Tipsheet

Remember the Trans Nashville Shooter? Well...

Mia Cathell
Mia Cathell  |  April 04, 2025 1:15 PM

After two years of "meticulous" detective work, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD) is closing its investigation into the Covenant School mass shooting on March 27, 2023, the agency's Chief John Drake announced Wednesday.

Upon closure of the case, the MNPD's Homicide Unit has released a 48-page final report detailing the probe's findings.

Among them, on a page titled "What She Didn't Leave Behind," the police agency disputes that the "transgender"-identified shooter, Audrey "Aiden" Hale, had ever left a manifesto divulging her motive.

This manifesto in question was the subject of several public records requests and ensuing litigation on multiple fronts over its release. After authorities refused to make the manifesto publicly available, parts of it were leaked, including excerpts of Hale's writings showing she wanted to shoot white children in particular.

By definition, the MNPD asserts, a manifesto is "a mission statement or other document written and disseminated by an individual or group to enumerate or expound upon the guiding principles and beliefs that inform their actions." Regardless of length, a manifesto is "a single document that outlines all the factors, intentions, and objectives of an individual act or a series of actions," according to the MNPD.

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"In this case, a manifesto didn't exist," the MNPD concludes. "Hale never left behind a single document explaining why she committed the attack, why she specifically targeted The Covenant, and what she hoped to gain, if anything, with the attack."

What did exist, per the MNPD, was simply "a series of notebooks, art composition books, and media files" documenting Hale's planning and preparation, the events in Hale's life that motivated her to carry out the mass murder, and her hopes related to the outcome of the attack.

"No single document, notebook, or digital device contains the answer to those questions," the MNPD says. "The answer is scattered throughout all the assembled material, which required a careful review of the material to understand Hale's motive."

According to the MNPD, she chose the Covenant School not for racial, religious, or economic reasons, given the affluent area. "It is certainly true she raged over these topics at times in her writings," the MNPD says. "But none of those motives impacted her decision to attack The Covenant."

"Kill those kids!!! [T]hose crackers going to fancy private schools with those fancy khakis + sports backpacks w/ their daddies mustangs + convertibles," Hale wrote on February 3, 2023, more than a month before the mass murder. "[F]**k you little s**ts. I wish to shoot you weak a** d**ks w/ your mop yellow hair. Wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little f****ts w/ your white privilege. [F]**k you f****ts."

In other entries, Hale wrote about wanting "a boy body in heaven" and craving "brown love."

Initially, in the lead-up to her shooting spree, Hale had intended to target Creswell Middle, a black-majority magnet school for the arts, which she also attended and where she was bullied for being "a rich white girl." But by March 2020, Hale became concerned about the racial demographics of the school since the student body is predominantly black. Hale was worried she might be "branded as a racist" for committing a massacre there, so she switched to targeting the Covenant School instead.

Though investigators never officially classified the attack as a hate crime, the MNPD found Hale had believed that followers of the Christian faith were "meek and afraid," hence why she set her sights on the private Christian elementary school, "a soft target." She was further emboldened by the fact that the students were "too young to effectively fight back or flee far," the MNPD says. Moreover, the age of the children and the school's Christian affiliation would ensure she'd attain infamy.

As for Hale's motive, MNPD suspects that she solely sought "notoriety" by leaving behind years of material, including 16 composition notebooks containing nearly 1,300 pages of content, to be discovered and analyzed.

"There have been numerous theories proposed by parties outside the investigation as to why Hale committed the attack," the MNPD laments. Some of those speculations have been based on snippets of Hale's writings leaked to the media, while others were "wildly posited for no other reason than to elicit controversy or attention," according to the MNPD, adding that those theories can "easily be debunked" by the trove of material handwritten by her.