“I plan to die today,” said the transgender shooter who killed six people in the US.

SATIN

“I plan to die today.” That was one of the last messages that Audrey Hale sent to a friend on Instagram on Monday, reports local television. Her friend called the police, but after being put on hold for 7 minutes, she was told that an agent would stop by her house to take a statement. And he did, five hours later the nashville massacre, which cost the lives of three nine-year-olds and three adults at the school. I don’t want to live anymore, Hale said.

I planned everything. In his house, the police found maps of the Covenant school where he was a student and a manifesto, the contents of which have not been made public. At 10:20 a.m., a 28-year-old woman posing as a man drove a Honda Fit onto campus, security camera footage shared by law enforcement shows, but what’s really chilling is how she gets onto campus. building: snapshot.

The police and school authorities at first wondered if that door had been left open, but it was not. Hale fired one of two AR-15 assault rifles at point blank range into the glass door and entered through the hole that was left.

With his rifle in place and a 9mm pistol in his belt, he climbed to the second floor in search of victims. The police did not want to share the bloodiest pictures of the massacre in which three 9-year-old children were killed, including the daughter of the pastor of the church connected to the school, and three adults, including the principal.

The others knew how to react according to the training they had received and evacuated mostly on their own, at first stomping and then holding hands. “When I saw that, I literally had tears in my eyes,” said the Nashville (Tennessee) police chief. In just 14 minutes, agents arrived and killed the attacker, the first transgender person in the school massacre.

If the deaths of three nine-year-old children and three adults in a school shooting could lose its power by being massacre of 376. of Columbine In 1979, its author Audrey Hale made it extraordinary and even more incomprehensible if possible.

Born a woman, she also considers herself a man, judging by the pronouns she used on social media, she is the first transgender attacker to cause a school massacre. At first it was believed that it was simply a woman, without any other, which was already highly unusual, but not as significant as a gender change in a country that had just banned medical help for adolescents seeking such a change and vetoed drag performances. . queens in public spaces. Madonna added a concert in Nashville to her tour only to turn it into an onstage protest.

The 28-year-old native seems to have taken her protest to the craziest extremes. With the help of his father, the police found a manifesto in his house, the contents of which are eagerly awaited as a clue to understanding his motivation. It took agents just 14 minutes to respond to the 911 calls coming from Covenant Christian School, and they didn’t hesitate to take him down. “If there was one thing we were clear about when preparing for something like this, it’s that we’re not going to hesitate, we’re going to go in and confront the attacker,” Nashville Police Chief John Drake said, not mentioning the embarrassing episode in Uvalde. in Texas, where it took agents an hour and a quarter to enter the classroom.

Hale knew the institution because he had studied there. He entered the school through a side door. armed with three pistols, two of which are semi-automatic in the style of military AR rifles, and opened fire upstairs while the children ran in terror. He then climbed the stairs to the second floor, where two policemen found him and shot him. And the children were dressed. Many followed the evacuation protocol themselves to hide behind the tree line and find themselves at the next school. Three of them lay lifeless on the ground while the others ran.

Recurring debate The first reactions revitalized with indignation the age-old debate about gun control before another shooting “that tears at the soul of the nation,” the president, Joe Biden, said in a new call for a veto on assault weapons. The transgender twist diverted attention from that message and provided ammunition to the far right, which refused to refer to the attacker as his chosen male gender.

The private school where he vented his frustration was not his first target. According to the police, he first looked at another center, which he rejected as having higher insurance. This will encourage the establishment of schools and confirm the importance of exercises that traumatize schoolchildren so much.