A new report is revealing more about Audrey Hale, the transgender shooter who killed six people, including three children, at a Christian school in Nashville this week.
On Thursday, The Tennessean quoted a former teammate of Hale’s as saying she was “obsessive” and “stalkerish” toward her friends from middle school.
According to the teammate, Mia Phillips, Hale was a shy girl when she joined the girls’ basketball team at Isaiah T. Creswell Middle School.
“We embraced her and really befriended her,” Phillips said.
“Audrey was super timid when we first met her,” said another teammate, Averianna Patton. “We had real camaraderie. … We were like a family.”
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Hale cherished her time on the basketball team. But in recent years, her attempts at reaching out to her former teammates resulted in some rather strange and unnerving interactions.
After eighth grade, Phillips and Hale went to separate high schools, with Phillips later attending Middle Tennessee State University.
She said that when she set up her college email account, she found an email from Hale already waiting for her. Hale also sent her memorabilia from their time at school together. Phillips doesn’t know how Hale got her address.
“It felt obsessive. It felt like stalkerish behavior,” she said.
In February 2022, Hale showed up uninvited to a birthday party at a bar attended by some of her former teammates.
After Hale began acting drunk (despite others at the party claiming she hadn’t had anything to drink), Phillips tried to get her phone to call her mother, but Hale refused to leave. When Phillips left, she received several messages from Hale asking her to come back.
“Everybody was confused,” Phillips said. “It was just rubbing us in a weird way of, like, giving us a really negative feeling. It didn’t feel right.”
After one of their teammates died in a car crash in August, Hale and Phillips saw each other at the funeral, with Hale following Phillips to her car afterward. Phillips told her it wasn’t the time to hang out.
Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale’s ‘suicide note’ revealed https://t.co/vYSqZ9P2I6 pic.twitter.com/icgwKtkxzV
— New York Post (@nypost) March 28, 2023
The media is pushing the narrative that Hale lashed out at Christians because they refused to “accept” her LGBT identity. But this report gives us a more complete picture.
Hale clearly suffered from some serious mental conditions that made her capable of carrying out a horrific shooting. Did these conditions also result in her strange behavior toward her middle school friends?
The fact of the matter is, no matter how mentally disturbed she was, Hale was not the victim. The real victims were the people she senselessly murdered.
But if these mental illnesses — including gender dysphoria — are not properly addressed and treated, we will only see more tragedies like the one in Nashville.
