A Place of Sanctuary Is Punctured by the Reality of Gun Violence in America

A Place of Sanctuary Is Punctured by the Reality of Gun Violence in America

 

As investigators searched for a motive in the killing of six people at the Covenant School in Nashville, the close-knit community there was struggling with the enormity of its loss.

 

Emily CochraneEliza FawcettJesus JiménezRick Rojas

By Emily Cochrane, Eliza Fawcett, Jesus Jiménez and Rick Rojas

March 28, 2023

 

NASHVILLE — In a stately stone building on a hill, the Covenant School was a private academy designed as an escape from the bustle of Nashville and a haven where students could learn and grow, with a curriculum that reflected the Christian values of the families who sent their children there.

 

Katherine Koonce, the head of school, had a zeal for learning and saw in students potential they did not see in themselves. “You’ve got it,” she would tell a struggling student. Mike Hill, a custodian, found fulfillment in work that his daughter said he absolutely loved. And there were bright students like 9-year-old Evelyn Dieckhaus, “a light for her family,” her pastor said.

 

That carefully built sense of security was punctured on Monday when an armed assailant breached the campus, opening fire at random students and staff members. The community surrounding the Covenant School was now wrestling with a horrifying reality: Dr. Koonce, Mr. Hill and Evelyn were all dead, as were two other 9-year-old students and a substitute teacher who had been fatally shot in the attack.

 

“Our hearts are completely broken,” Evelyn’s family said in a short statement released on Tuesday. “We cannot believe this has happened.”

 

As investigators try to piece together a motive for the attack, the authorities praised the actions of the Nashville police officers who rushed into the school, saying they moved swiftly in pursuing and fatally shooting the assailant.

 

The authorities said on Tuesday that the 28-year-old perpetrator had legally purchased seven firearms recently — including the three used in the shooting — and was being treated by a doctor for an emotional disorder. Chief John Drake of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said that the assailant’s parents had felt that their child “should not own weapons” and believed that their child did not.

 

Tennessee does not have what is known as a red flag law that would allow the authorities to temporarily confiscate guns from those found to be in danger to themselves or others, and the Republican-controlled State Legislature has steadily loosened restrictions on owning guns.

 

Still, Chief Drake said that if the police had known that the perpetrator was suicidal or intended to hurt others, “then we would have tried to get those weapons.”

 

Even with the uncertainty over what motivated the attack, the magnitude of the loss was clear as relatives, friends and people who knew the victims expressed their grief.

 

The other children who were killed were identified as William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs, whose father is the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church, the church connected to the school. Cynthia Peak, 61, was the substitute teacher killed.

 

Hannah Williams, who knows the Scruggs family, struggled to wrap her head around the trauma that those closest to the victims were now enduring.

 

“This family did not deserve this,” Ms. Williams wrote on a post on Facebook. “No family does. They deserve to wake up from this nightmare with Hallie by their side.”

 

In a video statement on Tuesday evening, Gov. Bill Lee said that Ms. Peak was a close friend of his wife, Maria. “Cindy was supposed to come over to have dinner with Maria last night,” he said. He described the anguish caused by the shooting — “the emptiness, the lack of understanding, the desperate desire for answers, the desperate need for hope,” he said.

 

“We’re enduring a very difficult moment,” Mr. Lee said. “Everyone is hurting, everyone.”

 

Nashville has weathered turbulence and heartache in recent years. There were floods and a deadly tornado. In 2020, a man consumed by bizarre conspiracy theories detonated a van filled with explosives on Christmas morning, killing himself and severely damaging a swath of downtown.

 

But this was different, as it kindled in the city a level of terror that other communities had faced amid recurring mass shootings but Nashville had not. In a post on Twitter not long after the shooting, Mayor John Cooper said, “Nashville joined the dreaded, long list of communities to experience a school shooting.”

 

The shooting has reverberated beyond Nashville, too, stoking fury and frustration and invigorating once again the country’s divisions over violence and access to guns. President Biden called for a ban on assault rifles, as he has done after other recent mass shootings — a repetition he acknowledged with a sense of exasperation on Tuesday. “I can’t do anything except plead with the Congress to act reasonably,” he said.

 

In Dallas, as worshipers gathered on Tuesday at Park Cities Presbyterian Church, the pain was much more personal. Chad Scruggs, the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church and Hallie’s father, had been the pastor there before moving to Nashville.

 

“The reality is, this event in Nashville is not merely an event for one school or one church or city,” said Paul Goebel, an associate pastor at Park Cities Presbyterian. “It touches our church, our community deeply, but it also affects and touches our whole nation.”

 

Mr. Scruggs, who left that congregation in 2018, returned to Dallas in February to preach, pointing out Hallie and her three siblings sitting in the pews. “Their story, in many ways, began here,” he said at the time.

 

Mark Davis, the current pastor at Park Cities Presbyterian, said he spoke to Mr. Scruggs on Monday afternoon; in that conversation, Mr. Scruggs acknowledged that “he’s in shock.” The congregation also had ties to Ms. Peak, the substitute teacher who was killed. Her sister worshiped there. Some who stood to pray for the victims during the vigil on Tuesday referred to Ms. Peak as “Aunt Cindy.”

 

“We’re here because our hearts are broken,” Pastor Davis told the congregation. “We’re here because we have questions.”

 

The Covenant School, which was founded in 2001 as a ministry of the Covenant Presbyterian Church, has about 200 students attending its campus in an affluent area of Nashville, where streets overwhelmed by the city’s rush of development in recent years give way to tree-covered hills.

 

It is part of a network of conservative evangelical churches and private schools in Nashville that is tight-knit, even across denominational lines. Some families attended church at one place and school in another. Palmer Williams, whose older son went to the Covenant School for his first several years of school, said she took her children out of the school only because she was involved in founding another school with a similar approach. “We wanted more schools like Covenant,” she said.

 

Dr. Koonce, the head of school since 2016, had previously worked at Christ Presbyterian Academy, a private school just five miles away. There, she nurtured a passion for working with students who had learning disabilities.

 

“She has always been a woman who is deeply passionate about kids having a love of learning,” said David Thomas, a longtime friend of Dr. Koonce’s and a director of family counseling at Daystar Counseling Ministries in Nashville.

 

She tutored Joseph Fisher in math years ago. He’s 34 now but still remembers the way she encouraged him. “She just believed that I have more to give — and I did,” he said. When he learned that she had been killed, Mr. Fisher, now a truck driver, said that he parked and walked up a mountainside, stunned.

 

Mr. Hill, a father of seven and grandfather of 14, liked to cook and spend time with family, his family said in a statement. He was “beloved by the faculty and students who filled him with joy for 14 years,” the statement said.

 

The Covenant School had a student-teacher ratio of 8 to 1, and Dr. Koonce was invested in building a nurturing environment for students.

 

On the morning of the shooting, students sang “Amazing Grace” in the chapel and practiced saying “jambo” — a traditional Swahili greeting — with a missionary doctor who was visiting the school.

 

“It was just such a sweet interaction with those kids,” said Dr. Britney Grayson, the visiting doctor, a pediatric surgeon from Kenya. “Everything was normal about our day. It went exactly like we thought it would — better than expected.”

 

She left shortly before the shooting, stirring conflicting feelings: She knew she avoided witnessing the shooting, but wondered if she could have been in a position to help.

 

Dr. Grayson said she had operated on children with gunshot wounds before, including one child who was injured in a school shooting in the United States. “It’s like, ‘Why wasn’t I still there?’” she said. “And in the very next breath, you think, ‘Well, I might be dead, too.’ I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to process those conflicting thoughts.”

 

The shooting also stirred fears about the lasting consequences it would have for children in the community, particularly those close to the victims.

 

“They are a family that has impacted more people than they will ever know,” Hannah Williams wrote in a Facebook post about the Scruggs family. “Hallie’s brothers: John Randall, Charlie, and Carter have lost their one and only sister at ages where this trauma will impact their forming brains forever.”

 

But there was also hope that the spirit of the school — the sense of closeness and warmth — would endure.

 

On Monday night, Palmer Williams’s family joined others at a baseball field, gathering spontaneously to tie ribbons to a chain-link fence. Her son knew William Kinney through a baseball league. The children were running the bases — “grieving the way kids do,” Ms. Williams said, “which is sadness but also just being kids.”

 

Mary Beth Gahan contributed reporting from Dallas. Ruth Graham also contributed reporting. Kirsten Noyes, Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

 

Emily Cochrane is a national correspondent covering the American South, based in Nashville. She was previously a congressional correspondent in Washington, chronicling the annual debate over government funding and economic legislation. @ESCochrane

 

Eliza Fawcett is a reporter for the National desk and a member of the 2022-2023 New York Times fellowship class. @ElizaFawcett

 

Jesus Jiménez is a breaking news reporter. @jesus_jimz

 

Rick Rojas is a national correspondent covering the American South. He has been a staff reporter for The Times since 2014. @RaR