Despite a Tennessee Supreme Court decision clearing the way for the release of records from the 2023 Covenant School shooting, The Tennessee Star’s lead reporter Tom Pappert warns that Metro Nashville could use procedural maneuvers to delay the documents’ release.
“I fully expect them to use every single tool at their disposal to pull this Band-Aid off one hair at a time,” Pappert said during an appearance Tuesday on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
The Tennessee Supreme Court last week declined to hear an appeal from Metro Nashville, the Covenant School and parents of Covenant students challenging a February Tennessee Court of Appeals ruling. The decision leaves the appellate ruling intact and sends the case back to Davidson County Chancery Court for further proceedings.
The Court of Appeals ordered the trial court to review the records and redact information that contains actual school-security details before making the remaining records available for inspection.
Pappert said that process should not take long, particularly because federal authorities have already gone through a similar review of the writings.
“In an ideal world, Metro Nashville would go through and make the dozen or so revisions to the documents, black out any information about the Covenant School,” Pappert said.
Pappert pointed to maps that the shooter, Audrey Elizabeth Hale, drew of the Covenant School and other schools she considered targeting as examples of information that could appropriately be withheld.
“I don’t need those as a reporter. That’s completely unnecessary to what I would do. Go ahead and redact those,” he said.
But Pappert said Metro’s history with public-records requests makes him skeptical the process will move quickly.
“But considering the process has already been completed once by the federal government, we have a good understanding or a good idea that this should not take that long,” he said. “So they should be giving this to us, I would assume, in a relatively short period.”
“If it takes longer than a month, flags will start to be raised in my imagination,” Pappert added. “I think, though, that what we’ve learned from Nashville over the last three and a half years, as well as our other public records efforts trying to figure out why they’re giving millions of dollars in grants to pro-illegal alien nonprofits and other matters, they’re going to drag their feet.”
Pappert also pointed to a July response from Metro Nashville to a separate public-records request filed by The Star. Metro had said it could not release the requested records while the Supreme Court was considering whether to hear the case and extended its expected response date to September 4.
Now that the Supreme Court has denied the appeal, Pappert said Metro’s explanation raises questions about what happens next.
“The appellate court order was very clear,” Pappert said. “It goes back to the chancery court. Chancellor I’Ashea Myles is instructed to go through the documents and eventually get them so they can be released to the public or inspected by the public.”
“There should be no back and forth at the trial court unless they’re going to try to, in my mind, contravene or pick apart the appellate court’s order in order to make it last longer,” he added.
Pappert said The Star also specifically structured its June records request so it would not depend on the litigation that has now been resolved.
“We were not so foolish in June to send a public records request that was just a carbon copy of the one we sent in 2023,” Pappert said. “We went to great lengths to make sure that none of what we requested in June should have been impacted by the then ongoing- Exactly litigation that we just won. And they ignored that.”
The records dispute stems from The Star’s years-long effort to obtain records related to the March 27, 2023, Covenant School shooting, in which Hale killed six people, including three 9-year-old students.
Pappert said delays in releasing the records ultimately harm the public’s ability to understand what led to the shooting.
“All they’re doing is hurting the public and the public’s ability to prepare for future tragedies,” he said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
