"Something bad is going to happen. You'll hear about me when I'm dead. This is a farewell message. See you in another life."
It is the last message from Audrey Elizabeth Hale to her former basketball partner shortly before the attack on the Christian school in Nashville, of which she had been a student and against which she harbored a strong resentment.
Hale's attack at Covennat School was a premeditated attack: the 28-year-old girl carefully assessed how she would move once she arrived on site.
And she did this by drawing floor plans of the property on which the school stands, as well as describing step by step in her diary how she intended to behave.
Detailed maps were found in his home together with a sort of manifesto and other documents in which the reasons for his crazy act could be hidden.
At the moment the police still don't know the reasons that prompted Hale to open fire in the elementary school, but he admitted that one of the leads under consideration is precisely the hatred towards the institute.
The girl - the Nashville police chief reported - identified as transgender and, according to some acquaintances, she had recently communicated this to her parents.
The break-in of the killer in the school caught on surveillance cameras
Neighbors described her as a "sweet", "normal" person, although "perhaps too quiet. Nothing would ever lead me to think that she would be capable of such a gesture or that there were guns in her family". said a neighbor.
Indeed, the girl's mother, Norma Hale, is an activist against guns and pistols and had repeatedly posted petitions on her Facebook page to ban high-capacity magazines and keep guns away from schools.
The woman and her husband are collaborating with the police to investigate the incident and said her daughter was under medical treatment for "emotional disorders".
As the investigation continues, investigators have released six-minute footage of the shooting.
Shot on an agent's bodycam,
the video shows the arrival of the police, the run to the second floor where the shots were coming from, the screams to stop Audrey - who was wearing a red cap and camouflage pants - and then the shots that killed her.
"Suspect down", are the last words of agents Rex Engelbert and Michael Collazzo to communicate to the rest of the team that the assailant was down.
Additional footage shows the woman arriving at the school in a gray Hyundai and entering the building.
The weapons in her possession, three in all, had been acquired legally.
And it is precisely on weapons that the political controversy is rekindled.
President Joe Biden has called again for a ban on assault rifles, such as Audrey Hale's AR-style rifle, generally the most used model in American mass massacres.
Democrats are pushing for stricter rules on controls.
The Republicans instead ride an aggressive anti-transgender rhetoric and attack the liberal champions of the Lgbtq+ community.
“Given the growing number of trans and non-binary people carrying out mass shootings, instead of talking about guns, wouldn't it be better to talk about these lunatics pushing their gender reaffirmation on our children?” tweeted Donald Trump Jr, the son of the 'former president.
"How many hormones like testosterone did the Nashville killer take? Everyone should stop picking on guns now. The woman who shot Nashville identified as a man. So should we still point fingers at white men?" Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Nashville citizens pay tribute to victims with stuffed animals and balloons
