Nashville news anchor fights back tears as she reports on school shooting

A Nashville news anchor fought back tears as she reported on the school shooting in the city leaving three adults and three children dead.

Amanda Hara said during a broadcast at WSMV on Monday that she was “getting emails from my child’s school that they’re going into lockdown at this time just as a precaution”.

“And one of my other children’s schools is working with security to make sure that everything is safe,” she added as she grew emotional.

Fellow anchor Holly Thompson laid a hand on her shoulder and said “it’s going to be okay”.

She then turned to the viewers and said, “it’s obviously very emotional, we know many of you are just now tuning in and as a parent, you know our hearts go out to all these kids and these other parents who are out there”.

“We know the emotions are high, there’ so much concern, there’s still a lot of panic, there’s worry because we have a lot of people trying to figure out what’s the status of my child, what’s the status of my spouse,” Ms Thompson added.

The suspect in the Nashville school shooting is a 28-year-old woman from the city, police have said.

She is said to have used two assault-type rifles and a handgun. The suspect, who died after being engaged by police, is yet to be identified but is thought to have been a former student.

Three adults and three children were killed in the shooting.

Only one officer was injured, from cut glass. Two officers from a team of five engaged the suspect and shot her, police said.

“We do not know who she is at this juncture, we are trying to identify her,” Nashville Police Public Affairs Director Don Aaron said during a press briefing. The 28-year-old was initially described as being “in her teens”.

“This is a church that operates a private school. There were no Metro Police personnel assigned to that school of any kind,” he added.

“There is video from the school that we are viewing now to try and understand what happened,” he said.

The former acting director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, said on CNN that it’s “exceedingly rare” for mass shooters to be women.

Police were called to the scene at 10.13am local time and the suspect was shot and killed 14 minutes later, at 10.27am.

Mr Aaron told the press that police were going through the first floor when they heard gunshots from upstairs.

“They immediately went to the gunfire,” Mr Aaron told the press, adding that the suspect entered the school via a side entrance and went to the second floor, “firing multiple shots”.

The confrontation between officers and the suspect then took place on the second floor in a “lobby-type area”.

An FBI investigation found that men were behind 98 per cent of all active shooter incidents in 2021 and that out of 250 active shooter incidents between 2000 and 2018, nine involved women.

The shooting took place at The Covenant School; the Presbyterian institution has around 200 students from preschool to sixth grade.