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Police in the US state of Tennessee said a person who killed three children and three adults at a Christian elementary school on Monday monitored and mapped the school in detail before carrying out the attack.
Police gave unclear information about the gender of the attacker. For hours she said it was a 28-year-old woman and later identified her as Audrey Hale. Later, at an afternoon news conference, Police Chief John Drake said Hale was transgender.
After the conference, police spokesman Don Aaron declined to elaborate on how Hale currently identified himself.
Hale had been a student at The Covenant School and left behind a manifesto and other writings, which were being examined by investigators.
“We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we are reviewing that refer to this day, to the incident as such,” Drake said. “We have a map that he drew for how all of this would play out.”
In an interview with NBC News, Drake said investigators believe Hale had “some resentment that he had to go to that school.”
According to police, Hale entered the school shooting through the glass doors of the building, armed with two “assault-type” rifles and a pistol. It is believed that he obtained at least two of them legally in the Nashville area.
Police killed Hale in an exchange of fire.
The victims were identified as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, all 9 years old, and the adults Cynthia Peak, 61; Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.
The school has about 200 students in kindergarten through sixth grade and approximately 50 staff members.
The massacre was one of those that have occurred in schools in the United States in recent years. Prominent among them were the shooting at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school last year of a first-grader shooting his teacher in Virginia, and a shooting last week in Denver in which two administrators were wounded.
At the White House, President Joe Biden called the shooting “a family’s worst nightmare” and again called on Congress to pass a ban on the possession of certain semi-automatic weapons.
“He is tearing at the soul of this nation, tearing at the very soul of this nation,” Biden repeated.
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