Melissa Joan Hart Reveals Her Shocking Role In Nashville Shooting
Melissa Joan Hart, whose children go to school near the site of the tragic Nashville school shooting, says she helped students from the Covenant School cross a busy highway.
In the days after the tragic shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, news is slowly trickling out about what exactly happened in and around the school on that day. Surprisingly, some of that news involves Melissa Joan Hart of Sabrina the Teenage Witch fame. According to NPR, the actress actually helped a kindergarten class cross a heavily trafficked highway to safety.
Unfortunately, this is not Melissa Joan Hart’s first brush with a school shooting. She and her family lived in Connecticut until just after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. They had been living not far from the school when it happened and presumably moved to Nashville to find a safer place to raise their children.
“This is our second experience with a school shooting, with our kids being in close proximity,” Melissa Joan Hart said in a video on her recent Instagram post. She and her children are all safe this time as well, but things could have been much worse.
Melissa Joan Hart’s children attend a school close to the Covenant School, but they were out of school that day for student-teacher conferences. Hart and her husband were on their way to their kids’ school for said conferences when the shooting happened. They saw a group of young children coming out of the woods nearby and they and others stopped to help.
It was obvious from her video that this was an extremely upsetting situation for Melissa Joan Hart, as she held back tears as she described how they helped the five-year-olds escape a situation they should never have been in in the first place. They helped to protect them as they crossed the busy road and reunited with teachers and parents on the other side.
“I don’t know what to say anymore,” Melissa Joan Hart said after she told her story. “Enough is enough. Just pray for the families.”
Even though Melissa Joan Hart and her family were safe, three children and three members of the Covenant School’s staff were killed in the school shooting in Nashville. As reported by another NPR article, there have already been 89 gun-related incidents in schools in the United States so far this year. That’s almost equivalent to one every day this year: 74 victims have either been hurt or killed.
Melissa Joan Hart’s sentiment of “enough is enough” is being echoed all around the country. But what can be done? Without getting into the highly divisive talk about stricter gun laws, experts urge children and staff to report anything suspicious they see at school, or to notice the warning signs beforehand which, according to Jillian Peterson, an associate professor and president of the Violence Project research center, are almost always there.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible in the case of the Covenant School, as the shooter was a former student who wasn’t on campus every day for someone to notice their behavior change. Audrey Hale was the shooter in this case, and her motives are as yet unknown, or at least have not been disclosed publicly.
While the pain of this tragedy will not fade for a long time, if ever, Melissa Joan Hart can at least know that she made a difference in helping children escape a nightmare that is, unfortunately, an all-too-common occurrence these days.
