‘Let’s go!”: Officers faced uncertainty of where victims, suspect were in Nashville school shooting

When the suspected shooter drove into the parking lot of Nashville’s Covenant School at 9:53 a.m. local time on Monday, a maintenance worker was standing outside with a leaf blower and a group of children were at a playground, some enjoying the sunny spring morning on a swing set, according to security video from the hilltop campus.

The suspect, identified as 28-year-old Audrey Hale, circled the nearly empty parking lot in a four-door Honda Fit, driving by the playground before parking.

Hale sat in the car composing an Instagram message to Averianna Patton, a former middle school basketball teammate, and sent the message at 9:57 a.m., writing, “I’m making plans to die nowadays. THIS IS NOT A JOKE!!!”

“You’ll most definitely pay attention about me at the news once I die,” Hale wrote, in step with the message Patton shared with ABC News. “This is my closing good-bye. I really like you,” Hale wrote, adding a heart emoji. “See you once more in some other lifestyles.”

A police spokesperson told ABC News that Hale was assigned female at birth, identified as transgender, and pointed to a social media account linked to Hale that included use of the pronouns he/him.

Hale as soon as attended the Covenant School, a preschool to sixth-grade establishment run by means of the Presbyterian church, and didn’t have a legal report. But cops stated clinical pros handled Hale for an emotional dysfunction.

Nashville Police Chief John Drake said Hale left home on Monday morning with a red bag. Before walking out the door, Hale’s mother asked what was in the bag, Drake said.

“I feel she simply pushed aside it as it used to be a motherly factor and did not glance in the bag as a result of, on the time, she did not know (the suspect) had any guns and did not assume any another way,” stated Drake, including that the investigation published Hale had bought seven guns, together with two assault-type rifles and a pistol Hale used to be armed with all the way through the rampage that left 3 adults and 3 9-year-old youngsters lifeless.

School surveillance video captured the suspect at 10:10 a.m. using one of the high-powered rifles to blast through the locked glass doors on the side of the school and stepping through the broken glass to enter the main school building.

Drake stated the school custodian, 61-year-old Mike Hall, a father of seven youngsters and a grandfather to fourteen, used to be status in the hallway and used to be fatally struck by means of a minimum of one of the photographs the suspect fired during the glass front doorways.

Other security video clips from inside the school showed the suspect walking by the church office before circling back and briefly entering the apparently empty office through an unlocked door and emerging, pointing the barrel of a gun down the hallway and then going through a set of unlocked double doors.

Drake said the suspect encountered Katherine Koonce, the head of the Covenant School, outside of Koonce’s office. The chief said Koonce was fatally shot in a hallway after possibly getting into a confrontation with the shooter.

Police said that at 10:13 a.m. someone from inside the school called 911, reporting shots fired.

The hallways, offices and classrooms, according to the videos, appeared empty as the suspect — wearing a red ball cap turned backward, camouflage pants, sneakers, black gloves and wielding two assault-type rifles, one being held and the other slung over a shoulder — walked around, entering doors.

At 10:20 a.m., a security video showed Hale walking down a hall, passing an office with a sign reading “Children’s ministry.”

“Based on what I do know concerning the school and the group round it, those who fled would were ready to escape into some beautiful critical quilt and concealment spaces beautiful fast according to the terrain. But those who were now not ready to do this and locked down the development, from what I perceive, did that as it should be as neatly,” Brink Fidler, president of Defend System, an energetic shooter coaching corporate that carried out drills with personnel at Covenant School closing yr, informed ABC News.

While teachers hid with students in rooms and closets, others fled the campus on foot, according to witnesses.

Actress Melissa Joan Hart told ABC News she was driving near the school with her husband when they noticed children coming out of a wooded area and stopped to help.

“We helped a category of kindergarteners go a hectic freeway. They were mountaineering out of the woods,” Hart said. “They were looking to get away the shooter state of affairs at their school. So, we helped a lot of these tiny sons and daughters go the street and get their academics over there. And we helped a mother reunite together with her youngsters.”

Katie Robbins, who lives near the school, told ABC News she watched the chaos unfold from her window.

“My middle virtually exploded,” Robbins said. “Like, ‘Oh my God, it is going down right here.”

Robbins said she saw a group of children and their teacher sprinting from the school, crossing the street and huddling at the gate outside her home.

“A little bit boy stated, ‘Help me get inside of. How can I am getting inside of?'” Robbins recalled. “I simply sought after to assist him and assist all of them get inside of, escape.”

She said she and a neighbor helped them get out of harm’s way.

The first officers arrived on the scene at 10:21 a.m. and entered the school two minutes later. Drake said 14 minutes elapsed between officers getting the first 911 call and when the suspect was killed.

Officer Rex Englebert, one of the first officers to arrive on the scene, immediately went to the rear of his police SUV cruiser and retrieved an assault-type rifle from a bag, according to footage from his body-worn camera that was made public on Tuesday.

“The children are all locked down, however we now have two children that we do not know where they’re,” a school personnel member is heard in the body-camera pictures telling Englebert, as he approached the entrance door of the school.

The staffer relayed to Englebert a report she received over her cellphone from inside the school and instructed the officer how to get to the stairwell leading to the second floor, saying, “all of the means down this corridor. At the top of this corridor is Scholarship Hall. They simply heard gunshots down there, after which up the steps are a number of children.”

Englebert went to the front door and was handed a key by another school staffer standing there, according to the body-camera video. Englebert called out for three officers to join him as he used the key to open the door, yelling, “Let’s move!”

As Englebert and other officers entered the school, sirens were going off, according to the body camera footage. As the officers went classroom-to-classroom searching for the suspect and victims, one was heard yelling about the suspect, “We have no idea where he’s.”

Then the officers heard gunshots. “Sounds adore it’s upstairs,” Englebert is heard saying.

At least five officers are then seen going up a stairwell to the second floor at 10:24 a.m. as the gunshots grew louder. Englebert appeared to take the lead, followed by several officers, including officer Michael Collazo, who was armed with a handgun, according to his body camera video.

When they reached an open area, the officers spotted and engaged the suspect, who was standing near a broken window, at 10:25 a.m. Someone yelled, “Reloading” as Englebert shot the suspect and Collazo additionally opened hearth. According to regulation enforcement resources, the suspect used to be killed at 10:27 a.m.