Covenant School killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale wrote in a newly released journal entry that the world was too hostile to school shooters, arguing the public should have greater empathy for them, as many suffer from various mental illnesses.
The FBI released more than 450 pages written by Hale on Wednesday, nearly a year after The Tennessee Star published the killer’s 2023 journal, with much of the new entries dated to years prior to her March 27, 2023, attack, where she killed six.
In one entry titled, “I hate living sometimes… I don’t want to he here,” which comes directly before a page the killer dated April 2019, Hale, who identified as a transgender man at the time of her death, complained about society’s attitude toward school shooters.
“I hate living in this world. I’m surrounded by stupid average teenagers, stupid social media, stupid drunk heads, a*******, atheists, non-conformists,” she listed. “I hate how this world is cluttered [and] overpopulated [with] more people than we need.”
She later continued, “I hate how people don’t accept school shooters for their chronic psychiatric condition.”
Hale’s parents previously told investigators she was diagnosed with five mental illnesses, including anxiety disorder, social phobia, dysthymia disorder, major depressive disorder, and autism spectrum disorder.
While she previously only listed various subjects of her loathing within the journal entry, the killer then wrote that she thought similarly to other school shooters.
“In a way I think like them,” wrote Hale. “I was bullied, friends I love the most don’t consider me someone to spend time with. I’m no one’s best friend. I have no best friend.”
This entry also appears to represent an early example of the killer describing individuals in her life, as well as forms of entertainment, as fake or artificial.
“I feel my life is surrounded by artificial, stale, corruptive [sic] media,” she wrote. “Problem is people’s love is fake.”
Her description of media notably was written around the same time Hale credited the media’s support for the LGBT movement for helping her to understand the voice of an “imaginary boy” which she heard in her head, but also may have foreshadowed the killer’s later description of those she disliked as “clones,” “robots,” or “not real” in her 2023 journal.
“What makes the world full of s*** is clones full of people that are meaningless s****,” she wrote in 2023. In another entry referencing politics, she wrote, “Whatever f***** is taking away human rights is not of a human at all; just a robot.”
It also was not the killer’s first reference to school shootings in a 2019 journal entry, as she previously floated the idea of attacking the middle school she once attended in an entry written the previous month.
Seemingly frustrated over unrequited romantic feelings, she wrote, “If I was the school shooter of I.T. Creswell (Prep) Middle, then you’d be cured from leprocy [sic] blindness of heart.”
Earlier in the same entry, the killer wrote, ” I fantasize to be a school shooter at I.T. Creswell,” and called it “only the rational thing to do.”
It was previously claimed by law enforcement that Hale began considering a school shooting when she herself was a middle school student, though these latest journals indicate the killer began considering such an attack in 2019, when she initially considered Isaiah T. Creswell Middle School, where she attended and developed romantic interest in members of her basketball team, a preferential target.
Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) concluded its investigation in June, when it stated that the killer was sane at the time of her attack.
These entries, made available by FBI nearly one year after The Star published a legally obtained, unredacted version of the killer’s 2023 journal, were released following nearly two years of litigation by the publication’s parent company, Star News Digital Media, Inc. (SNDM), and its editor-in-chief, Michael Patrick Leahy. The lawsuit was settled in June, when the FBI pledged to release redacted copies of the killer’s writing.
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Pennsylvania Daily Star and The Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
A lot of health “professionals” knew how seriously mentally ill their patient was, & yet she was not mandated to inpatient care.
They are guilty as much as she is.
Vanderbilt professionals affirmed her sick fantasy that she could be a male if she wanted to. They administered experimental drug therapy as well as psychological therapy affirming her gender dysphoria as ” normal”.
They should lose their Licenses & be prosecuted
Six mental illnesses—they skipped sex dysphoria.