A heavily armed former student shot through a locked school door before killing three children and three staff members at a private Christian campus in Nashville on Monday, authorities said.
In addition to the three 9-year-old students, the 28-year-old attacker fatally wounded a custodian, a substitute teacher and the head of school before being killed by responding officers, Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake said.
Audrey Hale had planned extensively for the violence at The Covenant School on Burton Hills Boulevard, police said.
“There were maps drawn of the school, in detail of surveillance, entry points,” Drake said.
The shooter, who was killed on the school’s second floor, had two “assault-type rifles and a handgun,” an official said.
The three students killed were Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, police tweeted.
Substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, 61, school head Katherine Koonce, 60, and custodian Mike Hill, 61, were also killed, police said. Koonce is a Vanderbilt University graduate who had a doctorate in education, according to the school’s website.
Students of the school, which serves preschool students through sixth graders, were bused to Woodmont Baptist Church, 2 miles away, where they were reunited with their parents.
President Joe Biden called Monday’s attack “heartbreaking” and a “family’s worst nightmare.”
“We have to do more to stop gun violence,” he said. “It’s ripping our communities apart, ripping the soul of this nation — ripping at the very soul of the nation. And we — we have to do more to protect our schools so they aren’t turned into prisons.”
But Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., told reporters that no laws — existing or proposed — could have stopped the attack.
(Source nbcnews)
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