The female transgender Nashville Christian school shooter reportedly changed her plans to avoid looking racist.
Audrey Hale was a 28-year-old woman pretending to be a man who shot up the Covenant Christian elementary school and killed six innocent people — three nine-year-old children and three adults — on March 27, 2023. According to a report released by the Nashville Metropolitan Police Department (NMPD), Hale initially planned to attack a different school: Creswell Middle School, which she attended and supposedly came away emotionally distressed.
The report began by falsely claiming that no manifesto for Hale’s attack existed:
🧵 / BREAKING: @FoxNews reports @MNPDNashville released its final report on the 2023 Nashville Covenant School Shooting in which the department states:
"… a manifesto didn't exist."
This is total bullsh*t. We read the manifesto, live, after we obtained it exclusively from an… https://t.co/Fq8hY93LxN pic.twitter.com/PDEalyw9On
— Steven Crowder (@scrowder) April 2, 2025
It then went on to discussing her initial attack plans.
“She drew a map from her memories of the layout of the school,” NMPD wrote in the report, referring to Creswell Middle School. “In the map, she specified the locations of classrooms, common areas, and where the entrances and exits were located. She outlined how she would progress through the school, who she would target and in what sequence, and where she would commit suicide within the school once she was done. Knowing access to the interior of the school was highly restricted during school hours, she detailed an elaborate plan to enter the school without being stopped or detected so she could begin her attack with the element of surprise.”
Hale was reportedly planning this attack during the first six months of 2019, with NMPD reporting: “Her OCD was manifest during this time with the excruciating detail she gave to the attack, including precise timelines, detailed descriptions of the clothing she would wear, and the specific route she would progress through the school. The more she pored over the details, the more convinced she was of her own success. The ‘rage storms’ that interspersed these plans also became more heated, showing Hale’s anger was reaching the boiling point.”
The police report stated that Hale extensively agonized over her plan, as she wanted to become a “god” like she believed that her idols, the Columbine killers, were. The shooter reportedly wanted to follow in their footsteps “by killing victims nobody would forget: children.”
However, Hale’s plans began to change in March 2020, as she realized that Creswell Middle School had a significant portion of black students, and she worried that she would be perceived as racist for carrying out the attack — which would ruin her chances of pushing whatever deranged message she wanted to push.
“Hale began to express doubts about targeting Creswell Middle,” NMPD reported. “Her doubts weren’t necessarily about the intention to kill children, but more about the racial demographics of the school. Hale knew a large portion of the student body was black. Though she had no qualms about killing anyone regardless of specific demographical categories, she worried she might be branded as a racist, which would remove her ability to give the motive and reasoning for the attack and [instead] allow others to choose it for her once she was dead.”
Nonetheless, Hale continued to plan to attack Creswell Middle School until finally changing her mine on April 8, 2021, instead shifting her attack plans to Covenant Christian school — as the shooter believed that the elementary school was a better target. According to NMPD, Hale had three reasons behind the shift: “(1) [It] was more geographically isolated than Creswell Middle, which she felt would give her more time to kill; (2) … being a private Christian school, she would receive more notoriety; and (3) due to the student body at Creswell Middle being predominantly black, she was afraid she would be seen as a racist.”
"Based on this analysis, she chose The Covenant as the better target for three reasons: (1) The Covenant was more geographically isolated than Creswell Middle, which she felt would give her more time to kill; (2) with The Covenant being a private Christian school, she would… pic.twitter.com/U709UmtLdC
— Steven Crowder (@scrowder) April 2, 2025
Apparently, just the chance that she could have been labeled as racist was enough for Hale to shift her focus to even younger victims at a Christian school — even though the shooter reportedly characterized her years at the Covenant school as “the happiest of her childhood.”
From the Covenant investigation case file, an interesting anecdote about Hale leaving Covenant School (the best years of her life) to go to a public school which cratered her self-esteem. pic.twitter.com/02F2DyVw4M
— Virgil Davis Hunt (@vrgldh) April 2, 2025
