One year ago today, a 17-year-old student who identified as a groyper and member of TCC opened fire inside the cafeteria of Antioch High in Nashville. He planned to kill at least 10 students but turned the gun on himself after the first victim died. A handgun with 7 bullets still loaded in the magazine was found next to his body when police arrived at the school.
Here is part of my summary from last year:
Two students died and two others were wounded during a shooting inside Antioch High School in Nashville, TN. A 17-year-old male student fatally shot a female student and then fatally shot himself with a handgun at 11:09 AM inside the cafeteria. Cellphone video recorded the sounds gunshots as the teen fired 9 shots at the female student who died, and then fired one shot killing himself.
The shooting was over in 17 seconds from the first to the last shot. The 9mm handgun he used was legally purchased in Arizona and never reported stolen. It’s unclear how a teenager in Nashville ended up with a gun purchased 1,500 miles away.
A male student was grazed, and a second male student suffered a non-gunshot injury that required hospitalization. While it appears that he deliberately targeted one female student who was killed, his social media account posted violent, racist, and antisemitic content. The writings include detailed plans for the shooting and reasons behind committing the attack, along with mentions of other school shootings. The shooting was livestreamed on KICK, a platform known for the lack of content moderation and hate speech.
A 50-page document posted on X contains selfies of what appears to be the shooter with far-right paraphernalia scattered between statements against “race mixing”. He wrote about wanting to “take revenge” on society, praised Adolf Hitler, and posted explicit photos from previous school shootings.
This week, a lawsuit filed by the former assistant principal brings up new questions about the shooting:
The school had an AI system that identifies guns on the CCTV cameras, but the system failed to send an alert during the school shooting. This is the same system that flagged a bag of Doritos chips as a gun causing students to be ordered to the ground at gunpoint. In the lawsuit, both principals got an alert about a gun on campus on May 8, 2024 but it turned out to be a squirt gun. These AI monitoring companies are very secretive about their ‘false positive’ rate and this lawsuit is the first public report of a false alert on the Antioch High campus. Nashville schools have a $1,050,487.80 contract for this AI gun detection system.
Lawsuit claims the principal ran away from the shooting while the assistant principal ran to the cafeteria. She got the cafeteria just as the student committed suicide before police arrived, and her lawsuit claims that witnessing the violence caused PTSD. Her lawsuit also claims that during the false alarm for the squirt gun, the principal panicked and didn’t respond to the threat.
As this Nashville lawsuit was filed, a Uvalde police officer is in court for 29 charges of felony child endangerment. From the details released over the last two weeks, the officer is accused of freezing rather than engaging the shooter outside on the Robb Elementary campus before the assailant entered the school. The officer arrived on campus 18 seconds after the first shot and the felony case focuses on a 60 second time period when the officer had an opportunity to stop the shooter outside of the school before any students or staff were harmed. As the assailant walked into the school building, the officer waited 5 minutes and 53 seconds before taking action despite his documented training in ‘active shooter’ response.
He was found not guilty yesterday:
The not guilty verdict delivered a devastating blow to families of the victims and survivors who have clamored for accountability for the delayed police response on May 24, 2022. During the three-week trial, prosecutors argued that Mr. Gonzales, 52, failed to stop the gunman despite a witness alerting him to his whereabouts moments before the assailant stormed two connected classrooms.
Back to the Nashville lawsuit, when police officers have repeatedly avoided engaging school shooters, are school administrators really expected to run toward the sound of gunfire?
Interestingly, the Nashville lawsuit doesn’t make claims about the missed opportunities to prevent this planned attack. The 17-year-old shooter was a current student who was active in public social media communities on twitter and Instagram that promote mass violence. He posted photos of himself mimicking the poses and wearing the same clothing as prior school shooters. He even posted photos with a gun which is likely the same weapon he used during the attack.
He wasn’t try to hide his intentions because his social media usernames were combinations of prior mass shooters’ names. I want to know why the FBI, regional fusion center (a post-9/11 DHS funded place for every police agency in a region to share information), and Nashville PD didn’t flag this online activity from a public account.
An online document he wrote explained a need to "speed up" his original plan to commit the school shooting with a specific date listed and he wrote that his goal was to kill “at least 10 people”. Per his writings, he wanted to use an AR-15 rifle and fully automatic Glock handgun. He also talked about using improvised explosives and flammable liquids which is a common component of attacks back to the firebombing during the Cokeville Elementary hostage crisis in 1986.
According to classmates the 17-year-old shooter was a ROTC cadet, “smart person at the top of the class”, and was “quiet.”
“I knew him personally. He was in my class and I didn’t think he was anything like that. I just thought he was a sweet quiet person, but he wasn’t.”
But the reality of his online life was much darker than it appeared to classmates. Last year, the leader of an Eastern European neo-Nazi cult was extradited to the United States from Moldova to face charges for soliciting hate crimes, planning a mass casualty attack in New York City, and having connections to a deadly school shooting at Antioch High.
“The Antioch High student livestreamed part of his attack. Prior to the attack, in an audio recording posted online, the 17-year-old attacker claimed he was taking action on behalf of MKY, Chkhikvishvili, and at least one other group,” the DOJ wrote. “The attacker’s [writings] explicitly mentioned the defendant by name and included numerous references to MKY’s founder, Yegor Krasnov. The attacker stated that he would write Krasnov’s name on his gun.”
The last missed warning came about three hours before the 17-year-old opened fire inside his school with a final social media post: “Today seems like a good day to die.”
Learn more about online radicalization including groypers and TCC:
Rise of purposeless, non-ideological gun violence by young American men
112 TCC-radicalized students identified by police in Jakarta, Indonesia
Ep 60. Inside the True Crime Community (TCC) that grooms teens into school shooters
Ep 57. TCC, gore videos, groypers, and online radicalization
Meme culture, Groypers, school shooters, and ‘Anomie Extremism’
Discord Platform: What schools and parents need to know to prevent a school shooting
David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my podcast—Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education & Security—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.