Authorities revealed Monday that Nashville mass murderer Audrey Hale fired 152 rounds during the assault on the Covenant School that left six dead and brought the United States back to mourning for a shooting.
This detail emerged in the latest update to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department’s investigation, which also revealed that Hale planned the massacre for months in writings found inside his car and home.
“[Hale] documented, in newspapers, [su] planning over a period of months to commit mass murder at The Covenant School,” police said in a news release.
Police also said Hale’s writings were turned over to the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia, which is working with local detectives to determine what led Hale to kill three children and three staff members in his old elementary school.
While a precise motive has not been discovered, police said they determined Hale “considered the actions of other mass murderers.”
For his part, Nashville Police Chief John Drake initially speculated that Hale, 28, who attended the private religious school as a child, had a “resentment” toward the former teachers there.
It has since been revealed that Hale was devastated by the recent death of a close friend, was under a doctor’s care for an emotional upset, and had sent a series of messages to a friend just before the attack began.
On the day of the shooting, March 27, Drake said Hale left behind a “manifesto” that detectives were looking into, but its contents have not been made public.
The barrage of bullets fired by Hale came from two assault rifles and a handgun, police said Monday. The three guns were part of a seven-gun cache Hale had legally amassed behind his parents’ back, hiding the guns throughout their shared Nashville home, Drake said last week.
Hale was shot to death by two Nashville officers just 14 minutes after she stormed the school shooting through locked glass doors.
Keep reading:
Nashville School Shooter Legally Bought 7 Firearms At 5 Stores: Police
Nashville school friend of transgender gunfighter remembers her as “sweet” and “funny”: “Nobody really saw this coming”
· Police publish identity of the suspect, as well as the six fatal victims of the shooting in Nashville, Tennessee