At least three children and three adults were killed in a shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville on Monday before police shot and killed the shooter, who appeared to be a teenage girl, officials said.
Nashville Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson Don Aaron told reporters a call about an active shooter was made to 911 at 10:13 a.m. CT. Police entered the school on the first floor and began clearing it when they heard gunfire on the upper level.
They located the suspect, who was armed with at least two semi-automatic weapons and a handgun, on the upper level firing shots in “a lobby-type area,” he said.
Two members of the five-member team on the site opened fire and killed her by 10:27 a.m.
“We do not know who she is at this juncture,” Aaron said.
Aaron said there would be approximately 209 students and 42 staff at the school on a typical day.
Students’ parents were told to gather at a nearby church.
The Covenant School, founded in 2001, is a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church in the Green Hills neighborhood of Nashville with about 200 students, according to the school’s website. The school serves preschool through 6th graders and held an active shooter training program in 2022, WTVF-TV reported.
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 Violence Project, a nonprofit research centre, were carried out by a female attacker.
There have been 89 school shootings “defined as anytime a gun is discharged on school property” in the U.S. so far in 2023, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, a website founded by researcher David Riedman. Last year saw 303 such incidents, the highest of any year in the database, which goes back to 1970.
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