Live Updates: Nashville Covenant School Shooting

Audrey Hale messaged Averianna Patton before yesterday's Nashville school shooting.
Audrey Hale messaged Averianna Patton before yesterday’s Nashville school shooting. (CNN)

In a message shared with CNN affiliate WTVF, Audrey Hale’s former middle school basketball teammate provided chilling new details about her post on social media ahead of yesterday’s Nashville school shooting. Communication with the shooter.

Averianna Patton said she saw a message on her phone that Hale had sent her on Instagram Monday morning saying that Hale was planning to kill himself and that she would see it on the news. A screenshot of a message posted by WTVF appears to show it was sent at 9:57 a.m. local time.

“Someday this will make more sense,” Hale wrote. “I’ve left enough evidence. But something bad is about to happen,” the source said.

“I tried to reassure and encourage her, then contacted the Suicide Prevention Helpline at 10:08 a.m. on instructions from my father,” Patton said.

Patton told WTVF that she called the Nashville-Davidson County Sheriff’s Office at 10:13 a.m. to keep them informed and was directed to call Nashville’s non-emergency number.

“I called Nashville’s non-emergency line at 10:14 a.m. and waited almost seven minutes before speaking to someone who said they would send an officer to my house. An officer didn’t respond until 3:29 p.m. Come to my house in minutes, Barton said.

In an interview with CNN on Tuesday morning, Patton said she was “still trying to process it all.”

She said she “couldn’t believe it” when she found out Hale was the shooter.

Asked by CNN’s Don Lemon why Hale was messaging her specifically, Patton said she works in radio and is well-known in Nashville, but she’s “asking God the same question.”

“Keep praying for us … I just want a solution, a better way, some better agreement, you know, to avoid this from happening in the future,” Barton said.

“I’m just trying to see if there’s something we can do as a community, as a city, to avoid that,” she said.

Some background on timing: Nashville Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Don Aaron said at a news conference that the first call of active shooting was received around 10:15 a.m. local time.

He said when the police arrived, they were walking through the first floor of the building. They then heard gunshots from the second floor of the building, according to Aaron. It was there at 10:27 a.m. local time that police confronted and killed the gunman, he said.

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