Nashville officers speak out about taking down shooter

(NewsNation) — The Nashville, Tennessee, police officers who took down the shooter at a Christian private school after she killed six people, including three children, spoke out publicly for the first time.

Police say Detective Michael Collazo and Officer Rex Engelbert shot and killed the 28-year-old attacker at Covenant School on March 27. They said Tuesday that they were in the right place at the right time, and that is what helped them.

NewsNation local affiliate WKRN said Collazo, a nine-year veteran of the Metro Nashville Police Department, had just started his shift when he heard the radio code of an active shooter. When he arrived, Collazo saw shell casings on the ground, bullet holes on the door and the custodian on the ground not moving, WKRN reported.

Collazo shortly linked up with Detective Sgt. Jeff Mathes and started clearing rooms.

“We didn’t know if the shooter was to the left or the right,” Collazo recalled. “Smoke was everywhere. The fire alarm was going off.”

Officers navigated a maze of classrooms and hallways to find and stop the shooter.

“It was somewhere right around that point we heard another shot and that’s what told us that the shooter was to our right,” Collazo said.

Body camera video shows officers finding the shooter on the second floor. They attribute their actions to training and location.

Engelbert remembered having to go to the Metro Police Academy for business the day of the shooting, meaning he was already near the school.

“I really had no business being where I was,” Engelbert said. “You can call it fate or God or whatever you want, but I can’t count on both my hands the irregularities that put me in that position when a call for service came out for an act of deadly aggression at a school.”

Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake says the already tragic situation could have ended worse had it not been for the officers’ response, the school’s active shooter training, dispatchers and others, WKRN wrote.

In the days after the school shooting, Nashville police were lauded for their response. Deanna DeHart, Collazo’s sister, told NewsNation during an interview last month that she always knew how brave her younger brother was — but it wasn’t until she saw body camera footage of him running toward gunfire that she found out how courageous he truly is.

“We’re all very proud of him,” DeHart told NewsNation in her first on-camera interview. Even that, though, is “probably an understatement,” she added.