Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said the full release of the Covenant school shooter manifesto would allow a glimpse into how treatments for mental health diagnoses, specifically when it comes to transgender individuals, have dramatically changed over the last decade.
On March 27, 2023, Audrey Elizabeth Hale – a biological woman who identified as a man – shot and killed six individuals inside of the Covenant School in Nashville before being shot and killed by police.
Earlier this year, The Star was the first to report that Hale was a 22-year mental health patient of Vanderbilt University Medical Center and other institutions from 2001 until the time of the horrific school shooting.
Despite The Star reporting on and publicly releasing Hale’s 2023 journal in September, the FBI and Metro Nashville Police Department continue to retain around 1,000 pages of writings left by the killer.
While the Metro Nashville Police Department refuses to give a firm date or time for its “active investigation” into the case to be completed, President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the general election may have an effect on the documents’ releasing through his nomination of a new FBI director.
Last week, Trump nominated Kash Patel to serve as the next director of the FBI.
As reported by The Star, Patel has previously called for the full release of major classified documents, including the manifesto left by the Covenant School killer and the client list once kept by disgraced financier-turned-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Pappert, who has reported extensively on the Covenant killer case, said the FBI’s potential release of the full manifesto under direction of Patel would allow for the review of mental health institutions and “figuring out what went wrong over the past 15 years.”
“I think this is a really big part of MAHA – Make America Healthy Again. That involves getting into these mental health institutions and figuring out what went wrong over the past 15 years. What happened between Diagnostic Standard of Medicine 4 and 5 where everything went so horribly awry,” Pappert explained on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Pappert added that the review of Hale’s treatments at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and other institutions may also end up being the “first domino” that falls to expose the transgender movement from a medical standpoint.
“I think this could be the moment, or this could be the first domino, at least, that really helps us understand that this transgender movement is harmful, it’s very profitable to a small number of people, and it’s not doing anything to actually address mental health,” Pappert said.
Pappert said he further believes that the review into the shooter’s mental health treatment will show that medical professionals used transgenderism to “grift” Hale throughout her 22-year history as a psychiatric patient.
“I think we’re going to find out it’s a grift with mental health professionals knowingly sending these people out there, even though they’re very mentally unwell,” Pappert said.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
