TRAVIS LOLLER, JONATHAN MATTISE, and KRISTIN M. HALL, The Associated Press
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Almost two years after another tragic school shooting in the city that sparked a heated debate about gun control in Tennessee, a shooting in a Nashville high school cafeteria on Wednesday left a female student dead and another student injured.
During a news conference, Metro Nashville Police spokesperson Don Aaron stated that the 17-year-old shooter, who was also a student at Antioch High School, later shot and killed himself with a revolver. He was recognized by the police as Solomon Henderson.
Josselin Corea Escalante, 16, was killed when the shooter addressed her in the cafeteria, according to Police Chief John Drake.
A gunshot grazed the injured student. Drake stated that after receiving treatment, he was discharged from the hospital. According to Aaron, a different student was admitted to the hospital for treatment of a facial injury sustained in a fall.
Nashville Metro In an effort to determine a motivation, police, federal, and state agencies are looking into extremely alarming social media posts and web articles linked to 17-year-old Solomon Henderson, the police stated in a statement Wednesday night.
According to The Tennessean, the posts featured pages of explicit images from past school shootings, statements condemning racial mixing, calls to exact revenge on society, and numerous selfies of the shooter wearing various alt-right accoutrements.
According to the statement, police stated that the gunshots might have been random and that investigators have not yet found a link between Henderson and the victims.
According to Aaron, the incident occurred at approximately 11 a.m. when two school resource officers were inside the facility. According to Aaron, they were not in close proximity to the cafeteria, and by the time they arrived, the gunman had already taken his own life and the shooting had stopped.
Following a shooting at Nashville, Tennessee’s Antioch High School on Wednesday, January 22, 2025, families wait as school buses arrive at a unification location. (George Walker IV/AP Photo)AP
The school is located in Antioch, a community around ten miles southeast of downtown Nashville, and has roughly 2,000 pupils.
After being transported by bus from the school to a medical facility, officials assisted astonished parents in getting back together with their kids.
On Wednesday afternoon, Dajuan Bernard waited at a Mapco service station to meet up with his son, a tenth grader, who was being kept in the auditorium with other pupils. According to Bernard, his kid was a little shocked when he first told him about the shooting. His son claimed to have heard the gunfire when he was upstairs from the cafeteria.
Bernard informed me that everything was OK and that he was alright.
“This world is so crazy,” he remarked, adding that it could occur anywhere. To stop them from doing this at all, we just need to safeguard the children and raise them properly. The hardest part is that.
A 16-year-old boy at Antioch High School was detained in October after school resource officers and administrators learned via social media that he had brought a gun to class the day before. Authorities say they discovered a loaded revolver in his pants when they stopped him the next morning.
The school shooting on Wednesday occurs almost two years after a shooter killed six people, including three children, at a different private elementary school in Nashville.
Hundreds of community activists, families, protestors, and others worked for months to urge politicians to take gun control measures into consideration after the tragedy.
The Republican-controlled state’s GOP lawmakers declined to do so. It’s unlikely that sentiments have shifted sufficiently to take seriously any significant legislation addressing gun regulation, especially because the Republican supermajority remained intact following the election in November.
Rather, politicians have been more receptive to increasing school security. For example, last year, they passed a bill that would permit select staff members and instructors to carry concealed handguns on school property while preventing parents and other educators from knowing who was carrying a weapon.