More than two weeks after a mass shooting at a Nashville Christian school, investigators have not yet identified a clear motive in the attacker’s journal writings, and authorities have not provided any details publicly to back up their early suggestion that the shooter may have felt resentment toward the school.
One of Tennessee’s top law enforcement officials said in a recent meeting that the writings of the 28-year-old shooter, Audrey Hale, appear to be ramblings and indicative of a mental health struggle.
A federal law enforcement source verified to NBC News that no direct motive has been established in the investigation and suggested that the driving force of the attack was similar to previous school shootings in which the assailant was drawn to other mass killers.
On the day of the March 27 shooting, Police Chief John Drake told NBC News that Hale may have targeted Covenant because “there’s some belief that there was some resentment for having to go to that school.” He noted that the investigation was still in its early stages.
Hale attended Covenant, a pre-kindergarten through sixth-grade private school, at around 10 years old, a former headmaster said.
What spurred Hale to target The Covenant School about two decades after attending there has led to rampant speculation and placed scrutiny on what police initially said was their focus on the investigation. In the hours after the shooting, Drake said of the shooter that officials “feel that she identifies as trans, but we’re still in the initial investigation into all of that and if it actually played a role into this incident.”
Some conservatives seized on that angle to blame the killings at the Christian school on Hale’s gender identity, with the hashtag #TransTerrorism trending on Twitter. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., called for federal law enforcement agencies to investigate the shooting as a religious hate crime citing law enforcement reports that the shooter “targeted” the Christian…
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