Silencing the shooter

Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake acknowledged possession early on. Standing before a wall of reporters, his large fingers laced and hands squeezing nervously, he alluded to “some writings we’re going over” during a March 27, 2023, press briefing—his second of the day.

It was two weeks shy of Easter. Redbud trees were blooming across the city, and patches of grass were greening up around them. But that morning a deadly chill descended on Nashville. Audrey Hale, 28, gunned her way into the Covenant School, a private Presbyterian elementary school she once attended, and left six bodies lying lifeless in its halls. Responding officers shot and killed Hale on a landing upstairs.

Hours later, with the shooter identified and the FBI assisting in the investigation, Drake stoically fielded questions. Was the attack targeted? Yes. Officers had discovered maps of the school in Hale’s car. Did she have any criminal history? No. But for the most important question—why did she do it?—Drake had no definitive answer.

But he did have some crucial clues.

“We have a manifesto,” Drake admitted, prefacing the news with a quick sigh. In hindsight, the sigh seems significant, a harbinger of the document’s complicated future.

According to an Education Week analysis, 39 U.S. school shootings resulted in injuries or deaths on K-12 school properties last year. On Jan. 22, another shooting at a public high school outside Nashville left one dead. After each tragic event, a question persists: How can we keep it from happening again?

The Covenant parents believe it’s time for a different approach: silence the shooter.

They and their supporters have for two years made a Herculean effort to keep Hale’s writings, as well as other evidence related to the shooting, hidden. Open records proponents have pushed just as hard for their release. In a surprising turn of events, the battle birthed a novel legal strategy that threatens to undermine government transparency and accountability.

Such a pitched clash over criminal evidence is unusual, and in this case seemed unlikely, at least at first. The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department was quick to broadcast its officer response footage. And just a month after the shooting, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee declared that Drake had assured him documents regarding the shooter would soon be released.

Days later, however, Drake backtracked. His department published a tweet stating it would hold on to the records for now, due to pending litigation. Two years later, police continue to insist the Covenant investigation is ongoing even though the shooter acted alone and died at the scene. But as long as the investigation remains open, the department doesn’t have to respond to records demands.

That kind of stalling is out of the norm. Not long after the Covenant tragedy, a man shot and killed three people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Fla. In that case, Sheriff T.K. Waters held the shooter’s racially inflamed manifesto for five months. That’s a long time, but Waters released it as soon as the investigation was complete, just as he promised on the day of the shooting. For him, the release was a routine matter consistent with a “commitment to transparency.”

Little about the quest for records related to the Covenant shooting has been routine. Many would say it hasn’t been too transparent, either. In fact, Nashville’s complex, precedent-­setting case could shroud future mass shootings in mystery, too, leaving the public—ordinary people trying to figure out what’s behind these extraordinarily senseless crimes—completely in the dark.

Children from the Covenant School are escorted to a reunification site at Woodmont Baptist Church after the March 2023 shooting. Associated Press / Photo by Jonathan Mattise

THE TENNESSEE PUBLIC RECORDS ACT, by itself, is pretty straightforward. Timely access to government records is standard, unless there’s a lawful “exception.” When lawmakers approved the measure in 1957, Tennessee had only two statutory exceptions. By 2017, it had 538, covering everything from littering offenses to judicial misconduct. One came under scrutiny during the Covenant case, an exception that keeps school safety plans private. The maps Hale drew of Covenant and other information in her writings, if released, could pose security problems for the school.

But having more than 500 exceptions means there are a lot of ways to say no to a records request. Even so, those denied access still have an option. They can file a petition and involve a court that, in most cases, makes a quick determination: Is the reason for not releasing a record recognized in the law or not?

A month after the Covenant shooting, Renee Brewer, a private investigator in the Nashville area, sued for access to records related to the case. She wasn’t acting alone. Lacking standing to file on its own behalf, the National Police Association retained Brewer, a resident with standing under the state’s open records law, to file a petition backed by the association.

Betsy Brantner Smith, a retired police sergeant who now serves as the association’s spokesperson, says its interest in the lawsuit centered on withheld information. “That’s never good in a violent crime like this,” she explained. “One of the ways law enforcement is able to prevent these types of crimes is to understand why they occurred in the first place.”

But Smith stressed her organization wanted more than the manifesto. It wanted all of the communication involved in the refusal to release the manifesto, because Drake’s backtracking indicated someone could be pressuring the department behind the scenes.

Others sued for access to the records, too: the Tennessee Firearms Association, former Hamilton County Sheriff James Hammond, The Tennessean, journalist Rachel Wegner, state Sen. Todd Gardenhire, and a conservative news group known as Star News Digital Media. But the petitioner that brought the most heat to the protracted battle over the records—and continues to—is Michael Patrick Leahy, Star News’ editor-in-chief and majority owner. Both he and Star News also sued in federal court, seeking the same records from the FBI.

Michael Martinez, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, says there’s a tendency to think the media are the bad guys after a devastating event. “I can see people circling the wagon saying, ‘OK, we’ve got to protect these families. You know, that was a pretty bad trauma.’ But I don’t think people realize the ramifications that trickle further down the line when you start stopping access to information. It’s more difficult to find solutions if you keep hiding everything.”

From the beginning, information in the Covenant case has been locked down tight. A public relations firm handled all media requests and has offered limited public comments. I made repeated requests for interviews with the Covenant parents representative and their attorney, the police department, and leaders in the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit. None would talk. Neither would Chancellor I’Ashea L. Myles, the Davidson County chancery court judge who oversaw the public records case. Myles consolidated the petitioners’ suits at the end of May 2023.

Meanwhile, Covenant Presbyterian Church, the Covenant School, and a group of Covenant School families known pseu­donymously as “Parents of Minor Covenant Students Jane Doe and John Doe” came to Myles with a request. They wanted to “intervene” in the case, with a goal of permanently sealing records related to the shooting. An intervenor is a third party with a vested interest in the outcome of a case. They can present arguments, evidence, and claims. Myles granted their request.

At the same time the lawsuit was taking shape, Covenant students were dealing with fallout from the March 27 shooting. Legal declarations filed in court by Covenant parents told stories of sons and daughters who could no longer sleep well or alone. One recalled a baseball game where a young player froze at bat because he mistook the sound of a car backfiring for gunshots. Another described siblings who planned ways of escape whenever they entered a large building. They also counted nearby police officers to determine if there were enough to stop a shooter.

One mother related details of her child’s return to school at the temporary site, Brentwood Hills Church of Christ, three weeks after the shooting. A police officer tried unsuccessfully to coax the fourth grader from her mother’s minivan as the girl wailed and refused to move. School administrators finally got her through the door to the comfort dogs, but it took most of an hour with a counselor before they could persuade her to go to class.

The legal filings also pull back the curtain on what happened during the shooting. One set of parents said their child remembers minute details—watching bullets shatter his teacher’s potted plant and paint fly off the walls. He thought he was going to die.

Such trauma forms the foundation of the parents’ case for keeping the shooter’s writings hidden.

Covenant School parents and their attorneys huddle in prayer outside a courtroom before a hearing to decide whether the documents and journals can be released to the public. Associated Press / Photo by Travis Loller

VIOLENCE IS PLOTTED in the heart.

That’s straight from Proverbs, tucked away in a verse that couples inward violent devising with an outward manifestation: lips that “talk of trouble.” These days, violence is also foreshadowed in journals, videos, and social media posts. In English essays and stick drawings. In remarks made to therapists behind closed doors.

Audrey Hale’s writings and records—what’s been leaked of them—suggest that she steeped herself in violent devising for years.

Throughout their crusade, the group seeking the documents’ release insists it’s acting in the public’s best interest. The expert opinion it brought to the court came from Katherine Kuhlman, a specialist in police and public safety psychology. She said a detailed analysis of Hale’s writings would give law enforcement, schools, and parents—even the media—an upper hand in preventing future violence. According to Kuhlman, it’s a simple concept: We learn from experience. “Understanding the root cause of the injustices the shooter perceived, the grudges held, the pre-attack indicators that occurred, etc., allows for identification of red flags. When compared with other school shooters, we can then determine if this is a pattern in mass shootings.”

The Covenant parents are prominent in the Nashville ­community—business executives, doctors, financial advisers. Tennessee state Sen. Todd Gardenhire, who joined the case in his individual capacity, said the court should not let emotion and influential people in Davidson County pressure it into setting a bad precedent. “If we’re going to craft legislation to help prevent these types of tragedies, we have to know what was going through the mind and motive of the person that did the shooting.”

On May 29, 2023, two months after the attack, Myles visited police headquarters to begin a private viewing of items at issue in the case. In addition to Hale’s writings, the petitioners requested access to her toxicology and autopsy reports; yearbooks obtained by police; all police communications with the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, and Nashville’s district attorney regarding the designation of the shooting as a “hate crime”; impound invoices; photographs and audio of calls for service from the incident; all emails, texts, and other communications to and from the police department mentioning the writings; and more.

But Hale’s “manifesto” is what they wanted most, a spiral notebook—maybe two notebooks—found in her car after the shooting. According to the police chief, the manifesto contained maps and drawings, her operational plan of attack. It’s the kind of material that the parents and others believe will, if released, make another attack more likely.

Erika Felix, a California psychologist who studies the effect of mass shootings on children, shares their belief. She says releasing the writings could lead to copycat attacks. She points to another danger, too. It would add to the psychological distress of Covenant students and the greater community of Nashville. In her report to the court, Felix said the country already has a wealth of knowledge from its many mass shootings, including the factors that can reduce them. “We do not need a shooter’s writings from one incident to make these changes.”

ON JUNE 8, 2023, the shooter’s parents, Ronald and Norma Hale, made a stunning announcement. They had transferred ownership of their daughter’s writings to a newly established Covenant Children’s Trust. It was an end-run around any attempt to make the writings public. With no will in the mix, the writings would become property of the trust when the police department finished with them. The couple desired “that no further harm come to any children or adults anywhere in the world because of the writings.”

That was a coup for the Covenant parents. The legal transfer gave them solid standing in their quest to intervene in the case, but more importantly, it gave them a new legal strategy to pursue.

Addressing reporters after the announcement, Brent Leatherwood, a Covenant parent who often speaks on the group’s behalf, acknowledged the transfer as extraordinary. Leatherwood is also president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. “You should know, the parents and the families have asked our attorneys to leave no stone unturned as we pursue our objective to keep all of these writings out of the public domain,” he said.

And what a stone they turned.

The Hales’ attorney specified in the legal filing for the ownership transfer that the writings constitute copyrighted works. Copyright law falls in the federal realm, which meant attorneys for the parents had a new muscle to flex, one that could potentially trump Tennessee’s public records law.

Deborah Fisher, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, called the copyright angle a novel approach, but she doesn’t think the copyright law was ever meant to keep crime evidence—video, audio recordings, texts—confidential. “If Hale hadn’t died, the documents would most likely be used in an open trial, by the prosecution to show intent, and by the defense to show insanity.”

Even the judge, Chancellor Myles, acknowledged the records case, with its new copyright facet, as precedent-setting. Her decision to allow the Covenant parents to insert themselves as intervenors had ramifications, too. On Oct. 16, attorney Eric Osborne represented the parents before the Tennessee Court of Appeals when the group seeking the documents’ release attempted unsuccessfully to remove third parties—the parents—from the case.

“I cannot emphasize this enough that for the parents, this case is literally a matter of life and death,” Osborne told the panel of three judges. “If the shooter’s writings are released, one or more children may harm themselves. It has happened in the past from school shootings, and we have a unique opportunity here to try to prevent these writings from coming out, to try to protect these children. That is the personal stake that the parents have.”

But interest in the case made it inevitable that the material would find its way to the public. On Nov. 6, 2023, Steven Crowder, host of the Louder With Crowder political podcast and YouTube channel, leaked three pages of what he said were Hale’s writings. They were hate-filled and graphic. They also looked legitimate. The police department put seven officers on administrative assignment while it investigated the leak.

A roadside memorial near the Covenant School on the one-year anniversary of the shooting. Associated Press / Photo by George Walker IV

THE HEARING in the public records case began April 16, 2024, in Nashville’s historic Metro Courthouse. Attorney Eric Osborne described the case as unique in American history. “There’s never been a chance to stop a shooter’s writings from coming out,” he told the judge. Osborne was just one of at least 15 attorneys representing the parents’ interests. Day 2 of the hearing also held significance. Across town from the courthouse, students returned to Covenant’s campus for the first time since the shooting.

As the trial progressed, The Tennessean made sure its readers understood why it decided to seek the records’ release. One reason? An interest in pertinent mental health issues “which have not yet been revealed through other means.”

Mental health issues are a big part of the Covenant story. The police knew within hours of the shooting that Hale, a female who identified as a transgender male, had been under the care of psychologists since age 6. She spent two decades as a patient at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and was twice evaluated for in-patient commitment. But further information about her treatment is scarce. Conservative Nashville radio host Brian Wilson, however, dropped several bombshells gained from an unnamed source beginning in May 2024. He told his audience that Hale had admitted a lot to her therapist—she allegedly considered suicide and fantasized about killing her father and committing mass murder at a school.

And yet it appears nothing was done to make sure she didn’t carry out those fantasies. Tennessee law mandates that mental health professionals take action to protect identifiable potential victims. “A sobering thought that six people killed by the shooter might well be alive today if the therapist had warned police,” Wilson mused aloud on his show.

Wilson wasn’t the only radio personality making waves. Petitioner Michael Patrick Leahy has a show, too. On June 4, he interviewed Garet Davidson, a retired Nashville police officer. Davidson told Leahy the FBI sent a memo to Chief John Drake a few weeks after the Covenant shooting. The memo advised the department against releasing what the FBI calls “legacy tokens”—certain materials left from mass shootings. Instead, it highlighted the precedent for destroying such documents. While the memo doesn’t mention Covenant directly, it’s dated May 11, 2023, just two days after Leahy filed a lawsuit against the FBI to compel the release of Hale’s written documents. That was in addition to his lawsuit in state court.

On June 5, 2024, Leahy published an unverified copy of the memo in his digital newspaper, The Tennessee Star. The Star also broke other big news that day. It claimed to have obtained dozens of handwritten pages authored by Hale, including a journal recovered from her vehicle at the scene of the attack.

Within a week, podcaster Steven Crowder invited Leahy to his Louder With Crowder show to discuss the new findings. “We have a mental health crisis in this country, and the mental health system in Nashville massively failed at multiple levels,” Leahy told the audience. “That’s the real story.”

The flow of information shocked the police department for a second time. Myles ordered Leahy to appear in court.

More than a dozen attorneys showed up on June 17, 2024, expecting a hearing over the leaked documents. But Leahy and the leak weren’t the center of attention. Instead, both sides spent an hour pleading for Myles to issue a ruling. They said it was past time for the chancellor to issue her opinion. Would the Covenant documents be released or not?

They would not. On July 4 at two minutes to midnight, Myles finally filed her decision. It was a full 58 pages long—60 if you count all the attorneys’ names and addresses—and they all boiled down to this: Nothing would be released at this time. No materials from the police investigation until it’s complete. No records that would violate the school safety exception to the public records act. And none of Hale’s writings. Ever.

Myles’ reasons could be summed up in two words—copycats and copyrights. Primarily, copyrights. “State law must cede to federal law,” she wrote. “Therefore, the materials created by Hale are exempted from disclosure based on the federal Copyright Act.”

But Myles also seemed swayed by the “real, present, and credible” risk of copycat behavior. She listed Hale as an example, explaining that she used the writings of perpetrators in 31 similar crimes to plan her attack at Covenant.

But even with that ruling, the case isn’t over. Open records advocates have filed an appeal.

Ironically, a sizable portion of what are believed to be Hale’s writings are now available to the public. Leahy unapologetically released them on Sept. 3, 2024, publishing the journal he says he legally obtained months earlier. The Tennessee Star referred to its contents in dozens of previous articles, but this time the whole thing ended up online. Downloadable and free. Some 90 handwritten pages.

Nashville police, it’s believed, still hold a thousand more.