Audrey Hale’s school shooting in Nashville was clearly motivated by hew own mental issues and rage at the world around her. We learned a lot more about that last summer when 80 pages of her personal journals were given to the Tennessee Star which published numerous stories about the contents.
We learned that Hale hated her body and her gender. Just 16 days before the shooting, which took place on March 27, 2023, Hale created a diary entry titled “My imaginary penis.”
“My penis exists in my head. I swear to god I’m a male,” wrote Hale in the diary or journal recovered by police. She then wrote about her desire to have a penis for the purpose of heterosexual sex with a woman…
About her parents, Hale added, “I hate parental views; how my mom sees me as a daughter – and she’d not bear to want to lose that daughter because a son would be the death of Audrey.”
In another entry just weeks earlier she wrote this:
In an entry dated February 21, 2023, Hale wrote, “I was called a woman, lady, and ma’am all in the same day.” She wrote, in capital letters, “I hate everything about my gender,” then added, “everything hurts.”
She seemed to see suicide as a way to complete her transition: “The [cocoon] of my old self will die when I leave my body behind and the boy in me will be free; in the butterfly transformation; the real me.”
And Hale seemed nearly as unhappy with her race as with her sex.
Hale created a flow chart that used arrows to connect the word “brain” to the concepts of white privilege and embarrassment. She additionally drew a series of arrows identifying herself as “no one.”…
“No one, I mean no one will think my life meant something after I die.” Hale wrote, “None of this s*** will matter to them once I’m dead.”…
In all capital letters, she signed the entry “White Nothingness,” followed by the name Aiden.
Based on these partial releases from her diaries, it was hard to work out a story that all these parts fit into. But this week Nashville PD released a report giving a detailed summary of the case. The report makes a point of saying there was no signle manifesto written by Hale. Instead her motives were spread out throughout more than a dozen notebooks and journals.
By definition, a manifesto is a mission statement or other document written and disseminated by an individual or group to enumerate or expound upon the guiding principles and beliefs that inform their actions…
In this case, a manifesto didn’t exist. Hale never left behind a single document explaining why she committed the attack, why she specifically targeted The Covenant, and what she hoped to gain, if anything, with the attack. As previously mentioned, what did exist were a series of notebooks, art composition books, and media files created by Hale documenting her planning and preparation for the attack, the events in her life that motivated her to commit the attack, and her hopes regarding the outcome of the attack. No single document, notebook, or digital device contains the answer to those questions. The answer is scattered throughout all the assembled material, which required a careful review of the material to understand Hale’s motive.
That’s really a fine point which makes no difference at all. It appears to be true that she did not write a “manifesto” meeting the dictionary definition of the term, but she did leave plenty of other writings describing her mindset in detail. I think that is what news outlets and normal people wanted released, some explanation of what motivated her.
What follows in the report is a “Summary of Attack Progression” which begins from the time she was a toddler. She considered her time at Covenant as the happiest of her life.
After noticing developmental delays in her daughter and believing she was autistic, Hale’s mother took her to a mental health provider for an assessment. The assessing psychologist concluded Hale did have certain developmental delays, particularly in asserting herself in social situations, emotional processing, and indicators of anxiety. Nothing was found during the assessment to show Hale had autism spectrum disorder. Hale’s mother also held her back from attending kindergarten for a year, believing the delay would help her catch up to her peers socially and emotionally.
Hale then attended The Covenant from her kindergarten year through the fourth grade (2001 – 2006). Hale considered these years the happiest of her childhood. She felt safe and accepted at The Covenant and made friends with other students. She considered her family life during this time as happy, with a positive relationship with both of her parents and her brother. During this time, she showed a proclivity for art, which her parents and teachers remarked was advanced for a child her age. Hale denied suffering any emotional or physical abuse during this period, and no records have been found to counteract her claims.
But in 5th grade her parents moved her to a magnet school because of her interest in art. There she was bullied for being a relatively well-off white kid in a mostly black school.
When Hale reached the fifth grade (2006), she transferred to Creswell Middle, a magnet school for the arts, and remained there until she completed her eighth-grade year (2010). This transfer was done to allow Hale to pursue her artistic interests. Once she arrived at Creswell Middle, she encountered a culture shock. While most of her classmates at The Covenant were predominantly white and came from middle class to wealthy households, most of her classmates at Creswell Middle were predominantly from minority groups and came from working-class households. Hale remarked it wasn’t long before other students began to pick on her and even bully her, believing she was a rich white girl and worthy of derision. Though Hale’s academics didn’t appear to struggle mightily during this period, she began to feel socially ostracized, which lowered her self-esteem and self-confidence.
Things turned around when Hale made the girls basketball team. Her team went to the city championships and her teammates, most of whom were black, began to stick up for her in school. She had romantic feelings for one of the girls on the team.
But when the seniors all graduated and went to high school, Hale was left behind. Her social problems returned and she didn’t make new friends. A year later she went to high school and reconnected with some of her old friends, but they had new friends now and she didn’t fit in with them. It was around this time that she began thinking about suicide. Her grades began to slip and her mother took her for counseling. The therapist concluded she was depressed and had social phobias and anger-management issues.
She graduated high school and then started attending the Nossi College of Art and Design. But she was further isolated from her Middle School teammates and didn’t make friends to replace them. Her mental condition deteriorated and she began having fits of rage.
From 2018 forward, she began to insert her anger more and more into each entry. She began to write “rage storms,” which consisted of long, expletive-filled entries devoted to topics that greatly angered her. Though she had many targets of her anger, the most common topics at first involved societal viewpoints that differed from hers and her father. Eventually, these viewpoints expanded to perceptions she held, which included her believing she was being discriminated against and disparaged for being autistic, being ostracized by black culture despite her longing for acceptance, political topics, gun control, white privilege, and how humans were ruling the world. Hale explained, however, none of these writings were to be taken literally, including the homicidal fantasies she penned regarding her father, as she was simply writing these passages to “blow off steam” in a manner that didn’t alarm anyone.
But eventually, the rage became directed towards the middle school teammates who abandoned her. As Hale continued to stalk them online, she noticed many of them were enjoying their adulthood and finding success in romance, education, and careers. She began to seethe over their posts showing them with their significant others, starting new careers, and enjoying themselves without Hale being present. She would write “rage storms” regarding their abandonment and wishing ruin upon them. Even though she would later write a retraction on many of these “rage storms” in the form of a letter or poem longing to be with them again, for those she believed were her “best friends” her rage never seemed sated. Eventually, this led to her deciding she needed to make them and society as a whole notice her.
So the best time of her life was at Covenant and one of the worst was being bulled at her Middle School both before and after being on the basketball team. She also became angry at her former teammates because they weren’t as close in high school and then went off to college without her. Given this history, you would think her rage would eventually lead her to lash out at her middle school or even her high school, not at the one place she was actually happy. Indeed, Hale initially planned to attack the Middle School.
By December 2018, Hale began actively planning an attack at Creswell Middle. She drew a map from her memories of the layout of the school. In the map, she specified the locations of classrooms, common areas, and where the entrances and exits were located. She outlined how she would progress through the school, who she would target and in what sequence, and where she would commit suicide within the school once she was done. Knowing access to the interior of the school was highly restricted during school hours, she detailed an elaborate plan to enter the school without being stopped or detected so she could begin her attack with the element of surprise.
During the first half of 2019, Hale continued to plan her attack on Creswell, without knowing how to obtain the means to commit the attack. Her OCD was manifest during this time with the excruciating detail she gave to the attack, including precise timelines, detailed descriptions of the clothing she would wear, and the specific route she would progress through the school. The more she pored over the details, the more convinced she was of her own success. The “rage storms” that interspersed these plans also became more heated, showing Hale’s anger was reaching the boiling point.
Her rage became so acute that her therapist finally noticed and sent her to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for a psychological assessment. Hale denied plans to hurt herself or others, which was a big lie, but she did participate in an 8-week outpatient program in an attempt to improve her mental state. It seemed to work briefly but within a matter of weeks her depression returned and she returned to seriously planning her own death and a school shooting. She considered moving the location to her old high school but eventually settled on Covenant because she was concerned an attack at her Middle School would result in her being labeled a racist.
By March 2020, Hale began to express doubts about targeting Creswell Middle. Her doubts weren’t necessarily about the intention to kill children, but more about the racial demographics of the school. Hale knew a large portion of the student body was black. Though she had no qualms about killing anyone regardless of specific demographical categories, she worried she might be branded as a racist, which would remove her ability to give the motive and reasoning for the attack and allow others to choose it for her once she was dead. Despite these concerns Hale continued to plan an attack on Creswell Middle, primarily due to the perceived past abuses she experienced there…
In December 2020, Hale conducted her first reconnaissance of Creswell Middle. She went to the school after hours and took photographs of the entrances of the building. She managed to enter the building by unknown means and noted the layout of the school, with the intention of reconciling the layout with her memories. She paid particular attention to the structure and strength of the doors, especially since she planned for the eventuality she may have to force entry into the school to commit the attack…
On April 8, 2021, Hale cancelled the attack on Creswell Middle all together and changed her target selection to The Covenant. Hale then listed the pros and cons for each target, focusing on the physical structure and security of each location, the age and backgrounds of the individuals at each location, and the public reaction she would receive following the attack. Based on this analysis, she chose The Covenant as the better target for three reasons: (1) The Covenant was more geographically isolated than Creswell Middle, which she felt would give her more time to kill; (2) with The Covenant being a private Christian school, she would receive more notoriety; and (3) due to the student body at Creswell Middle being predominantly black, she was afraid she would be seen as a racist, which would affect how much control she had over the narrative after her death and allow others to state her motive behind the attack.
So she was happy to think about murdering children before killing herself, but didn’t want people to think she was racist. Someone could write a dissertation on that one.
What followed was two years of buying guns and ammo and hiding her plans from her parents (whom she still lived with) and her therapist. She considered other targets, including a mall, but eventually settled on the Covenant school.
She openly expressed a desire to primarily kill children, though she believed only the older children (over 7 years of age) were viable targets. She felt the younger children were too young to understand the difference between good and evil or how the world was structured, which made killing them especially cruel. She reiterated her belief that the race, religion, gender, or other demographical categories of her victims wouldn’t matter, provided most of her victims would be children. She openly acknowledged none of those she would kill were guilty of anything and denied any personal motivation for targeting them. She felt their deaths were necessary to give her death meaning.
The report includes a behavioral assessment of Hale which is interesting.
Throughout the writings, Hale demonstrated a high degree of narcissism. She believed she was far more intelligent and creative than others, felt she was entitled to having the things she desired in life without having to work for it, and she felt she should be fully accepted and embraced by other individuals and groups without question or reservation. She showed a high level of selfishness by regularly expressing how she was the true victim in an attack she carried out, how others had to die to give her death meaning, how she would become a “god” in the aftermath of the attack, and how she should be emulated by others. She regularly manipulated others into giving her what she wanted, and she railed against those who saw through the manipulation.
There’s also a brief section on motive:
In short, the motive determined over the course of the investigation was notoriety.
Even though numerous disappointments in relationships, career aspirations, and independence fueled her depression, and even though this depression made her highly suicidal, this doesn’t explain the attack. As Hale wrote on several occasions, if suicide was her goal then she would have simply killed herself.
Throughout the writings and videos, Hale frequently commented that her death needed to matter and be remembered. Throughout her life, Hale experienced loneliness and disappointment. She felt abandoned and ignored by those she longed to befriend and engage with romantically, which angered her more than anything else. She believed that by simply committing suicide, she would be quickly forgotten and not even worthy of a footnote in history. She craved the notoriety Harris and Klebold attained following Columbine. This can be seen clearly with the frequent references in her writings and videos of how they became “gods” following their attack. This led to a deep desire on her part to become a “god” like them and other mass killers who attained notoriety, even if it meant infamy.
There’s one final bit of information from the day of the attack which I hadn’t seen before. After killing multiple people, including children, at Covenant, Hale retreated to the chapel and shot at a stained glass window.
Upon reaching the second floor, Hale found herself in the upper level of the main lobby to the sanctuary. She then entered the sanctuary itself, reaching the upper level. Once there, she fired several shots through a stained-glass window positioned high on the wall in the sanctuary with her carbine. Though the window was damaged, it wasn’t destroyed. The window she targeted depicted Adam and Eve in The Garden of Eden.
I suspect that target was not accidental and tied into her anger over her sex and belief she had the wrong body, though the report doesn’t speculate about that.
Anyway, I think the report does a good job of putting her mental illness in context and explaining what motivated her. I’m not interested in giving her the notoriety she craved but I do think we should learn to recognize people like Hale so that we can stop them from committing similar crimes. Hale literally spent years plotting all of this under the nose of her parents and therapists who only occasionally seemed to grasp the danger she represented. That’s a shame because all of the signs were there years before the attack if only someone had looked closely.
