Nashville school shooting live updates: Community comes together to mourn

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Audrey Hale was on the basketball team at Isaiah T. Creswell Middle School of the Arts, where Hale was a student from 2006 to 2010. The team’s basketball coach at the time, Antoine Buchanan, said Hale was one of the few white players on the girls’ team at Creswell, a predominantly Black school.

While he did not recall Hale as a “major player” on the team, he also doesn’t remember Hale as being troubled.

“Even thinking back to that, she would have not been a troubling person,” Buchanan said Tuesday. “If you were going to be trouble for me, I’m not keeping you on the team.”

In the minutes before the shooting at The Covenant School, Hale sent Instagram messages to a former Creswell teammate warning that something bad was going to happen and asking for forgiveness.

Melissa Joan Hart is sharing her experience guiding frightened students to safety after the school shooting in Nashville.

In an emotional Instagram video, Hart said she and her husband, Mark Wilkerson, were driving to parent-teacher conferences at her children’s nearby school when they noticed children sprinting from The Covenant School.

“We helped a class of kindergartners across a busy highway. They were climbing out of the woods. They were trying to escape the shooter situation at their school,” the actor said, through tears. “So we helped all these tiny little kids cross the road and get (to) their teachers … We helped a mom reunite with her children.”

Read the full story here.

YouTube said Tuesday that the police body camera video from the school shooting Monday in Nashville, Tennessee, would normally violate its policy against graphic violence but that the platform will leave the video online with certain safeguards.

The Google-owned company said the video was in the public interest as it can educate people about what happened. 

The company also said it was monitoring its platform for videos, livestreams and comments that would glorify the violence in violation of YouTube’s rules. 

“Following the tragic attack in Nashville Tennessee, some footage released by the Nashville Police Department has been age-restricted with a warning interstitial because of its graphic nature and will remain on YouTube as it is in the public interest,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, said in a statement.

Read the full story here.

DALLAS — Hundreds of people packed Park Cities Presbyterian Church today to sit in prayer and grief and to support the family of Hallie Scruggs.

Hallie, 9, was one of six people killed at The Covenant School in Nashville on Monday. The school is housed at Covenant Presbyterian Church, where Hallie’s father, Chad Scruggs, is the lead pastor.

Mark Davis, the senior pastor at Park Cities Presbyterian, knew Chad and his wife, Jada, from their time as campus ministers with Reformed University Fellowship at Southern Methodist University. In July 2013, Chad Scruggs took Davis up on an offer and joined his church. That year, Hallie was born.

“She was a radiant little girl,” Davis said. “From every picture you see, you can just see that light in her, which we really believe is the light of Christ.”

Davis said that Hallie was selfless and energetic, that she cared for others and that as the youngest with three older brothers, “she held her own, in a good way.”

“Because she was so little, I just always saw her kind of in a swarm of activity around her parents,” Davis said. “Just so much a part of the nucleus of that family that just brought so much joy to all of them.”

Davis said that when he learned about the shooting, he immediately reached out to Chad Scruggs. It wasn’t until later Monday that he found out that Hallie was one of the victims.

“We talked for about 15 minutes, just as friends, just as dads, and we wept and talked about where you go next, what do you do next,” Davis said. “Their faith is strong. The grief is really strong, too.

“He said to me yesterday, ‘We love Hallie so much, but we know Christ loves her more, and we believe she’s with him,’” Davis said. “That’s real faith to them, and to us.”

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A 9-year-old known for brightening up the neighborhood with her Broadway-like performances in the driveway. A school custodian who loved students like they were his own kids. And a school leader who was determined to help every child, no matter what challenges they faced.

These were some of the victims of Monday’s rampage at The Covenant School in Nashville, where three students and three adults were killed.

Authorities identified the victims at the small Christian school as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, all age 9; school head Katherine Koonce, 60; substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, 61; and school custodian Mike Hill, 61. 

Read more about their lives.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., on Tuesday called on federal law enforcement agencies to investigate the shooting at The Covenant School as a religious hate crime.

Hawley cited law enforcement reports that the shooting was “targeted” against the Christian school, which police believe the shooter attended.

“It is commonplace to call such horrors ‘senseless violence,’” Hawley wrote in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. “But properly speaking, that is false. Police report that the attack here was ‘targeted’ — targeted, that is, against Christians.”

In 2021, Hawley voted against an anti-Asian hate crime bill that was passed on a 94-1 vote and directed the Department of Justice to expedite the review of such crimes. The measure also tasked the attorney general and the Department of Health and Human Services with issuing best-practices guidance on how to mitigate racially discriminatory language in describing the pandemic.

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President Joe Biden said today that he had watched footage related to the Nashville shooting and said the victims should be alive.

"Those children should all be with us still," he said at an unrelated event in North Carolina.

The president reiterated that gun violence is tearing apart the soul of the nation and said more must be done to protect children "so they learn how to read and write instead of duck and cover in the classroom."

Biden said that he's a "Second Amendment guy" and that he has two shotguns, but said of automatic weapons: "These are weapons of war."

He reiterated his call on Congress to pass an assault weapons ban.

"It's a common sense issue, to act now. People say, 'Why do I keep saying this?'" Biden said. "Because I want you to know who isn't doing it, who isn't helping, to put pressure on them," he said, referring to Republicans.

NASHVILLE — Evelyn was known for brightening up the neighborhood with her driveway Broadway-type performances.

“She was everything a 9-year-old should be. She was in and out of our house on a regular basis playing tag,” said next-door neighbor Nick Riegal, 45, whose two children often played with her.

There were often games of hangman and laughter coming from the back porch. And plenty of fun times during the days and evenings.

But it was the lively outdoor theater performances in which Evelyn and other neighborhood kids each chose a character from the Broadway hit “Hamilton” that Riegal said he will remember the most. 

“They worked really hard on 'Hamilton,'” he said, adding that all of the children involved picked a character and learned 20 minutes of the popular theater show, honing their acting skills.