Report: Covenant School Shooter Fantasized About School Shootings as Middle Schooler

Covenant School shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale had been having fantasies of carrying out school shootings ever since she was a middle schooler, 99.7 WTN afternoon radio host Brian Wilson reported Wednesday.

Wilson revealed a number of other previously unknown details about Hale, referencing a “lengthy” document he obtained regarding her and the shooting. He said he had more details he would reveal on Thursday.

99.7 WTN radio host Brian Wilson: So let me take you to the crime scene on the day of the event immediately after the shooting. Police located the shooter’s car in the parking lot of the school, and inside they found a number of unusual things. First, several of her most beloved stuffed animals. Her car keys, her phone, there were two flash drives containing a great deal of data, including a number of videos, and, most importantly, her two most recent journals. These two journals reveal obsessive planning for the attack. And when police recovered the other journals from her bedroom in her parents’ home, they discovered that the shooter had been thinking about various school shooting scenarios since she was in middle school. In fact, over the course of many years, the shooter shared with her therapist that she had thoughts of suicide, thoughts of homicide, and in fact revealed on at least one occasion that she had fantasized about carrying out a school shooting. We’ll have more on that in future reports.

Wilson also reported many mental health issues Hale suffered that were previously unreported, including that she was autistic.

Wilson: As I mentioned, investigators said the attack was obsessively planned. There were tweaks to the plan. There were revisions to the plan and more revisions, planning upon planning, they said. The shooter was close to her mother, and her mother had helped her navigate life, and she needed a lot of help. And this is new information now… We have learned that the shooter in these documents was diagnosed at an early age to be autistic. To my knowledge that has not yet been reported. Not only that, she was diagnosed as having an auditory processing disorder, the shooter was said to be easily startled by loud noises. She had a sensitivity to bright lights, and at times, she had a sensitivity to certain smells. She was described by her parents as obsessive at times, bright in some ways but also naive. She struggled with handling money as with many people on the autism spectrum. She struggled in social interactions with others. She was obsessed on some occasions with other girls in her orbit. She struggled with understanding the boundaries necessary in healthy relationships. At times, she was treated by doctors for anxiety, an eating disorder that became so critical that it required emergency treatment. And she was in fact treated twice at Vanderbilt University Medical Center when she expressed thoughts of suicide.

In her writings, Hale would use “Aiden,” her more masculine persona, as an alter ego, Wilson reported.

Wilson: Investigators spent countless hours studying these journals and they found that at times the shooter wrote as Audrey. Audrey, they say, wrote in a more feminine handwriting. But on some pages, her alter ego Aidan was writing. Aiden’s writing were [sic] darker, the handwriting described as being more manly. In fact, in reading these documents, one gets the sense that there were two Audrey’s. One persona she showed to her parents and those she encountered on a day-to-day basis. They described her as childlike even though she was 28 at the time of the attack. Her bedroom was filled with dolls and stuffed animals that she named and cared about deeply. But the journals revealed anger, at times rage, she became adept at hiding things from her parents. She took money from an education grant she received to purchase her weapons and to pay for training at a local gun range.

Not only that, but Wilson reported that Hale intended to murder her father after carrying out the Covenant School shooting, had she survived.

Wilson: It was a shock, and I mean a big shock, when investigators revealed that if Audrey had survived the attack that day, she had planned to return home and murder her father. The big question, did any of her therapist and there were several Did they have any idea that she was capable of carrying out such a heinous attack? We’ll bring you more on that in tomorrow’s report.

However, it appears that Hale has not explained anywhere in her writings her reason for carrying out the 2023 shooting at her former school, Wilson reported.

Wilson: And I want to share with you that there really is no manifesto. There are no writings that the shooter used to explain the rationale for the attack on the school that fateful day, March 27 of 2023. But what police have uncovered are approximately 30, I’m sorry, 20 journals, sometimes described as diaries. Now the writings began in middle school and continued up until the day of the shooting.

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