Deborah Fisher, the executive director of Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, described the continued withholding of documents by the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) relating to the case of the Covenant School killer as simply “disturbing.”
On Tuesday, The Tennessee Star published all 90 pages of the journal written between January and March of 2023 by Audrey Elizabeth Hale, the 28-year-old biological woman who self-identified as a transgender man and who, on March 27, 2023, murdered three 9-year-old students and three staff members at the Covenant School in Nashville before being subsequently killed by MNPD officers.
The contents of the journal, which was recovered by MNPD in Hale’s vehicle on the day of the shooting, were legally obtained by The Star in early June of 2024 from a source familiar with the MNPD investigation into the shooting.
However, approximately 20 additional journals written by Hale over an estimated 15 years from 2007 to 2022, which are said to contain about 1,000 pages, continue to remain under wraps by MNPD more than a year after the shooting took place.
Other documents related to the case – including Hale’s full 22-year long medical log while being treated at Vanderbilt University Medical Center which was first reported by The Star – also remain under wraps, as MNPD cites an “ongoing investigation” for the refusal to make such documents public.
In addition, as a result of The Star and other parties litigating in an effort for the materials to be released under the Tennessee Public Records Act, Tennessee Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea L. Myles’ ruled that not one page of the materials written by the killer will be released to the public, citing the ongoing investigation by MNPD and a copyright claim over the writings held by the Covenant Children’s Trust.
Fisher said it is simply “disturbing” that “we are still, a year and a half later, talking yet again about public records that have been withheld by government.”
“One thing I think the public needs to understand – and the reason that this situation is so frustrating – is that in a normal case, an investigation would be over, especially if the perpetrator was killed by police at the scene, certainly within a year. There’s a lot of documents that should still be released when it’s over, but the writings, the evidence that is collected by police about the killer at her home, things that she wrote or emails she sent, all of that’s collected by police and that, in a normal case, would be released,” Fisher explained on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“But in this case, it’s not being released and it’s been litigated, it’s been fought, and the judge, I think, incorrectly made a decision that the writings that were collected by police shouldn’t be released,” Fisher added.
Fisher said she believes MNPD’s claims of an ongoing investigation relating to the case is a “stalling tactic” being used to continue withholding the documents under a statutory exception to the Tennessee Public Records Act dealing with school security, which Fisher said was wrongly interpreted by Myles.
Fisher said she was present at the legislature when the Tennessee General Assembly passed the statutory exception to the Tennessee Public Records Act to protect school security, explaining how she believes the MNPD wrongfully used the exception in the Covenant School shooting case to defend keeping the killer’s writings under wraps.
“I was actually there at the legislature when that exemption was passed. It was passed because of these violent incidents, school shootings, basically, and what they didn’t want was someone to be able to get the building plans or any assessments that had been done on the building about where there were security weaknesses or assessments on whether teachers were locking or not locking their doors. They didn’t want that information to be out there, to be gotten by someone who might do something, someone who might be a school shooter. That’s really what that exemption was about, and what the judge said is…the Covenant parents in the school argued that if someone saw the writings of the shooter, they would want to copy her and it would inspire a copycat killer,” Fisher explained.
“I know that was not what was in the minds of lawmakers when they passed that exemption. I think she expanded that statute in a way that’s really unrecognizable and also bought the fact that everything in the writings…would be a school security problem,” Fisher added.
Everything considered, Fisher stressed that there is a massive public interest in having the materials related to the March 27 shooting released.
“In any case with public records, and especially records related to crimes like this, I do think the public has an interest in safety, and they don’t want things to happen again. We do need to understand what happened or what didn’t happen,” Fisher explained.
“It’s highly frustrating because this incident of a school shooting is of huge public interest, mostly because we don’t want these things to happen again. So we want to understand what led up to this and were there ways that the public or authorities or people in charge could have intervened to stop it? Those are the kinds of things that police are going to find in their investigation as well as whether anybody else was involved. And the fact that all of that has been secret, except for what has been leaked to [The Star], is disturbing,” Fisher added.
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.
