Melissa Joan Hart assisted kindergarten students in crossing the street to safety following a fatal shooting at a Nashville school on Monday morning.
The “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” star, who lives in Nashville with her family, told NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield that she and her husband, Mark Wilkerson, were driving near The Covenant School when the tragedy occurred. Hart claimed she saw small children following their teacher after being guided by a cop.
She added that Hart stepped out of the car and began assisting the children in crossing the street.
“We pushed them across the street as quickly as we could. The teachers avoided making eye contact. I believe it was because they were trying not to break down,” Hart explained.
Hart stated that she didn’t know why the children were being hustled across the street — and why more youngsters were being ushered out of a wooded area into the road — but she assumed there was a gunshot.
“That was so horrible, and I was just a bystander,” Hart recalled. “I’m just there trying to help in any way I can.” “To know that there were parents last night who went home without their children… it’s beyond comprehension.”
This isn’t the first time Hart and her family have been near a school shooting.
Hart had previously lived in Connecticut during the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, and she remembered racing to pick up her first-grader from a nearby school.
“Last night, I hugged my 17-year-old and said, ‘I’m sorry this is the second time you’ve been in a lockdown,’ he answered, ‘Actually, Mom, it’s the third.’ I had forgotten about his school… there had been a shooting in the temple next door.”
Hart said she saw the same worry on the faces of Covenant parents on Monday. One adjacent mother informed Hart that her children were still at school. Hart and her husband brought the mother to a fire station and reunited her with her children.
“I prayed with her until my husband could take her down the hill, and then I realized she was pregnant.” In 2012, I had just given birth to my third child and had two children in school. “I was that mom a decade ago, and I just felt for this woman,” Hart said.
The shooter at The Covenant School killed six people: Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, all nine years old; Cynthia Peak, 61; Katherine Koonce, 60; and Mike Hill, 61.
According to sources, police identified Audrey Hale, 28, as the culprit who legally purchased at least seven firearms from local businesses.
Within 14 minutes, officers from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department responded and neutralized the subject.
Officers Rex Engelbert, a 4-year veteran, and Michael Collazo, a 9-year veteran, are shown reacting to the warning and traveling across the Covenant campus in bodycam footage released by the MNPD on Tuesday.
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