was being planned.
After the incident, parents gathered at a neighboring church to be reunited with their children. As buses of children came, they stretched their heads and hands out of the windows to gesture to their parents, according to the Tennessean newspaper. Just south of downtown Nashville, in the upscale Green Hills neighborhood, is where you’ll find Covenant School, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church.
One student’s mother claimed that the incident had traumatized her kid. We shouldn’t be having these conversations, she continued. We are failing our kids, I say.
By Monday night, the police presence and expanding monument had changed the entryway to Covenant from looking like any other church with a school.
A sign outside advertised the Easter Sunday service schedule and enrollment for a summer program.
“When I heard it, I was unable to finish my task. Mark from south Nashville recalls, “I felt sad and outraged.
I’m honoring the lives lost by bringing flowers, says the speaker.
Nashville Mayor John Cooper issued a statement in which he said that his city had “entered the feared, lengthy list of towns to experience a school shooting.”
The shooting was described as “a family’s worst nightmare” by President Joe Biden.
He urged Congress to enact gun control regulations, saying, “We have to do more to combat gun violence.” It is tearing this country apart from the inside out and tearing apart our neighborhoods.
According to Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit that keeps track of gun violence statistics, the incident was the 129th mass shooting to occur in America in 2023.
Up to the end of last week, 12 school shootings in the US had resulted in fatalities or injuries, according to data collated by Education Week.
