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The head of Nashville’s Covenant School ran toward the mass shooter, a city councilman said.
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Katherine Koonce was on a Zoom call when the gunfire first rang out, the councilman told Fox News.
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Koonce, 60, was one of six people killed in Monday’s mass shooting at an elementary school.
The leader of the Nashville, Tennessee, school where another deadly school massacre unfolded earlier this week ran toward the sound of gunfire when the shooting began, a city councilman said.
Katherine Koonce, the head of The Covenant School, was on a Zoom call when the gunfire first rang out at the private Christian elementary school on Monday morning, Nashville City Councilman Russ Pulley told Fox News.
Pulley, a former FBI agent, said that 60-year-old Koonce then “immediately ended the call, got up, and headed straight for the shooter.”
Koonce was one of six people, including three 9-year-old children, who were slain by the 28-year-old shooter after the assailant fired through the school’s glass doors to enter the building.
The city councilman did not have any more details about what may have happened between Koonce and the shooter before she was killed, but Pulley told Fox News: “She did what principals and headmasters do; she protected her children.”
“In addition, she prepared the school by seeking advanced-level active-shooter training, and from witnesses at the scene, this protocol – details of which I cannot provide – saved countless lives,” Pulley added.
Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told reporters on Tuesday that it was “very possible” that Koonce ran toward the shooter, but he could not confirm the detail.
“I do know she was in the hallway by herself,” Drake said, explaining, “There was a confrontation, I’m sure, you can tell the way she was lying in the hallway.”
A longtime friend of Koonce’s told Insider that the school headmaster — a married mother-of-two — was a huge advocate for her students.
“The way that she honored the personhood of everyone in her circle, everyone in her presence, everyone she interacted with, it was so holy, and I don’t mean that to sound mystical, it was just really life-affirming, in a way that’s rare and precious,” Anna Caudill said.
Caudill told Insider that as she was watching the live news footage showing the aftermath of the shooting, she was looking for any sign of Koonce.
“And not seeing her, I kept making excuses like, well, ‘She must be, you know, helping the kids get onto the buses so they can go to the reunification point’ or ‘She must be talking to police’ or ‘I bet she’s helping with the first responders or with the children,’ ” Caudill said.
“It wasn’t until I went to pick up my younger son at the end of the day and my husband called me when I was on the way and said she didn’t make it,” said Caudill, “And I was just crushed.”
The other victims of Monday’s school shooting were 9-year-olds Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, 61-year-old substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, and custodian Mike Hill, 61.
Police ultimately shot and killed the shooter inside the school just minutes after they arrived at the scene.
Read the original article on Insider
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