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Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto Released

June 11, 2024

Nashville Christian school shooter Audrey Hale believed dying in a mass murder would allow her to experience an eternal gender transition, receiving a male body that would receive the erotic affection of brown-skinned females in Heaven, new documents reveal. Despite a 14-month police blackout, a local conservative news outlet has obtained dozens of pages of Hale’s writings.

The handwritten entries, which deeply reflect transgender ideology and critical race theory, show the trans-identifying mass child murderer intensely hated her father, referred to Jesus with a curse word, and had fantasized school shootings since she was in middle school. Officials close to the case say police appear to justify denying the public access to these documents by citing a stalled investigation into whether members of the psychological community — from whom Hale received treatment since childhood — suppressed information that could have prevented the tragedy.

Last March 27, Audrey Elizabeth Hale entered Nashville’s Covenant School, a church-run Christian private school, killing six people: three third graders and three staff members. She told others that she had left behind voluminous materials that would explain her motivation, and police reportedly uncovered more than 20 journals from the 28-year-old’s home, dating back to her adolescence. Yet more than a year later, officials have refused to release the writings, citing an “ongoing investigation.”

A conservative website, the Tennessee Star, has obtained 80 pages of a journal which police recovered from Hale’s vehicle on the day of the Covenant School massacre. Hale wrote less of a full-blown manifesto than an ongoing diary, slowly exposing the growing hold depression and extremism exerted over her as she expounded her plans and intentions for the assault over several years. The writings disclose layers of motives including frustrated lesbian affairs, lifelong psychological problems, pharmaceutical side effects, an irrational hatred of her father, and the profound influence of cultural and political tropes associated with critical theory.

Hale’s spiral into mass murder appears to have begun, in part, due to unrequited same-sex attraction and the failure of a subsequent lesbian relationship. Hale idolized a former middle- and high-school classmate named Sydney Sims, who died in a 2022 car accident. Although Sims seems never to have returned Hale’s interests, Hale made regular posts about Sims’s death on social media until the shooting. In her journal, she lashes out at her father when he encouraged her to move on. In another journal entry, Hale writes to Sims that “maybe, just maybe you’ll give a kiss to me in heaven. God knows I can’t get it down here.”

Those close to Hale say she began to identify as a transgender male after a girlfriend broke up with her. “She had been openly grieving about that on social media, and during the grieving is when she announced that she wanted to be addressed as a male,” Maria Colomy, a former teacher who instructed Hale at the Nossi College of Art & Design, told The New York Times.

Hale’s father, Ronald Hale, revealed how deeply she accepted the popular-yet-false notion that gender transition is an easy process with few if any drawbacks. In reality, the “gender-transition” process involves a lifetime of cross-sex hormone injections and, frequently, multiple expensive surgeries. In fact, Dr. Shayne Taylor convinced Hale’s hospital to adopt transgender surgeries, because “they require a lot of follow-ups. They require a lot of time, and they make money — they make money for the hospital.” Hale apparently had been misled about the extent of the process.

“She didn’t know what was involved in it,” Mr. Hale told investigators, saying she “had a child-like view” of the issue. “She figured she could, like, go to the hospital and just get it done. … She thought she could have an operation.”

A three-page entry from shortly before the assault, titled “My Imaginary Penis,” discloses how deeply Hale had imbibed extreme gender ideology. “My penis exists in my head,” wrote Hale, illustrating her journal with a crude image. She felt that after a tortured childhood, “I finally found the answer — that changing one’s gender is possible.”

Hale would come to identify herself as her male alter ego, “Aiden.” Those who have seen the journals say her handwriting changes from a flowing female script to a taut, seemingly angry style on entries she signed with her male name.

But the writings show her social, and possibly medical, transition did not improve her mental health. After changing her gender identity, Hale deems herself “the most unhappy boy alive.” She writes that most women are attracted to men — and her self-identity did not change their attraction. “I will be of no use of love for any girl if I don’t have what they need: boy’s body / male gender,” she writes.

“[M]y body doesn’t make me a female,” Hale asserts in one entry. “I wish death on myself cause of the pure hatred of my female gender.”

Hale also appears to have internalized negative tropes about other immutable characteristics, referring to herself as “white nothingness” in a February 10, 2023, journal entry. “I am nothing. Brown love is the most beautiful kind.” (Paradoxically, Hale apparently also saw herself as a tortured elitist. After writing it would be better if she led a normal life with real friends, she consoles herself, “The most brilliant people suffer the most and are the most isolated from everything they love.”)

Hale’s embrace of radical left-wing ideologies harmonizes with a previously released page from Hale’s writings, obtained by conservative activist Steven Crowder, in which Hale rages against her former classmates at Covenant School in terms borrowed from critical race theory: “Wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little fa***ts w/ your white privileges.” Hale also believed the nation oppressed transgender-identifying people. “So now in America, it makes one a criminal to have a gun or, be transgender, or non-binary,” Hale writes. “[W]ith no rights, anyone’s country is a s***** dictatorship.”

The writings uncover the shooter’s hopelessness and despair. “Nothing on earth can save me… never ending pain. Religion won’t save,” she claims. Hale regularly ended her entries, “Everything hurts.”

Hale believed by killing young Christian schoolchildren, she could strike out at privileged young people and mystically transcend her physical limitations to become a male desired by dark-skinned girls. “The [cocoon] of my old self will die when I leave my body behind and the boy in me will be free; in the butterfly transformation; the real me,” she forecasts.

“If God won’t give me a boy body in heaven, then Jesus is a f*****,” she curses.

The entries reveal Hale nurtured a deep-seated hatred of her father, expressed in five entries during the brief period covered by her final journal. Hale expresses her desire to kill her dad, claiming at one point that he is mentally ill. “I hate when my dad loves on the cats; not me,” she writes. “He never once loved on me for years, maybe like ever (as a child; maybe).” She then turned to address him directly: “I don’t care if you die. I want to kill you.” In addition to her encyclopedic journals, police recovered a large number of video diaries, in some of which she would mock her father and pretend to injure him literally behind his back.

Hale’s disturbed mind had so turned her father into a scapegoat for her lifetime of suffering that police officers revealed, the morning of the shooting, Hale planned to slash her father’s tires, murder children, then create a distraction to escape the school, and return to murder him.

Audrey Hale also looked down on her mother, whom she wrote “grew up, conservatively” in a world where “LGBTQ — especially transgender — was an enigma, nearly non-existent.” Hale bemoaned the fact that “my mom sees me as a daughter — and she’d not bear to want to lose that daughter because a son would be the death of Audrey.”

Hale apparently transferred the natural affection she owed her parents to her toys and stuffed animals. Hale’s handwritten entries reveal a lifelong fixation with the inanimate objects that bled into the erotic. She seemingly lost herself for hours at a time in her room, using them to enact her sexual fantasies. She came to identify with a male baby doll named Tony, excited to simulate male sexual intercourse with female animals. Through that fantasy, she writes, “I can pretend to be them [and] do the things boys do [and] experience my boy self as Tony.” Eventually, she realized this consumed too many of her waking hours. “I am such a pervert,” she writes.I waste too much time in my fantasies.”

She apparently got over her familial bitterness in a final farewell note to her family, which she posted on her bedroom wall. She concludes her two-paragraph letter by saying, “I’m sorry, but it is my time to go… I love you, Aiden.” That signature proves Hale identified as a transgender male at the time of the Christian school shooting; the legacy media have universally used her birth name and implied her gender identity was fuzzy.

Sources obtained by those close to the investigation reveal how long Hale planned her shooting. “The shooter had been thinking about various school shooting scenarios since she was in middle school,” reported Nashville talk radio host Brian Wilson, who has uncovered documents related to the shooting. Hale’s writings also indicate a long-running death wish.

“For 5 years I planned to die,” writes Hale in an undated entry apparently written last March. “Now I am finally ready to go.” The diaries indicate that Hale originally scheduled her assault for January 17 but postponed the shooting, because “[i]t was too sudden. I’m unstable. I hope I feel numb in the days coming.” She was also apparently restrained by love of her stuffed animals, writing, “I could not leave my animals. I just couldn’t do it.” Another entry implies she rescheduled the assault for February 17 but believed the school had been closed due to weather conditions.

The writings show she planned to spend her last week on earth going to a game store, playing a video game, taking time to “look at all my toys [and animals],” watching several films including one about cannibalistic mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, and going to a gun range.

At times, Hale expresses amazement no one had thwarted her murderous designs. In a previously released entry from the day of the assault titled “Death Day,” Hale confesses, “Don’t know how I was able to get this far, but here I am.” She adds, “There were several times I could have been caught, especially back in the summer of 2021.”

Although she does not elaborate on what may have prevented her rampage, police believe one or more psychological counselors may have known she intended to carry out a school shooting but told no one. 

Hale received mental health treatment at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) for 22 of her 28 years, enrolling as a psychological patient in 2001 at the age of six. Like one out of every four people who identifies as transgender, Hale had been diagnosed with autism. A 2020 study found people who suffer from gender dysphoria are up to 636% more likely to be autistic than the general population.

“[E]veryone misunderstands autism,” Hale writes, denying she suffered from any further mental illness. “I’m not emo or bi-polar.”

Her mental health may have worsened due to her inability to find or keep a job following her 2022 college graduation. One full journal page details her history of “freelance failure.” Hale claims she called the National Suicide Prevention Helpline five times. Things reached such a crisis at one point that former Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) Lieutenant Garet Davidson says he believes a psychologist forcibly “committed” Hale to VUMC for mental treatment.

Hale had been prescribed Buspirone, Lexapro (or Escitalopram), and Hydroxyzine, a source with knowledge of the investigation told the Star. The combo of Lexapro — a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) — and the anxiety medication Buspirone may increase the pair’s known side effects, which include “mood swings” and “outbursts of anger.”

It is not known if Hale received injections of testosterone, which would also increase aggression, as Hale’s autopsy apparently did not test for the male hormone. Psychologists cannot dispense testosterone in Tennessee but often refer the case to a psychiatrist or psychiatric nurse practitioner. Lt. Davidson told the Tennessee Star that Hale’s psychologist referred her to VUMC, although he did not state that gender identity was the primary reason. He told the publication that VUMC did not, to the best of his knowledge, report Hale’s violent fantasies to law enforcement.

If true, that would violate state law. Tennessee Code Annotated (TCA) § 33-3-206 (2021) states that, if a patient communicates “an actual threat of bodily harm against a clearly identified victim,” the counselor must “warn of, or take precautions to protect the identified victim.”

MNPD’s affidavit for a search warrant asks VUMC to tender all records about Hale from April 23, 2001, until Hale’s death. The officer who filed the affidavit, whose name is redacted, wrote that the police force “believes there is a strong possibility that Audrey Hale confided to a Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital Staff member since she has been receiving care there since 2001.” The force subpoenaed all VUMC records on May 13, 2023.

“[S]ources familiar with the investigation confirm that search warrants were run on the home and office of the therapist in an effort to obtain notes of the therapy sessions with the Covenant School shooter,” said Wilson on her June 1 broadcast. The Tennessee Star, which is withholding the name of Hale’s female psychologist, reports that the medical professional is last recorded as licensed with the Tennessee Board of Examiners of Psychology on December 1, 2022, and closed her business three weeks later.

None of her therapists ever felt that they had, like, a duty to warn anybody,” her father, Ronald Hale, told police four months after the shooting.

As of this writing, Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk has not filed any charges publicly against anyone in the psychiatric community over the shooting.

Despite the light the writings shed on the mass murder — and the practice of broadcasting manifestos of racial collectivist terrorists — Hale’s handwritten explanations have been suppressed by law officials from the federal, state, and local level for more than a year.

A memo the Tennessee Star obtained reveals the Biden administration’s FBI encouraged the Metro Nashville police chief to bottle up Hale’s “confusing” writings, claiming they would stoke “conspiracy theories.”

After Crowder released a few pages, the police department vouched for their authenticity — and immediately launched an investigation to punish the leak. Davidson told Wilson that an official MNPD investigation found no wrongdoing by anyone involved — but supervisors reassigned every officer who served on the case, anyway.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.



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