Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said the Metro Nashville Police Department’s (MNPD) 48-page report into the Covenant School attack committed on March 27, 2023 by 28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale appears to be “political” and “missed the mark.”
On Wednesday, MNPD officially wrapped up its more than two-year investigation into the attack by releasing the report, which ultimately concluded that Hale, despite identifying as a transgender man prior to killing six at the Christian school she once attended and being a 22-year mental health patient, carried out the pre-planned attack based on her desire for “notoriety.”
On page 37 of the report, MNPD writes:
In short, the motive determined over the course of the investigation was notoriety…Hale longed for her name and actions to be remembered long after she was dead. She wanted absolute control of the narrative surrounding the attack, particularly her motives.
While MNPD acknowledged Hale’s “gender identified as male and used he/him as preferred pronouns” prior to her death, the department failed to mention the word “transgender” throughout its entire report, which Pappert noted appeared to be a “political” move.
“It seems political as so much of this has been. This quest for fame, I do think that was part of it, but I think they slightly missed the mark,” Pappert explained on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“They do hint at this or mention it somewhere within the 48 pages of what she really wanted; she had created some sort of theology for herself that through committing these murders, she would become a god-like entity that would be transgender, it would be Aiden Hale, the transgender name she adopted. There is a little bit of mention of that, but of course they don’t dare mention transgender, so they can’t give you the full story there,” Pappert added.
Noting how the killer’s 2023 journal leading up to the attack – which was exclusively and legally obtained by The Star last year – provided that Hale obsessed over her transgender ideology, Pappert said MNPD was “crazy” to “completely ignore all mention of the killer’s gender identity.”
“You have to be a crazy person to not mention that on every other page [of the killer’s journal] she writes, ‘I’m a transgender. Nobody accepts me. I want to kill everybody because I’m a transgender and nobody accepts me’,” Pappert said.
Papert discussed another “glaring omission” from MNPD’s report, which was its lack of discussion regarding the State of Tennessee’s duty to warn law enforcement, which was expected to be relevant given that Hale told mental health professionals she fantasized about killing her father and committing a mass shooting at a school, but potential victims were not warned.
“This is a glaring omission from the report, and I’m very interested in untangling this loose thread. We know from a police document we received the same time we did Hale’s manifesto…that Hale’s parents were informed from a Metro Nashville investigator that Hale wanted to kill her father. They learned this from mental health professionals ostensibly at Vanderbilt University Medical Center where Hale was receiving treatment,” Pappert explained.
“This would seem to indicate that there was a duty to warn that was failed when it came to Hale’s father. That may not count when it comes to the Covenant School, when it comes to these horrible six deaths, but it seems to me that that is an omission from this report, which of course, does not even mention whether there was any failure to warn,” 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.
