Tennessee Firearms Association in conjunction with Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit in 2023 seeking access to the records that were being gathered by Metro Nashville Police Department ("MNPD") concerning the Covenant murders.  Those records included writings and other materials that the MNPD seized from the shooter's vehicle, home and potentially other locations. 

MNPD claimed that it did not have to release the records until its investigation of the deceased shooter was over (it never identified another person of interest).  That investigation officially ended in early 2025 - curiously within a week after the TFA filed its appellate brief.

In the trial court, many attorneys representing Covenant Church, Covenant School, the Covenant parents, all sought to intervene to forever block public access to the records - mainly the records seized from the shooter and to some extent records related to "school security."  

Ultimately, the trial court ruled that the records were protected based on three theories - an allegedly open criminal investigation (of a deceased shooter), a public records exception pertaining to "school security" records, and the court's conclusion that the federal Copyright Act somehow required a finding under Article VI (federal supremacy) that the records were exempt from disclosure under the state open records act. 

On October 30, 2025, the case was set for oral argument in the Tennessee court of appeals. At this point, the appellate court has not ruled in the matter.

However, whether it ever rules may be irrelevant to those who are interested in seeing what the shooter wrote in her "manifesto" - a term that is starting to encompass thousands of pages of documents.  

Copies of many of the records were provided by local or state officials to the FBI.  Federal law does not have a copyright exception to federal Freedom of Information Act requests.   As of December 29, 2025, the FBI's "Vault" has six (6) PDF's of records containing over 2,000 pages related to the Covenant School shooting.  Many of the records are in the shooter's handwriting or are the shooter's drawings.  While some portions of the records are heavily redacted, much of the content is not redacted.  Some of those FBI records are clearly pages from the shooter's logs and in her own handwriting.  (Of course, Tennessee's new media sources are not sharing that information).  

Those who are seeking information about why this happened and what constitutionally permissible options might exist to address this type of situation in the future may be interested in these records and those that apparently will continue to be released.