Mass Casualty Events Are Not Always What You Think | Nashville + Denver
But wait! There's more!
This is a follow-up piece to my deep dive into the Covenant School shooting in Nashville on March 27th.
The media has been quite busy with their gun violence segments these past couple weeks and it seems as though there are some strange patterns emerging. In my first piece, I touched on the coincidence (ha) that gun control activists Ashbey Beasley and Shaundelle Brooks magically appeared together at a press conference for the Covenant School shooting. Beasley allegedly survived a shooting at a parade on July 4th last year in Highland Park, Illinois. She was in town visiting her friend Brooks whose son was allegedly shot and killed at a Waffle House in Antioch back in 2018.
These two would use the recent Nashville incident to make numerous appearances on mainstream news networks. It only gets stranger from here, though. When the trial was starting for the Waffle House shooting last year, a woman by the name of Samira Hardcastle was quoted by a local CBS affiliate stating, “We talk about it because it happened in our community, you know, so a lot of people have thoughts about it when we drive by, it’s like, ‘oh, that’s where the shooting happened.’”
I wonder if Hardcastle said “when we drive by” because she rides shotgun.
Believe it or not, Hardcastle went to school with our alleged trans shooter. I didn’t know Nashville was such a small town!
In this…um…riveting interview, Hardcastle quickly establishes that she did know the shooter Audrey Hale in middle and high school. A moment later, Chris Cuomo says Hale targeted the place he went to middle school (speaking about Covenant). Hardcastle then says she is not familiar with what years Hale was at the Covenant School but says they attended an arts magnet school called I. T. Creswell Middle. Great reporting, Cuomo.
It is indeed at I. T. Creswell where Hale apparently played basketball alongside Paige “Averianna” Patton. In the days following the incident, Patton would go on a media tour to talk about the cryptic message she received from Audrey (under the name Aiden) that hinted at murder-suicide. Why she was selected to receive this random message about 15 years after they went to school together is quite the mystery…or is it? Patton would make appearances on ABC, FOX and a couple more on CNN. She’s used to that, though, because she’s Averianna the Personality, the “Queen of Nashville Radio” who has worked for ESPN3 and numerous red carpet events.
It’s almost as if the media wants predictable people on television so the messaging comes across a certain way. Speaking of media, one of the reporters of the Nashville shooting, Joylyn Bukovac, not-so-organically disclosed she was a school shooting survivor in multiple segments on air.
Why does it seem like people who went to schools with reported shootings are more successful in the arts, media and politics? Hmm. Speaking of the arts, remember that Clarissa did explain it all.
Meanwhile, there was a shooting at Denver’s East High School on March 22nd. Reports say two school administrators got shot by a student named Austin Lyle while patting him down. One of the FOX News reporters on the scene was Alicia Acuna, who made a point to hug her child—a student at East High—live on air.
Apparently FOX was all over the scene, as another FOX reporter interviewed a FOX legal analyst Chris Decker and his son Jackson who attends the school.
While Nashville suffered from gun violence at the hands of a militant trans man, Denver kids got a scare while in an assembly held by the school club Latino Students United that was meant to acknowledge a shooting on February 13th that resulted in the death of student Luis Garcia.
What are the odds that this culture war mashup with gun violence would happen organically and this particular group of activists, artists and media personalities would be deployed?