The teenager who fatally shot a student at a high school in Nashville, Tennessee, livestreamed part of the incident, according to the platform he used, and he was influenced by internet content that authorities described Thursday as “harmful and objectionable.”
The 17-year-old gunman, who wounded a second student before he died by suicide, fired 10 shots from a 9 mm pistol 17 seconds after he entered the cafeteria at Antioch High School, southeast of downtown Nashville, on Wednesday, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said in a statement Thursday.
The shooter’s mother dropped him off, the department said, correcting the police chief’s earlier comment that he took the bus to school. Before he opened fire, he went to a nearby bathroom and posted social media photos, police said.
The attack was partially livestreamed on the streaming platform Kick, the company said in a statement Thursday. The account that posted the video was quickly banned, and the company removed it, according to the statement.
“Violence has no place on KICK,” the company said. “We are actively working with law enforcement and taking all appropriate steps to support their investigation.”
A pistol with seven rounds was recovered from the cafeteria floor, the police department said.
The gun the shooter used was bought by someone in Arizona in 2022. That person was not identified by police, who said the weapon had not been reported stolen.
The gunman, Solomon Henderson, appears to have left behind two documents totaling 339 pages, which homicide investigators are reviewing, the police department said.
It is clear that he was “significantly influenced by web-based material, especially that found on non-traditional sites that most would find harmful and objectionable,” the statement says. “The FBI is working closely with the MNPD in the ideological influences portion of this investigation.”
The police department has not publicly identified a possible motive.
Authorities identified the 16-year-old student who was killed as Josselin Corea Escalante. A 17-year-old male student suffered a graze wound to an arm and was treated at a local hospital and released.
A student who was in the cafeteria described a terrifying scene, telling NBC affiliate WSMV of Nashville that he hid behind garbage cans before he fled through a back door.
“I saw people getting shot, on the ground, bleeding and stuff,” the student told the station. “I tried to help these people who was falling, getting pushed.”
An artificial intelligence-powered weapons detection system installed at Antioch failed to detect the gunman’s firearm, officials said Thursday.
The system, Omnilert, partly relies on the schools’ existing camera network, but it did not pick up the shooter’s gun because of his proximity to those cameras, school spokesman Sean Braisted told reporters at a news conference.
“It wasn’t close enough to get an accurate read and to activate that alarm,” Braisted said, adding: “It’s not going to work in every instance, in every spot, based on where that weapon might be visible.”
Police instead activated the system by brandishing their weapons during their response, he said.
