Two victims of the horrific Nashville school shooting on Monday performed final acts of heroism, before their lives were tragically cut short by an unhinged attacker.
Shooter Audrey Hale, 28, went on a 14-minute rampage at a private Christian school on Monday morning, which took the lives of three 9-year-old children and three staff members.
Hale breached the Covenant School by blasting through the double doors of the attached church with an assault weapon on Monday, and spent ten minutes searching for victims before entering the school’s first floor.
When Hale stumbled across three 9-year-old students, victim Evelyn Dieckhaus’ immediate reaction was to attempt to pull the fire alarm to save her classmates, and the deranged shooter took her life for trying.
Evelyn’s family called her “a shining light in this world,” and said they are “completely broken” by the tragedy in a statement.
Her elder sister Eleanor reportedly desperately wept at the loss of her younger sibling, while exclaiming that she didn’t “want to be an only child.”
The third grader wasn’t the only heroic victim of Hale, who wrote a detailed manifesto that included “writings” about other potential locations, and “a drawing of how potentially” a shooter “would enter and the assaults that would take place.”
Covenant School principal Katherine Koonce had reportedly “prepared the school by seeking advanced-level active-shooter training,” prior to the shooting.
Koonce was credited for saving “countless lives” with the protocol, according to witnesses at the scene of the horrific crime.
Nashville City Councilman Russ Pulley, a former FBI special agent, told Fox News Digital that Koonce was in the middle of a remote meeting when the first shots were fired at 10:13 a.m.
“It is my understanding from a witness at the school that Katherine Koonce was on a Zoom call when she heard the first shot,” Pulley detailed.
“She immediately ended the call, got up and headed straight for the shooter,” he noted. “She did what principals and headmasters do; she protected her children.”
According to Nashville Police Chief John Drake, who wasn’t clear on Koonce’s actions, as the hallway her body was found in was not under video surveillance, but he knows she had some kind of intervention with Hale.
“There was a confrontation, I’m sure – you can tell the way she was lying in the hallway,” Drake remarked.
When five heroic police officers arrived on the scene, they entered through the school’s main doors without any tactical gear at 10:21 a.m.
At that point, Hale had holed up on the second floor and was firing out a window at patrol cars below.
Officers Rex Englebert and Michael Collazo came upon the shooter as she was reloading her weapon and fired multiple shots, which ended Hale’s life at 10:24 a.m.
Both officers are being hailed as heroes for rushing into the building to confront the shooter without waiting for backup to arrive.
