New Journals Show Covenant School Killer’s Mental Collapse Was a ‘Slow Motion Train Wreck,’ Pappert Says

Kaitlin Housler
Tom Pappert

Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, described the mental deterioration of Covenant School killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale as a “slow motion train wreck,” citing newly released journal entries that shed further light on Hale’s psychological decline leading up to the 2023 attack.

Last week, the FBI released a new series of writings by Hale, the transgender shooter who claimed the lives of six at the Covenant School in Nashville on March 27, 2023.

Pappert, who continues to review the approximately 800 pages of Hale’s writings obtained so far by The Star, said the latest writings of Hale’s that have been released detail the killer’s struggles with loneliness and rejection during her teenage years.

On Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Pappert pointed to Hale’s 2018 journal in which she wrote about a male voice in her head, encouraging her to identify as a lesbian and eventually as transgender.

By 2019, Pappert explained that Hale was writing openly about suicide, a desire to commit a school shooting, and intentions to kill her father – citing grievances that ranged from what he ate to his political views with regard to Donald Trump.

“This third journal has the 2019 journal entries where Audrey Hale is talking about suicide. She’s talking about a school shooting. She’s talking about killing her father,” Pappert explained.

“Hale wrote two journal entries discussing her father and it’s just really a litany of grievances against him: ‘He goes to the bathroom too much. I don’t like what he eats. He doesn’t work hard enough. He doesn’t pay my school tuition on time.’ But then she hones in on one specific complaint, and that is he watches Donald Trump content on the internet. She calls the talking heads ‘ear infection creators.’ This seems to be one of the key complaints about her father in the months leading up to her commitment, where she said, again, allegedly that she wanted to kill him,” he added.

Pappert went on to criticize the mental health system for failing to intervene considering Hale’s behavior despite multiple evaluations she had undergone for psychological crises and an eating disorder, questioning how any individual so disturbed was able to avoid long-term institutional care, even after expressing violent thoughts to mental health professionals.

“Mental health professionals did try to intervene, but the question I keep coming back to is what was wrong with their process? How did this person manage to avoid the scrutiny of these medical professionals? She was evaluated three times – twice for mental health crises and once because of an eating disorder – and the only time she ever really had an inpatient extended, like more than a week encounter with mental health professionals, my understanding is from this eating disorder,” Pappert said.

Ultimately, Pappert said he sees the Covenant tragedy not only as a mass shooting, but as the preventable result of years of untreated mental illness with regard to Hale.

“To me, that is the real story here. Yes, this is a horrible, heartbreaking tragedy for those six people who died, but also for this young girl who was unable to get help even as she kept appearing at medical institutions begging for it,” he said.

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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.

 

 

 

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