The Nashville police in the US on Tuesday released an officer body camera video footage of the latest mass shooting to rock at a school.
The Nashville police in the US on Tuesday released an officer body camera video footage of the latest mass shooting to rock at a school, generating praises for officers for how efficiently they pursued the assailant.
Six people, including three children, were killed at a small, private Christian school just south of downtown Nashville on Monday after a shooter opened fire inside the building of about 200 students. Police received a call about an active shooter at The Covenant School — a Presbyterian school — around 10.15 am Authorities said that about 15 minutes after that call to police, the shooter was dead. The remaining students were ferried to a safe location to be reunited with their parents.
The suspect, Audrey Hale, 28, was a former student at the school. Hale did not target specific victims — among them three 9-year-olds and the head of the school — but did target “this school, this church building,” police spokesperson Don Aaron said at a news conference on Tuesday.
News agency Reuters reported that when police officer Rex Engelbert arrived at the school on Monday, he immediately retrieved a rifle from the trunk of his patrol car. Three minutes later, the shooter was dead, dropped by rounds Engelbert fired.
“Let’s go,” Engelbert directed others, as police quickly closed in on the shooter who had killed three 9-year-old school children and three adults at the Covenant School.
Engelbert is a four-year veteran of the force and Collazo a nine-year veteran, police said. Collazo had previously worked as a paramedic with the SWAT team and had special weapons training, Police Chief John Drake told reporters.
“I was really impressed that with all that was going on, the danger, that somebody took control and said ‘let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,'” Drake said at a news conference on Tuesday.
The body camera video shows officers searching room by room for the shooter as a school alarm blared. They follow the sound of gunfire, rushing up a flight of stairs. As police converge on the shooter, someone yells “reloading” and Engelbert appears to be the first officer to fire, squeezing off four rounds that down the shooter.
Another officer with a long gun, standing between Engelbert and Collazo, may have also fired a round. Then Collazo quickly moves forward, firing four more shots with his handgun.
In Collazo’s body camera video, he runs through a hallway with other officers toward the gunfire.
“Shots fired, shots fired, move,” Collazo says before joining Engelbert and the other officer in confronting the shooter.
With the perpetrator on the floor, Collazo presses forward to take the final four shots, exhorting the shooter to “stop moving!”
There is no response from the mortally wounded assailant, as Collazo says, “suspect down, suspect down.”
The shooter legally bought seven weapons in recent years and hid the guns from their parents before carrying out the attack by firing indiscriminately at victims and spraying gunfire through doors and windows, police said.
The violence Monday at The Covenant School was the latest school shooting to roil the nation and was planned carefully. The shooter had drawn a detailed map of the school, including potential entry points, and conducted surveillance of the buildingbefore carrying out the massacre, authorities said.
Hale was under a doctor’s care for an undisclosed emotional disorder and was not known to police before the attack, Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake said at the news conference.
Hale’s parents believed their child had sold one gun and did not own any others, Drake said, adding that Hale “had been hiding several weapons within the house.”
