Melissa Joan Hart became emotional as she opened up about helping small kindergartners get to safety after a fatal school shooting in Nashville on Monday morning.
Three 9-year-olds and three staff members were killed when a former student opened fire at a private Christian school.
The actress and mom of three, who lives in Nashville, shared in an emotional Instagram video that her children attend school “right next to” the Covenant School, where the tragedy took place. This isn’t the first time she and her family have experienced a nearby school shooting.
“We moved here from Connecticut where we were in school a little ways down from Sandy Hook, so this is our second experience with a school shooting with our kids being in close proximity,” said Hart, 46. “Luckily we are all okay.”
She shared that she and her husband Mark Wilkerson — with whom she shares sons Mason, 17, Braden, 15, and Tucker, 10 — were in the middle of the aftermath and helped small children who “were trying to escape.”
“My husband and I were on our way to school for conferences. Luckily our kids weren’t in today,” Hart continued, becoming emotional. “We helped a class of Kindergartners across a busy highway. They were climbing out of the woods, they were trying to escape a shooter situation at their school. So we helped these tiny little kids cross the road and get their teachers over there.”
She concluded, “We helped a mom reunite with her children and I just … I don’t know what to say. Enough is enough. Just pray, pray for the families.”
“Prayers today, Action tomorrow,” she wrote. “This was too raw to post yesterday but wanted you to hear this story.”
Nashville authorities have confirmed that the assailant, a former student identified as 28-year-old Audrey Hale, gained entrance to the Covenant School by shooting through a glass door before killing three adults and three children. Officers engaged the shooter on the second floor of the building, killing the assailant, who was confirmed dead by 10:27 a.m.
The gender of the assailant is unclear. Police initially referred to the shooter as a female, and then said the assailant identifies as transgender. CNN reports a police spokesperson told the station Hale used male pronouns on a social media profile.
The shooter had two “assault-type rifles” and one pistol, Nashville police spokesman Don Aaron said.
On Tuesday morning, police released body-camera footage from Englebert and Collazo of their encounter with the shooter.
Prior to identifying the shooter, police announced that the victims were Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, William Kinney, all 9 and Katherine Koonce, 60, Mike Hill and Cynthia Peak, both 61.
“Our community is heartbroken,” the Covenant School said in a statement emailed to PEOPLE. “We are grieving tremendous loss and are in shock coming out of the terror that shattered our school and church. We are focused on loving our students, our families, our faculty and staff, and beginning the process of healing.”
According to statistics from the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are shot, regardless of the number of fatalities, there were 128 mass shootings in 2023 as of Monday morning.
How to help
You can donate to the families of the victims through The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee. ViVE and VictimsFirst have also created GoFundMe pages for donations. Both fundraisers are verified.
