Audrey Hale, the 28-year-old transgender shooter in Nashville, reportedly wanted to kill children so that she would not be forgotten. According to police, the only concern that she had throughout her “rage storms” was not that she would be called a mass murderer or child killer but a racist. Her primary grievance appeared to be with Creswell Middle School, where she was bullied as a transgender student. However, she dropped that target at the last minute because it had a large black population and she did not want to be thought of as a racist.
Hale shot and killed six victims at a Nashville Christian school on March 27, 2023. However, she originally planned to shoot up another school. She created detailed plans for the attack on Creswell Middle School, which she attended, and she blamed for the past bullying. She said that she wanted to become a “god . . . by killing victims nobody would forget: children.”
According to the police report, she spent months working on the plans for the Creswell attack:
“Her OCD was manifest during this time with the excruciating detail she gave to the attack, including precise timelines, detailed descriptions of the clothing she would wear, and the specific route she would progress through the school. The more she pored over the details, the more convinced she was of her own success. The ‘rage storms’ that interspersed these plans also became more heated, showing Hale’s anger was reaching the boiling point.”
However, by March 2020, she changed her mind. Not to spare the lives of innocent children, mind you. She realized that Creswell Middle School had a large minority population that people might think that she was racist. So, she decided to kill the children at the Covenant Christian School because they were mainly white. She would prove she was not a racist by killing those children because of their race:
Hale began to express doubts about targeting Creswell Middle. Her doubts weren’t necessarily about the intention to kill children, but more about the racial demographics of the school. Hale knew a large portion of the student body was black. Though she had no qualms about killing anyone regardless of specific demographical categories, she worried she might be branded as a racist, which would remove her ability to give the motive and reasoning for the attack and [instead] allow others to choose it for her once she was dead.
She wanted to be a mass child killer. The last thing that she wanted was for people to think that she was a racist.