FBI Releases Covenant School Shooter’s Journals

On March 27, 2023, a former student entered The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, armed with two rifles and a handgun. Within minutes, three nine-year-old students and three staff members were dead. The shooter, Audrey Hale, was killed by responding officers before more lives could be lost. In the two years since, the community has grieved, the school has tried to heal, and investigators have worked to piece together why this happened.

Now, after a long legal battle and months of controversy, the FBI has released more than 100 pages of Hale’s journal writings. These documents, originally discovered in Hale’s vehicle, were kept under wraps by law enforcement for over two years. In the meantime, a set of pages leaked last fall to The Tennessee Star reignited a wave of public outrage, political opportunism, and misinformation. That leak is now confirmed to be part of what the FBI just made public on its Vault website.

I read those pages when they first leaked. Anyone reading them with sense and without an agenda will quickly come to the same conclusion I did. Audrey Hale was deeply unwell. The entries were filled with anguish, confusion, fixation on death, self-hatred, and loneliness. Hale wrote about wanting to die, about feeling unloved and unseen, and about her yearning for a different life. She planned her death in detail, marked out the week it would happen, and left behind to-do lists that blended the mundane with the macabre. She mentioned watching movies, reading books, and then taking innocent lives with the belief it would somehow make her own pain matter.

She should not have had access to guns. But she did. And like so many others in this country, that access turned her inner pain into a public tragedy. There’s another hard truth in this story, though. It’s difficult to help someone who doesn’t want help. Hale had been under mental health care. Her providers were aware she struggled, but according to police, they had no legal grounds to take further action. No red flag laws were in place to remove the weapons. No system existed to bridge the gap between her pain and the people who could have intervened.

Unfortunately, not everyone reads these journals to understand. Those with a right-wing agenda will focus only on Hale’s gender identity, as they have from the beginning. To them, nothing else matters, not her autism, not her suicidal ideation, not her grief, not her isolation. They will try to use these documents as evidence that transgender people are inherently dangerous. They will ignore every school shooter who wasn’t trans, every journal filled with similar thoughts from cisgender men, and every system failure that allowed another person to slip through the cracks. These people can’t be reasoned with. They’re not interested in understanding anything beyond their narrative.

The documents themselves are below. They won’t provide all the answers. But they do reveal the kind of pain that festers when it’s ignored, and the kind of violence that can follow when it’s armed.

(Sources)