NASHVILLE, TN (WSAU-REUTERS) – At a private Christian school in the capital city of Tennessee, a heavily armed 28-year-old on Monday fatally shot three children and three adult staff members before being shot and killed by police, according to authorities.
At 10:13 a.m., the police started getting calls about a shooter at The Covenant School. According to Don Aaron, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, officers could hear gunfire coming from the second level of the school.
Aaron said the shooter had at least two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun. Two officers from a five-person team shot at her in what Aaron described as a lobby area, and she was dead by 10:27 a.m.
At a press conference, authorities confirmed that the 28-year-old woman who killed six people, three of whom were children, at a Christian school in Nashville identified as transgender.
On Monday afternoon, local authorities along with the FBI searched the home of the female shooter. During the search, police said they discovered “a manifesto” as well as detailed maps of the school with points of entry. The police chief stated that authorities have a theory about the shooter’s motivation but are not yet ready to share it.
The six victims were identified by police as three 9-year-old children and three adults aged 60 and up.
The victims are “Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, all age 9, Cynthia Peak, age 61, Katherine Koonce, age 60, and Mike Hill, age 61,” according to the Metro Nashville Police Department.
Over the last 18 years, deadly shootings and attempted attacks at schools have become more common in the United States, but a female attacker is extremely rare. Since 1966, only four of the 191 mass shootings documented by The Violence Project, a non-profit research organization, have been carried out by a female attacker.
When four or more people are killed in a shooting, it is referred to as a “mass shooting” (excluding the shooter). According to that definition, there have been 13 incidents involving lone shooters since the beginning of the twenty-first century, killing 66 people and injuring 81 others.
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