TENNESSEE: The 28-year-old shooter who shot dead six people, including three children, at a school in Nashville in Tennessee, one of the states of the US, on Monday morning was under doctor’s care for ‘emotional disorder.
Police said that assailant Audrey Elizabeth Hale, later gunned down by police during a shootout at Covenant School, had bought seven guns legally and hid them at home.
Police said that the suspect’s parents felt Hale should not have weapons. The parents did not know the guns had been concealed in their house.
Six people, including three nine-year-old children, died in the attack at the Covenant School.
According to the BBC, Tennessee has no laws allowing police to confiscate guns from violent suspects.
Despite the absence of such red-flag laws, police said they would still have sought to have the guns confiscated if authorities had had any warning that the suspect was a threat.
Three adult staffers at the privately-run Christian school who died were identified as Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61. The students killed in the attack were identified as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney.
Police spoke to the parents of the slain shooter, who was shot and killed by police less than 15 minutes after the rampage began.
Hale, who identified as transgender and a former student of the school, was armed with three guns, including a semi-automatic rifle.
The attack occurred after Hale conducted surveillance of the premises, drew maps and wrote what police said was a ‘manifesto’.
A police spokesman said that the shooter did not target any person in particular but targeted the school and the church building.
Hale’s parents thought their son had owned only one gun and that it had been sold.
They believed their son “should not own weapons,” and they were unaware the suspect “had been hiding several weapons within the house”, said Nashville Police Chief John Drake on Tuesday.
He said the weapons had legally been purchased from five shops in the city.
The killer “was under doctor’s care for an emotional disorder”, Drake said without further details.
He said that if there had been reports of suicidal or violent tendencies, police would have sought to confiscate the guns.
“But as it stands, we had absolutely no idea who this person was or if [the suspect] even existed,” he said.
