Reporters uncover overlooked red flags after a Tennessee school shooting

On Jan. 22, 17-year-old Solomon Henderson walked into his Nashville high school with a gun and fatally shot a 16-year-old girl before turning the gun on himself.

In the weeks following the shooting, two reporters dug into the boy's troubling past and found several concerning red flags raised to Tennessee authorities. The reporters, Aliyya Swaby of ProPublica and Paige Pfleger of WPLN/Nashville Public Radio teamed up to trace what led up to the deadly shooting.

In this Q&A, Swaby and Pfleger share their reporting approach to covering their story and lessons learned along the way.

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

How did this story come together? Walk us through the reporting process.

Pfleger: It started on Jan. 22 when our newsroom at WPLN was notified that there was a school shooting at Antioch High School. We were on top of the breaking news that day, and in the days following the tragedy, we started talking about the bigger-picture stories we might be able to pursue. At that point, Aliyya and I had been collaborating for nearly a year on stories about Tennessee's threats of mass violence law, which casts a really wide net and entangles kids in the justice system over threats that sometimes the school is not finding credible. Aliyya and I talked about the Antioch shooting, and we wanted to understand what red flags existed in this case that were missed, and who they were missed by. The state is casting such a wide net, but how is it that this child didn't get caught up in it?

How did the collaboration between you two and your newsrooms work?

Swaby: I started early last year on a project about how Tennessee was handling threats of mass violence in its schools. As I started requesting records from state and local agencies, I realized that Tennessee is one of a handful of states that allows agencies to deny requests from people without a state ID. So, I reached out to Paige to see if she would be open to helping me out. We clicked pretty much immediately and decided to collaborate even beyond records. Paige had been reporting on juvenile justice and guns in Tennessee for years, and I've been an education reporter for more than a decade. Together, we were a dream team for this investigation.

Pfleger: We even gave ourselves a collab name combining our last names: Team Swager! As a local reporter, it is really beneficial to collaborate with ProPublica - they have a lot of resources, databases and expertise in these types of investigations. Locally, we have the power of a radio signal that reaches folks in our region, which has helped immensely with source gathering and building connections here in Tennessee. It really is a great match. On a more personal note, I've learned so much from getting to see the way Aliyya reports. She's incredible. And we're lucky that we share the same ethics, approach to interviewing and writing style, too.

Your story chronicles the many opportunities for law enforcement and the school system to intervene and potentially prevent Henderson from committing the shooting. As one teacher aptly put it, he was a "walking red flag." What went into reporting that part of the story?

Pfleger: One of the best parts of collaborating is being able to divide and conquer. Once we decided we wanted to see if there was an investigation here for the two of us, I started requesting records, and Aliyya hit the phones. ProPublica's research reporter Mollie Simon had put together some background information on Henderson, including past addresses his family had lived at in Clarksville - about an hour from Nashville. So, not only did we send in requests to Nashville's dispatch, police and school district, but we also sent records requests to Clarksville's dispatch and police to see if he had any prior interactions with law enforcement where he lived before. That tactic turned up a violent incident between Henderson and his mom that had not been previously reported.

Aliyya: Mollie also dug through Facebook posts after the shooting to understand how community members were talking about it. Her background research helped lead us to Gemima, the girl who Henderson pulled a knife on at school. I cold-called her family and explained what we were working on and what we wanted to know, and they were happy to talk. I also asked them for documentation that would corroborate the story. They shared court records that proved Henderson was charged with reckless endangerment in juvenile court and that Gemima was the victim in the case. Gemima also shared a photo she took of Henderson in the cafeteria right after he threatened her, which she shared with administrators at the time. The metadata on that photo helped us cross-reference the date of the incident with existing local reporting about Henderson's disciplinary record.

Pfleger: Once we had all of that in hand, we took our findings to everyone in the story who could help us put them in context - judges, lawmakers, police, schools. It was through that process that we discovered that MNPD did not know about the Clarksville incident.

Can you walk us through some of the violence prevention methods you learned about over the course of reporting, like conducting threat assessments or connecting troubled students to services? What should reporters looking to cover these strategies know about how to report on them?

Swaby: I've talked to a number of threat assessment experts across the country who have helped me put Tennessee's policies in context. They all criticized the state's reliance on expulsions and arrests for handling threats, including in cases where the threats were not credible.

Reporters who want to cover these violence prevention strategies should understand that many school districts and law enforcement agencies are not implementing them well. The hardest part about this reporting has been getting details about how these strategies are helping or harming students in schools. We've focused on finding families who are willing to share their stories and who have helped us access records we otherwise wouldn't have gotten.

Pfleger: We also wanted to be mindful of the fact that we had the benefit of hindsight. It's easy for us to look back at all of these prior incidents and interpret them as warning signs that this child was going to become a school shooter. But law enforcement, in the moment, is handling these incidents as they come, and sometimes not connecting the dots in the ways that we set out to do. We wanted to make sure that our final story kept that in mind, while still holding agencies accountable by illuminating who knew what and when - but also being clear about what we can and cannot say for sure since many records involving kids are sealed.

This story is a strong example of the accountability reporting that should be following tragic breaking news like mass shootings. Can you explain why this reporting is important and what impact you hope comes from this and reporting like it?

Pfleger: Antioch was the second school shooting that I have covered in the four years that I've lived in Nashville. The first was the Covenant School Shooting, where three children and three school employees were killed. That shooting led to the state's Republican governor calling for changes in gun regulation - he and his wife were friends with one of the adults killed that day. The legislature had a special session, but no gun reform was passed. I've done a lot of reporting about how Tennessee often responds to these gun tragedies by making it easier, not harder, for more people to have guns. The reality is that the ubiquity of guns here, and loose regulations, are largely immovable - at least right now. So that makes it even more vital to look at the gaps in the system we do have, and the ways that system might be improved, in hopes of trying to prevent future tragedies.

Swaby: After a school shooting, the breaking news reporting on what happened and who was killed is absolutely crucial. But what Paige and I tried to do here was take a step back and ask another question: Could Tennessee have done anything differently to stop this from happening? Our reporting highlighted inconsistencies and flaws in the state's approach to school violence to show that school shootings do not have to be a foregone conclusion.