By The Daily Wire (World News) | Created at 2025-04-02 19:20:10 | Updated at 2025-04-04 00:32:20
1 day ago
The final police report on Nashville’s deadly Covenant School shooting, released more than two years after the attack, claims the motive of the attack was “notoriety” and makes little mention of the shooter’s radical positions on gender, race, or religious animus.
While pages from the writings of the 28-year-old woman who murdered three children and three adults at The Covenant School in March 2023 demonstrate that she was fixated on gender ideology and “white privilege,” police say that she was primarily motivated by a desire for notoriety. Investigators said that neither her documented hatred of Christianity or affluent white people played a role in her targeting of The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school in a wealthy area of Nashville.
“Regarding why she selected The Covenant, many have speculated [the shooter] selected this location for racial, religious, or economic motives,” the report said. “It is certainly true she raged over these topics at times in her writings. But none of those motives impacted her decision to attack The Covenant.”
Instead, the police said that Covenant was targeted because the attacker, who was killed by police, believed that she would receive greater notoriety by murdering young children. Three of the victims of the March 27, 2023, attack — Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney — were all just 9 years old. The other victims of the attack were adults Michael Hill, Katherine Koonce, and Cynthia Peak.
Throughout the report, police made little mention of the attacker’s transgender identity, only mentioning that she identified as a male and that she had made references to wanting to transition.
“It should be noted that in life, the offender … gender identified as a male and used he/him as preferred pronouns. Under Tennessee law, a person’s gender identity must correspond with their biological sex or with information present on their certificate of live birth,” police wrote. “As [the attacker] was a biological female at the time of her death and throughout the incidents described in this summary and in the case file, [the attacker] will be referred to as a female.”
In the only other mention of her transgender identity, investigators said that they uncovered no evidence of her undergoing any gender medical procedures.
“Nothing has been found to suggest she initiated or was undergoing a transition at the time of her death, including medical documentation,” police wrote. “During her autopsy following her death, it was determined she was biologically female.”
These mentions don’t appear to fully take into account the attacker’s transgender identity, which dominated her life.
In journal entries previously published by The Daily Wire, the attacker wrote just weeks before the deadly shooting about her fantasy of having an “imaginary penis” and said that it was a “f***ing curse” that she was born a woman.
“I want to know what that’s like, but I never will because I was damned to be born this way,” she wrote in the journal of her desire to have a penis. “I swear to f*** I hate it so goddamned much. It’s a f***ing curse.”
Image of Covenant School shooter’s journal obtained by The Daily Wire
She said that puberty ruined her life, lamenting the fact that her parents never put her on puberty blockers.
“A bare flat chest made me free. Girl puberty imprisoned me. And so does my mind. Puberty = life sentence. The people in this world adds more bullets to shoot violent thoughts into my head on full-auto,” she wrote.
In other journal entries, the attacker made clear her hatred of Christianity and people with “white privilege,” which she believed hindered her development.
For example, she wrote that she wanted to kill “crackers going to private fancy schools” and explained why she rejected her parents’ faith.
“Parents actually believe religion can change nature,” the shooter wrote. “That could explain why I don’t practice religion anymore. Let kids think for themselves, listening to parents does no damned good but to mold their premature minds into a pre-formatted program.”
These writings were portions from 16 notebooks, which some have referred to as her manifesto, and were the subject of a lengthy legal battle. In their report, police denied the existence of a manifesto, saying that there was no singular “document explaining why she committed the attack, why she specifically targeted The Covenant, and what she hoped to gain, if anything, with the attack.”
Police investigators also ruled that the attacker was “sane” despite numerous mental health disorders.
“Despite all her assorted mental health disorders, [the attacker] was certainly sane,” police wrote. “She was capable of adjusting her plans as needed, manipulating others into seeing her as meek and nonthreatening, and fully understood her attack was not only criminal but morally reprehensible.”
Police say that the attacker first started to fantasize about carrying out a school shooting in 2017 before beginning to plan one in 2018.
“By this point, [the shooter] wrote how she was tired of being alone and ignored, ostracized by those she felt were her friends, and shunned by society for being autistic,” the police wrote. “After writing an expletive rant directed towards her ‘best friend’ for choosing a relationship with a man over her, [the shooter] decided it was time to make others notice her for a change. She felt by ‘killing a bunch of children’ she would no longer be ignored.”
Police said that the attacker floated in her mind a number of different targets, including various Nashville schools and malls. At one point, one of her plans was disrupted after her guns were confiscated by her parents, with whom she lived in Nashville.
She moved away from targeting one school because it was predominantly black, worrying that she “would be seen as a racist, which would affect how much control she had over the narrative after her death and allow others to state her motive behind the attack.”
Eventually, police say that she settled on the Covenant School because she believed she would receive more notoriety by attacking a Christian school and that the faith of the students would make them “meek and afraid.” She prepared for the attack for years, even going on a tour of the facility in September 2021 so she could map out the school’s layout in preparation.
Despite this conclusion, police said that the attacker never left behind any evidence of having a specific animosity for the Covenant School.
“She never remarked of being bullied and ostracized there; on the contrary, she remarked on a couple of occasions how she established friendships, which included play-dates at the homes of other children and a sense of acceptance,” police said. “She gave no examples of how anyone at the school belittled her or harmed her, as she did in other places she attended school.“
At the end of the report, investigators officially closed the investigation, saying that they identified no other individuals who were criminally culpable for the shooting.
