Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said there appears to be “zero interest” among the officers of the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) assigned to the Covenant School killer case to finalize the case nearly two years after the shooting occurred.
Over the weekend, MNPD Public Affairs Director Don Aaron revealed for the first time to The Star that there had been a staff change at the department among the lead detective who had been in charge of the Covenant case from its inception on March 27, 2023.
The previous lead detective, Bobby Roland Samuels Jr., reportedly resigned from MNPD in early 2024, which led to the case being reassigned to Detective Mathis, who, as Aaron noted in his remarks to The Star, is also working “other homicide cases.”
Noting this, in addition to Aaron’s previous comments dating back to last year, where he claimed that the case was in its documentation phase and a recent chancery court ruling that none of the writings left by Covenant School killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale shall be released, Pappert said there seems to be “zero interest” in MNPD closing the case.
“We already know there’s a chancery court ruling where the judge said you don’t have to release any case files so long as the case remains ongoing. So it seems as though this is a very busy detective. He must be charged with every homicide in the city investigating them because it’s been a year without any, it seems, real progress,” Pappert explained on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“Don Aaron told us almost a year ago that this was in the documentation phase of the case and we seem to still be there. It’s very disconcerting,” Pappert added.
Given the change in staff among the lead detective of the case, Pappert questioned whether there was a loss of information relating to the case during the handoff.
“I would also add we have the transcript of an interview that the former detective, Detective Bobby Samuels, conducted with [Hale’s] parents. This new detective was not one of the three who conducted that interview. I almost wonder, and I’m not denigrating this guy whatsoever, but I wonder how much knowledge he had of the case before he walked in,” Pappert said.
“[Detective Bobby Samuels] was moving very fast in his investigation, this is the author of the Vandy psych document where it appeared the detective was going through medical records from Audrey Elizabeth Hale and writing about her several instances where she would tell her therapist about her urges to kill her father or commit other types of crimes…It seems as though, this is just my opinion, that this detective was pursuing a case against Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where Hale was a 22 year mental health patient, and it seems as though this became an avenue he could not pursue, and then he left the department,” Pappert added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
