The officers who took down the transgender attacker responsible for the deadly shooting in Nashville Monday have been identified.
QUICK FACTS:
- Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake said Officer Rex Englebert and Officer Michael Collazo were the responding officers who shot 28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale and “fatally wounded her” during Monday’s school shooting in Tennessee.
- Drake said Officer Englebert has been a part of MNPD for four years while Officer Collazo is a nine-year veteran.
- “Chief John Drake and the men and women of the MNPD join all of Nashville in mourning today’s deaths of six innocent persons, three nine-year-olds and three adults, at the hands of an active shooter at Covenant Church/School on Burton Hills Drive,” a statement from the Nashville Police said
- According to Drake, Hale fired at officers at the scene from a window on the second floor before they found her in a main room.
- “The first call to 911 about shots being fired in the building came in at 10:13 a.m. Officers rushed to the campus, made entry, and began clearing the building. Shots were heard coming from the second level. It was on the second floor, in a common area, that a team of officers encountered Hale shooting (she had been firing through a window at arriving police cars). Two members of an officer team fired on Hale and fatally wounded her,” Chief Drake said.
- MNPD confirmed six people were killed, three of the deceased being students.
REPUBLICAN SENATOR JOSH HAWLEY (MO) ON INVESTIGATING THE NASHVILLE SHOOTING AS A HATE CRIME:
“We should be clear about what happened in Nashville. Police say the shooting was ‘targeted,’” Hawley tweeted. “That makes it a federal hate crime – against Christian children and teachers. Targeting victims on the basis of religious affiliation is a hate crime. It should be investigated as such.”
BACKGROUND:
- According to police, Hale drove to the campus in her Honda Fit and was heavily armed with two AR-style weapons and a pistol.
- For the first few hours following the shooting, police identified the shooter as a 28-year-old woman, eventually reporting that Hale was “transgender.”
- Police said Hale was a former student of the school, and created a detailed map of the campus and written manifesto before walking in and fatally shooting six people.
- While the details of the manifesto have yet to be released, Nashville Police released images of Hale’s murder weapons, one transcribed with the word “Hellfire” in red letters at the top.
- The shooting comes the same week as a planned transgender “Day of Vengeance” is set to be carried out later this week.
- The “Trans Radical Activist Network (TRAN),” says the group is seeking revenge for what they call “trans genocide,” a theory that claims transgender people are “systemically targeted” with violence.
- Although there has been no indication that the event has been canceled, various “trans activist” social media accounts have been made private following Monday’s events.
