Two students are dead and one injured after a 17-year-old male student armed with a handgun opened fire in the cafeteria of Antioch High School in Nashville on Wednesday morning.
The student then fatally shot himself, according to the Metro Nashville Police Department.
The shooter, identified as Solomon Henderson by Metro Nashville Police, was a 17-year-old student at the school.
Nashville Police Chief John Drake said during a 2:30 p.m. news conference there are online “materials” that are factoring into the police’s investigation.“As to a motive, we’re looking into that,” Drake said. “There are some materials on the internet that we’re looking at that’s under the investigation.”
Antioch school shooting updates:Get the latest on the shooting in Nashville
A nearly 300-page document posted on the X social media platform contains numerous selfies of what appears to be the shooter with various alt-right paraphernalia scattered between statements against “race mixing,” wishes to “take revenge” on society, statements praising Adolf Hitler and pages of explicit photos from previous school shootings.
Social media accounts linked in the document and scattered across many platforms including X, Kick, TikTok and more focused heavily on “groyper” content — a nickname used by many online white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups — as well as “incel” content, a name referring to young men who claim to be “involuntarily celibate” and espouse incredibly violent misogynistic views.
In the same document, updated four hours before the shooting, the writer expressed dismay at having to “speed up” an original plan to commit the shooting on Thursday, and said their goal was to kill “at least 10 people,” alongside a specifically targeted elementary school teacher who was not named.
On a Bluesky account linked in the document, a post on Wednesday morning read, “Today seems like a good day to die.”
The shooter also appeared to have livestreamed the attack from multiple platforms, including Kick.
Wednesday night, Kick confirmed the shooting was partially livestreamed on the platform, and that the account was “rapidly” banned and the content removed.
“We extend our thoughts to everyone impacted by this event,” the company said in a statement on X. “Violence has no place on Kick. We are actively working with law enforcement and taking all appropriate steps to support their investigation.”
Carla Hill, senior director of investigative research at the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, confirmed that the organization had reviewed one of the writings allegedly posted by the shooter.
“Our analysts located a sprawling manifesto full of anti-Black content, references to accelerationism and antisemitism,” Hill said. “It also plagiarized from various far right manifestos and publications, including Terrorgram Collective and a manifesto by Matthew Harris.”
Drake said in a news conference that he hopes in the future, if people see something concerning, they say something.“We believe there’s some materials out there, and maybe they were seen,” Drake said, adding if someone “said something, maybe more could have been done.”
Contributing: Evan Mealins of The Tennessean and Will Carless of USA Today.
The USA TODAY Network – Tennessee’s coverage of First Amendment issues is funded through a collaboration between the Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners.
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