Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, called out the Metro Nashville Police Department’s (MNPD) lack of interest and work in obtaining the full mental health record of 28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale, the self-identified transgender man who carried out the Covenant School shooting on March 27, 2023.
On Wednesday, MNPD announced the conclusion of its more than two-year investigation into the shooting by releasing a 48-page report, which ultimately concluded that Hale, despite identifying as a transgender man and being a 22-year mental health patient, carried out the pre-planned attack based on her desire for “notoriety.”
In the report, MNPD said “not all of Hale’s mental health records were able to be obtained during the investigation due to factors outside of the control of the MNPD Homicide Unit,” claiming that a “leak” to the media led to the killer’s parents “no longer” having “confidence” in MNPD and stopped sharing Hale’s medical records dated beyond 2019.
Page 35 of the report reads:
As detectives were preparing to obtain records from Hale’s third and final therapist, as well as an eating disorder clinic which treated her in 2017, events which occurred outside of the control of the MNPD Homicide Unit derailed the process. After information from the case file was leaked to the media, which included information regarding Hale’s medical and mental health treatment that was to be kept in the strictest of confidence, Hale’s parents no longer had confidence in the ability of the MNPD to safeguard this information. After being unable to devise a mechanism to satisfy their concerns and obtain their consent, and without any other legal mechanism being available to obtain those records, further attempts to obtain those records were abandoned.
Noting the “many flaws” with the report, Pappert said MNPD’s lack of work to obtain the shooter’s full mental health history was the report’s largest “red flag.”
“[MNPD] was able to get [records from] the first couple of doctors, but they seem to be blaming us. They say that once we started reporting about the materials we received legally, including Hale’s 2023 manifesto, the parents clammed up and stopped sharing information with police,” Pappert explained on Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“For some reason that is not explained in the report, there was apparently no attempt to go get a warrant to get this mental health information. So we don’t actually know a lot about what was going on in Hale’s head during the final years of her life, simply because I guess the parents didn’t give it up voluntarily,” Pappert added.
Pappert further honed in on MNPD’s relationship with Hale’s parents, noting how a notable amount of information included in the department’s final report does not align with information provided by the killer’s parents during a July 12, 2023 interview with MNPD investigators.
“I believe another flaw with the report has to do with the interactions with the parents. For example, we have…audio of the parents being interviewed by Metro Nashville Police. They make a couple claims, one of which they said they didn’t know Audrey Hale had all of these guns. They didn’t know that she was buying materials related to the Columbine killer. What we then see in this report that came out yesterday, it turns out the parents did know she was buying guns. They let it go for two years before they finally intervened, made her get rid of them, and she started buying them again in secret. But that’s not what they said in the interview. That’s not what they said at all,” Pappert explained.
“This keeps coming up with the parents where they said very specific claims to Metro Nashville in that early interview only for this report two years later to not match what those claims were. One must wonder why the parents stopped cooperating at some point…and why were they handled with kid gloves?” Pappert added.
Pappert concluded that MNPD’s report is a “big whitewash” of its analysis of the killer.
“It would be very difficult to do a comprehensive analysis of other reports like this and come up with one that has more glaring issues. If we had another three hours, I could go over a million more flaws…This seems to be a big whitewash,” Pappert said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
