Trans Nashville shooter described as ‘obsessive’ and ‘stalkerish’ toward ex-teammates

More details have emerged about the mentally troubled transgender terrorist who gunned down six people including three young children at a Nashville Christian elementary school this week and the warning signs were flashing red well before Audrey Hale’s killing spree.

The 28-year-old shooter, who was killed by police before she could massacre more kids, was allegedly “obsessive” toward her former middle school basketball teammates, one of whom she contacted in an eerie Instagram message shortly before she entered the Covenant School on her murderous mission.

“I’m planning to die today,” she wrote to Averianna Patton who was a teammate on the 2008-2009 Isaiah T. Creswell middle school girls’ basketball team. “You’ll probably hear about me on the news after I die.”

The chilling message was reported by The Tennessean in a story that sheds light on her bizarre fixation with her former middle school teammates which “resulted in awkward and strange interactions with those teammates in recent years,” described by one of them as “obsessive” and “stalkerish.”

(Video: The Daily Mail)

Hale became the third member of that team to die in the last year when she was taken out on Monday, joining 27-year-old Sidney Sims who perished from injuries from a Nashville car crash in August, and 29-year-old Marque Lichelle Hamilton who passed away at the scene of a crash on I-65 in February, also in Nashville, according to The Tennesseean.

The shooter was remembered by her former Creswell head coach Antoine Buchanan as “a shy, small kid at a school where everyone made the team.” Hale was an eighth-grader when the team advanced to the final four of the city’s tournament but was pretty much a bench warmer.

“She would have played if we were really winning or really losing,” Buchanan told the outlet.

“Audrey was super timid when we first met her,” recalled Patton who notified police after receiving Hale’s Instagram message just before the murders. “We had real camaraderie. As far as on the court, we were like a family.”

Other former teammates recalled a much darker side of Hale.

“We felt she was shy,” said Mia Phillips. “So we embraced her and really befriended her.”

After their time at Creswell, the two girls attended different high schools, drifting apart, but over the years, Hale would contact her over social media about their time spent together in middle school, communications that were “mostly sweet” but also at times “unnerving,” according to Phillips.

“I’m trying to be as respectful and also as honest as possible,” she said. “It felt obsessive. It felt like stalkerish behavior” and while it “never escalated to the point where Phillips felt the need to contact authorities” their “recent interactions left people confused and uncomfortable,” the outlet reported.

According to The Tennessean, “In February 2022, Hale came uninvited to a birthday party at Ponobe’s Bar and Restaurant in Goodlettsville that was attended by some members of that middle school team, Phillips said. Hale did not seem to be using male pronouns at the time, Phillips said. (Phillips declined to name the other people at the party).”

“Phillips arrived after Hale and noticed her former teammate acting visibly drunk, stumbling and slurring words. But the other people at the party said that Hale hadn’t had anything to drink. Everyone believed Hale was pretending to be drunk at a party she hadn’t been invited to,” Phillips told the paper, adding that she attempted to get her former teammate’s phone so she could contact Hale’s family to get her home safely but the future child killer refused.

“Everybody was confused,” Phillips recalled. “It was just rubbing us in a weird way of like, giving us a really negative feeling. It didn’t feel right.

There are few answers as to what drove Hale to slaughter three nine-year-olds and a trio of middle-aged adults, but her manifesto which is currently being suppressed could hold some clues. Although, as her former girls’ basketball teammates have indicated, there was likely a slew of red flags leading up to her final act of vengeance.

Chris Donaldson

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