Covenant School killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale claimed to witness an accidental injury after training at a Nashville-area gun range just two days before her terrible attack.
Hale reported witnessing the incident in a handwritten journal or diary entry that was recovered from her vehicle, photographed, and eventually provided to The Tennessee Star as part of a portion of Hale’s writings.
In an entry dated March 25, 2023, Hale claimed she was on her way to the gun range when she “saw a billboard on suicide only meters away” from the building. She declared, “I will use guns in my suicide.”
“Then after time in range (while cleaning my [rifle]), a lady got [ricocheted] in the leg [and] ankle,” wrote Hale. She continued, “I saw the EMTs working on her leg on the floor [and] they took her away on the gerny [sic].”
The Star is withholding the name of the Nashville-area gun range where Hale claimed she witnessed the incident.
According to her entry, Hale then questioned whether the event foreshadowed her “own massacre” and reported, “there was blood splatters on the floor.” According to Hale, the incident provoked a police response, with officers asking others at the range for their version of events.
The entry suggested Hale continued to find meaning in unrelated events after she left the range.
“Saw sunlight peering clouds twice in a row this week,” she wrote. Then Hale questioned whether “the angels” were telling her deceased former friend that she will die soon.
Hale began the entry, before the dateline, with the words “week of D.D.” Hale previously referred to March 27, 2023, as “death day.”
The Star first reported it obtained dozens of pages of Hale’s writings on Wednesday, including a political rant about transgenderism, gun rights, and non-binary people that she penned just over one month before the devastating attack that claimed the lives of three 9-year-old students and three adults at the Covenant School.
Hale, who was born a biological female, identified as a transgender man at the time of her attack. In part of her rant, Hale wrote, “Disabled have rights, civil races have rights, LGBTQ have rights, gun owners have rights.”
Both Star News Digital Media, Inc., which owns and operates The Star, and its editor-in-chief Michael Patrick Leahy are suing the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) and the FBI to compel the full release of Hale’s writings, including those sometimes called a manifesto.
Star News on Wednesday published an FBI memo sent to MNPD Chief John Drake in May 2023 that “strongly” discouraged the release of “legacy tokens” from Hale. According to a public FBI definition, both the writings sought in the lawsuits and those already obtained by The Star are likely considered “legacy tokens.”
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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].
Background Photo “Gun Range” by aeroplanepics0112. CC BY-SA 3.0.
