The Metropolitan Nashville Police has released disturbing body cam video of officers’ engagement with the Covenant School shooter who killed three adults and three children.
In a tweet, the police posted the video, saying, “MNPD Officers Rex Engelbert, a 4-year veteran, and Michael Collazo, a 9-year veteran, were part of a team of first responders to the Covenant campus Mon morning. They fired on the active shooter, who was killed. This is their body camera footage.”
Sound is audible in some of the video, including alarms, shouts and shots fired. A staff member can be heard alerting an officer about the shooting, and officers can be seen quickly reacting. The officers are then seen making their way through various classrooms until eventually they arrive at the school’s second floor, where the shooter can be heard shooting at responding officers. Soon after, the video shows the shooter down on the ground.
Police got the first call about the shooting at 10:13am Central Time Monday and “by 10:27, the shooter was deceased” after engaging police, the police department’s Don Aaron said at a Monday afternoon news conference.
Later in the day, police identified the shooter as 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who resided near Nashville and was a former student of The Covenant School, a private Christian school for kids pre-K through 6th grade.
Police also identified the victims, including children Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney. According to police, two of them were 9-year-olds and one “was 8, about to be 9.” The three adults killed in the massacre were Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61, all of whom were identified as school staff members.
This was the 128th mass shooting in the U.S. so far this year and the third mass shooting to take the lives of elementary school children. On May 24 a mass shooter at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas killed 19 fourth graders and two teachers. That was the second deadliest elementary school shooting in U.S. history, after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, when a gunman slaughtered 20 first graders and six adults.
