Nashville: 3 children killed in a shooting at a private school, Tennessee
A gunman killed three children and three adults at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee on Monday before being shot dead by police. Police said the attacker appeared to be a teenage girl.
Police began receiving calls at 10:13 a.m. about a shooter from The Covenant School, which teaches children through 6th grade. Officers heard gunfire coming from the second floor of the school, Metropolitan Nashville Police Department spokesman Don Aaron told reporters.
The gunman had at least two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun, Aaron said. Two officers from the five-man squad shot at her in what Aaron described as the lobby, and she was dead by 10:27 a.m.
“We don’t know who he is at this point,” Aaron said.
Deadly mass shootings have become commonplace in the United States, but a female attacker is highly unusual. Only four of the 191 mass shootings since 1966 cataloged by the non-profit research center The Violence Project have been carried out by female attackers.
According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, a website founded by researcher David Riedman, there have been 89 school shootings in the U.S. so far in 2023 — defined as any time a gun is fired on school property. There were 303 such incidents last year, the most of any year in the database, which goes back to 1970.
Three students were pronounced dead on arrival at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital. at Vanderbilt with gunshot wounds, hospital spokesman John Howser said in a statement. The gunman killed three adult staff members, police said.
Apart from the deceased, no one else was shot, Aaron said.
Parents of the students were told to gather at a nearby church.
Founded in 2001, Covenant School is a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Nashville’s Green Hills neighborhood with about 200 students, according to the school’s website. The school serves preschool through 6th grade and hosted an active shooter training program in 2022, WTVF-TV reported.
Nashville Mayor John Cooper expressed his condolences to the victims, writing on social media that his city “joins the dreaded long list of communities that have experienced a school shooting.”
