Police say the 2023 Nashville school shooter hid mental health issues from doctors and family

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The shooter behind the 2023 Nashville elementary school attack that killed six people, including three children, had been obsessively planning it for years while hiding mental health issues from family and doctors, a police report released Wednesday reveals.

The nearly 50-page investigative case summary includes long-sought-after details of The Covenant School shooting and underscores the elaborate lengths the shooter took to research and plan a massacre at the Christian institution without provoking interference from mental health providers.

The prospect of releasing the shooter’s writings sparked a legal battle. Some of the documents have been leaked, and while Wednesday’s report closes the Nashville Police probe into the March 2023 shooting, the fight over what else should be released — concerning that attack and others — is ongoing.

Early in the investigation, police suggested the shooter had written a “manifesto” detailing motives and intentions. Instead, the 28-year-old shooter, Audrey Hale, left behind “a series of notebooks, art composition books, and media files ″ documenting plans and preparation for the attack, as well as life events and other motivations, police determined. Hale, who once attended Covenant, was killed by police.

Hale wanted to kill at least 40 people, hoping to inspire books, documentaries and movies, have the weapons placed in museums and his bedroom preserved as a memorial, police found.

Hale sometimes used male pronouns, but the police report uses female pronouns, citing a state law definition of "sex" as “determined by anatomy and genetics existing at the time of birth.” Police said Hale identified as male.

The report acknowledges but dismisses speculation that Hale’s mental health providers could be criminally culpable for not intervening.

The report says Hale’s parents and therapist had been concerned about his mental health for years. Psychological assessments conducted by Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2019 and 2021 concluded Hale wasn’t suffering from psychosis and recommended outpatient treatment.

“She had enough experience with the mental healthcare system to understand which topics to avoid with her providers and how to manipulate them into believing her documented issues with homicidal and suicidal ideations were well in her past,” it says.

Police found that as Hale’s parents and therapists became more concerned, Hale became more manipulative. At one point Hale planned to kill his mother to prevent discovery, despite a “strong emotional attachment” to her, the report says.

Hale avoided using credit or debit cards on expenses related to the attack, knowing his mother could access the accounts. Hale also frequently removed attack-related material from his computer and cellphone so his mother wouldn't find it, police wrote.

Hale selected The Covenant School for a few reasons, police said. He felt he would not be overpowered by the staff and students there. He figured he would gain notoriety for attacking a Christian school. And, he had happy memories of attending the school.

“Hale often remarked her time at The Covenant was the happiest she was during her childhood education,” police wrote.

Police dismissed speculation about racial, religious or economic motivation in the shooting, saying "none of those motives impacted her decision to attack The Covenant,” even though Hale “raged over these topics at times in her writings.”

The report says Hale researched other shooting locations, including highly traveled roads and shopping malls.

As early as 2018, Hale was planning an attack on Creswell Middle, a Nashville public school Hale attended after Covenant. Hale created detailed plans including a timeline. However, by March of 2020, Hale started to have doubts. Most of Creswell's students were Black and Hale worried about being labeled a racist, though he had “no qualms about killing anyone regardless of specific demographical categories,” police wrote.

The report notes that Covenant had prepared for a possible school shooting, with blackout curtains and security bars for the classroom doors. Once staffers were aware of a shooter in the building, those precautions seemed to work. Hale wandered the hallways, unable to find targets and instead “shooting television sets, doors, and windows in places where nobody was present.”

The people killed in the shooting were: Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, all 9 years old; Cynthia Peak, 61; Katherine Koonce, 60; and Mike Hill, 61.

Mary Joyce, who had a third grader in the class with the children who were killed, said Wednesday she remembers Koonce and a male teacher speaking at a parent orientation in the fall before the shooting about their preparation in case of a school shooter.

“I remember he got emotional about it, but he said, ‘I feel really grateful that we are prepared if anything were to happen.’ And then it did,” Joyce said.

FILE - Families leave a reunification site in Nashville, Tenn., Monday, March 27, 2023 after several children were killed in a shooting at Covenant School in Nashville. The suspect is dead after a confrontation with police. (AP Photo/John Amis, File)

FILE - Children from The Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville, Tenn., hold hands as they are taken to a reunification site at the Woodmont Baptist Church after a deadly shooting at their school on Monday, March 27, 2023. (AP Photo/Jonathan Mattise, File)

FILE - A police officer walks by an entrance to The Covenant School after a shooting in Nashville, Tenn. on Monday, March 27, 2023. (AP Photo/John Amis, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to use an 18th century wartime law to deport Venezuelan migrants, but said they must get a court hearing before they are taken from the United States.

In a bitterly divided decision, the court said the administration must give Venezuelans who it claims are gang members “reasonable time” to go to court.

But the conservative majority said the legal challenges must take place in Texas, instead of a Washington courtroom.

The court’s action appears to bar the administration from immediately resuming the flights that last month carried hundreds of migrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador. The flights came soon after President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act for the first time since World War II to justify the deportations under a presidential proclamation calling the Tren de Aragua gang an invading force.

The majority said nothing about those flights, which took off without providing the hearing the justices now say is necessary.

In dissent, the three liberal justices said the administration has sought to avoid judicial review in this case and the court “now rewards the government for its behavior.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined portions of the dissent.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said it would be harder for people to challenge deportations individually, wherever they are being held, and noted that the administration has also said in another case before the court that it’s unable to return people who have been deported to the El Salvador prison by mistake.

“We, as a Nation and a court of law, should be better than this,” she wrote.

The justices acted on the administration’s emergency appeal after the federal appeals court in Washington left in place an order temporarily prohibiting deportations of the migrants accused of being gang members under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act.

“For all the rhetoric of the dissents,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion, the high court order confirms “that the detainees subject to removal orders under the AEA are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal."

The case has become a flashpoint amid escalating tension between the White House and the federal courts. It's the second time in less than a week that a majority of conservative justices has handed Trump at least a partial victory in an emergency appeal after lower courts had blocked parts of his agenda.

Several other cases are pending, including over Trump's plan to deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of parents who are in the country illegally.

Trump praised the court for its action Monday.

"The Supreme Court has upheld the Rule of Law in our Nation by allowing a President, whoever that may be, to be able to secure our Borders, and protect our families and our Country, itself. A GREAT DAY FOR JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site.

The original order blocking the deportations to El Salvador was issued by U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge at the federal courthouse in Washington.

Attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of five Venezuelan noncitizens who were being held in Texas, hours after the proclamation was made public and as immigration authorities were shepherding hundreds of migrants to waiting airplanes.

ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said the “critical point" of the high court’s ruling was that people must be allowed due process to challenge their removal. "That is an important victory,” he said.

Boasberg imposed a temporary halt on deportations and also ordered planeloads of Venezuelan immigrants to return to the U.S. That did not happen. The judge held a hearing last week over whether the government defied his order to turn the planes around. The administration has invoked a “ state secrets privilege ” and refused to give Boasberg any additional information about the deportations.

Trump and his allies have called for impeaching Boasberg. In a rare statement, Chief Justice John Roberts said “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

Associated Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report.

Venezuelan migrants deported from the United States peer through windows of an Eastern Airlines plane upon arriving at Simon Bolivar International Airport in Maiquetia, Venezuela, Sunday, March 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Cristian Hernandez)