Seven Nashville Metropolitan Police Department (MNPD) officers have been placed on administrative duty amid the ongoing investigation into the Nov. 6 leak of three pages of the so-called manifesto left behind by the March 27 Covenant School shooter.
The department confirmed the decision in an email to The Epoch Times on Wednesday afternoon.
“Seven individuals are on administrative assignment (absolutely non-punitive) to protect the integrity of the active, progressing investigation,” a spokesperson said in the email. “All seven have full police power. We are not identifying any of the seven by name. Not fair to them.”
The pages, which were confirmed as authentic by MNPD Chief John Drake in a statement on Monday, detailed what could have been at least two years of planning and an arsenal of hate held in the mind of 28-year-old shooter Audrey Hale.
Ms. Hale was identified by authorities as a female-to-male transgender person, who used both the name Audrey and Aiden on the leaked pages of the writings detailing her attack on the private Christian school.
Conservative Daily Wire Podcast host and Nashville resident Candace Owens claimed on X Tuesday morning she had information that led her to believe two officers were going to be fired by MNPD over the leak.
She also claimed that the images were “sold” by officers to the media—though she said she was not claiming they were directly sold to podcaster Steven Crowder who released them on Monday. Crowder has denied that the documents were sold to him.
The Epoch Times reached out to MNPD about the claims, to which a representative said in an email they were “not true.”
“The statements are all we have to offer at this time,” a spokeswoman said in an email. “The Candace Owens tweet is not true.”
What Administrative Assignment Is Used For
According to the MNPD manual, administrative assignment is used when the agency approves the employee to be “absent from their normal assigned tour of duty and no other type of status is appropriate.”
“Most often this status will be used when an officer has been involved in a use of force that is under investigation and the officer must be readily available to assist investigators,” the manual states. “Being placed on this type [of] assignment requires the employee to stay in contact with the investigative unit and respond immediately to any investigative request.”
On Monday, Metro Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell said in a statement he advised the Metro legal director to initiate an investigation into the source of the leak.
“I have directed Wally Dietz, Metro’s Law Director, to initiate an investigation into how these images could have been released,” Mr. O’Connell said. “That investigation may involve local, state, and federal authorities. I am deeply concerned with the safety, security, and well-being of the Covenant families and all Nashvillians who are grieving.”
In a follow-up statement Tuesday, Mr. Drake added that MNPD is dedicated to finding the source of the leak as well and decried it as “unauthorized” and “disturbing.”
“This police department is extremely serious about the investigation to identify the person responsible,” Mr. Drake said in the statement. “This action showed a total disregard for Covenant families, as well as the court system, which has control of the shooter’s journals at the present time due to litigation filed earlier this year. It is now pending in Davidson County Chancery Court and the Tennessee Court of Appeals. We are not at liberty to release the journals until the courts rule. Our police department looks forward to the ultimate resolution of the litigation concerning the journals.”
Court Cases Still Pending
The leak of the documents has not yet been brought up in pending court cases—as lower trial court proceedings have remained halted until the state’s appellate court can issue a decision on whether or not the lower court erred in allowing the Covenant school, families and church to enter the public records lawsuit as third-party intervenors.
As third-party intervenors in the case, they cannot have a direct impact and are not recognized as parties to the main suit, but are able to have their opinion heard by the court.
Covenant parties, as well as the shooter’s parents, have argued in court that the documents should never be released to the public.
The appellate court heard oral arguments in the decision on Oct. 16 and their ruling has yet to be made. A court clerk told media outlets the court’s decision could take days, weeks, or months.
Once the appellate court rules on the intervention matter, the merits of the public records case can begin being heard in the lower court.
Details of Leaked Pages
The “manifesto,” which is how the shooter’s documents were referred to by Mr. Drake in the days after the shooting before he began referring to them as a “series of writings” and “journals,” detailed a hate-fueled ideology held by the shooter.
The writings detail not only anti-white rhetoric and homophobic slurs, but that the shooter had possibly planned the attack for two years. The shooter herself was white and according to police identified as a female-to-male transgender person.
In one page, Ms. Hale said she was nearly “caught” planning the attack, “especially back in the summer of 2021.”
She referred to the children as having “white [privilege]” while going to “fancy private schools” with their “fancy khakis and sports backpacks” in their parents’ “mustangs and convertables [sic].”
She wrote that she had “been excited for the past 2 weeks” indicating further that the attack was planned.
In a page supposedly written on Feb. 3, a month before the attack, she went on an expletive-laden attack on the children themselves, of which the three she murdered were only nine years old.
She wrote “Kill those kids!!!” while attacking them for their “white privilege” and continuing her expletive-laden rant.
“[Expletive] you little [expletive]. I wish to shoot you [expletive] w/ your mop yellow hair. Wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little [expletive] w/ your white privlages [sic]. [Expletive] you [expletive].”
She also included a schedule in the leaked writings, which she ended by writing “Let massacre begin. Time2die,” indicating that she planned to die at the hands of herself or the police. Ms. Hale was killed shortly after beginning her attack by responding officers.
From The Epoch Times
