Melissa Joan Hart Helps “Tiny, Little Kids” Flee the Nashville Shooting
She saw a confused little girl come out of the woods and will “never forget” the look on a teacher’s face.
Nineties sweetheart Melissa Joan Hart is doing more than acting these days. The actress revealed she just helped some young kids flee from the tragic school shooting at the Nashville Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. In a tearful video posted to her Instagram account on Mar. 28, Hart shares that she helped some of the young and scared kindergarteners escape the scene. The shooting killed six people, three of whom were nine-year-old children.
Hart told her 1.7 million Instagram followers that her own children attend a school nearby, though they didn’t have school that day due to parent-teacher conferences. She and her husband Mark Wilkerson were in the area when the tragic situation unfolded, and the couple found themselves helping children escape.
“We helped a class of kindergarteners across a busy highway. They were climbing out of the woods, and they were trying to escape the shooter situation at their school,” she shares. “We helped these tiny, little kids cross their road and get their teachers over there, and we helped a mom reunite with her children,” the 46-year-old mom shares, choking back tears.
The Sabrina the Teenage Witch star revealed this isn’t the first time she’s been close to the scene of a school shooting. “We moved here from Connecticut… a little ways down from Sandy Hook,” she says of the 2012 shooting rampage that killed 26 people. “So this is our second experience with a school shooting with our kids being in close proximity,” exclaims Hart. “Enough is enough.”
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The Clarissa Explains It All star also took to her podcast What Women Binge to address what happened with the Nashville shooting, saying she will “never forget” the look on one of the teacher’s faces, or the confused little girl she greeted coming out of the woods.
“I was like, ‘We’re just going to cross the road,’ and she doesn’t know me so she doesn’t know the fear in my voice but it’s very quickly dawning on me that this is not a fire drill … something is going on really bad, something is worse behind them,” says Hart.
Nashville Police say Audrey Hale allegedly walked into the private elementary school on Monday wielding three weapons and gunned down three students and three staff members, before being shot and killed by police. The 28-year-old was reportedly a former student at the school and was being treated for an emotional disorder, according to CNN.
While the community mourned, other celebrities came forward on social media to say they had ties to the Nashville school shooting, including Jesse James Decker, whose children attend a school just two miles away.
“A lot of you are messaging, and it’s not my kids’ school, but it’s only two miles up the road. It’s in our town, it’s in our community, and it’s just awful,” Decker shared in an Instagram story. The same day, actress Jana Kramer revealed on an Instagram story that her children attend school just 15 minutes away and are OK.
This was the deadliest school shooting in nearly a year, reports CNN, and the 19th shooting at a school or university in 2023 so far. Just last week, two school administrators were gunned down at a high school in Denver, Colorado.
