Canadian Killers Helped Inspire Nashville School Shooter

A 17-year-old shooter killed one classmate and wounded another before taking his own life. His manifesto and journal cite the Québec City Mosque shooting and the London, Ontario van attack that killed a Muslim family among his inspirations.

Peter Smith
Canadian Anti-Hate Network



Antioch High School. Source: Google Maps


This article contains graphic themes and discusses mass casualty violence and suicide. 

A school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, has left one innocent student dead and another injured. The shooter, who took his own life during the attack, left behind a lengthy journal of his preparation for that attack, a manifesto, and a confusing digital trail that shows a Black youth embracing racially motivated white shooters.

Solomon Henderson’s writings paint a bleak picture of a youth who carried a deep self-loathing and hatred towards himself and his own race. His diary and manifesto are obsessed with dozens of spree killers, including at least six Canadians.

The Attack

  

According to his writings, Henderson spent years watching videos of white supremacist and ideologically motivated mass murders. 

On Wednesday, January 22, he brought a handgun to his school. 

Henderson was called into the office that morning and was worried he had been caught, only to find that it was related to some kind of “probation,” according to a post on a BlueSky account he names in his manifesto.

Around 11 AM CST, a Twitter account attributed to Henderson posted three pictures showing the floor of a bathroom stall. A handgun is visible inside a backpack in one of the images. In another picture, taken in the same bathroom stall, a firearm magazine is held up with ammunition visibly loaded inside.

The firearm was identified as a Taurus G2c 9mm compact pistol by the anonymous weapons identification expert War Noir after the incident.

Shortly after 11 AM, Henderson walked into the cafeteria and started shooting. 

Police say the boy took 17 seconds to fire 10 rounds. 

“Sixteen-year-old Josselin Corea Escalante was fatally wounded,” police said in a release. “A 17-year-old male student was grazed in the arm. He has been treated and released from Vanderbilt University Medical Center.“

The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said they are not aware if he targeted particular students or if he fired randomly.

“Henderson died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.”

   


Screen capture of a Blue Sky account belonging to Henderson. Source: Blue Sky

   

Two school officers were reportedly on the school property at the time of the shooting, but Henderson died as they arrived at the cafeteria. 

Two videos appeared on an account attributed to Henderson on the live-streaming website Kick. Though the footage was quickly removed, copies were made and shared online. Seeming to be streamed from his cellphone, an unseen individual assumed to be Henderson struggles with a locked door, swearing. The camera then follows a crowd into another room. 

The person holding the phone crouches down and brief images of a handgun barrel are shown before the video stops. A second video shows a black screen and voices talking loudly. After six minutes a police officer is shown briefly looking into the camera before the video ends. 

Henderson had tried, and failed, to livestream his attack.

 

Manifesto and Diary

   

Henderson left behind two documents outlining his thoughts and preparations for the attack: a 51-page manifesto and a 288-page journal. Both are filled with anti-Black racial slurs, accelerationist neo-Nazi imagery, and use the language of deeply ironic and violence-obsessed online communities. Accelerationists, in this context, are people who celebrate, encourage, or carry out acts of violence to hasten or bring about societal collapse.

The manifesto was released on Twitter using a shareable Google Document. Written using an online word processor capable of allowing collaboration between writers, the manifesto’s settings allowed anyone with the link to edit the document to make changes. This is not a default setting and must be made manually by the original author. Edits are stored and visible on the documents, but Google has blocked access to the file. 

A portion of the manifesto thanked an unnamed individual for contributing to one of the sections, though it is not clear if this is a direct collaborator or one of the authors of several manifestos quoted by Henderson.

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network has obtained and reviewed available copies of the manifesto. It is not possible at this time to tell if the files were altered in any way and how.

The diary is a long, seemingly unfiltered and disturbing series of reflections that details some of the planning and thought processes behind the shooting. Henderson expresses his admiration for multiple mass killers. This includes Canadians Alexandre Bissonette, the Quebec City Mosque shooter; Nathaniel Veltman, who murdered a Muslim family with his truck in London, Ontario, and Alec Minnassian, who used a van to run down people in Toronto. At least  six Canadian spree and mass killers were mentioned within the diary and manifesto, including referring to Marc Lépine, who murdered fourteen women at École Polytechnique in 1989, as a “saint.”

In the accelerationist subcultures he references in his manifesto, racially motivated mass murderers are frequently referred to as saints and martyrs.

Henderson uses the documents to pay homage to numerous spree killers, flexing his esoteric knowledge of school shooters and obscure mass murderers. Many of them are depicted through cartoonish fanart. Both the diary and manifesto contain videos, images, links to websites, and include a recording of Henderson singing Happy Birthday to Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of a 2019 massacre at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. 

Tarrant, who murdered over 50 people, live-streamed the brutal killings, which Henderson attempted, and failed, to do during his attack.

The images posted in the bathroom before the shooting also resemble those posted by another shooter, 15-year-old Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow, who attacked the Abundant Life Christian School killing one teacher and one student before taking her own life in December 2024. 

The pair did have some communication online before their respective attacks. Reporting by Wisconson Watch and ProPublica found that Rupnow had reposted content posted by Henderson wishing a happy Veterans Day to the perpetrator of a 1966 shooting from a Texas clocktower that killed 14 people. 

Moments before Rupnow’s own spree, when she posted the bathroom stall picture onto X, an account linked to Henderson commented: “livestream it.”

The same report said that of Rupnow’s 13 followers, two accounts have been attributed to Henderson.

After her death,  Henderson fawned over Rupnow in his writing, calling her a “Saintess” and delighting in the fact that she followed him on his X account. Nothing mentioned indicates private contact between the two at this time. Rupnow, who also left a short manifesto, used language similar to Henderson that reflects the Incel (Involuntary Celibate) ideology. 

Incels are an internet subculture that promotes pseudo-scientific proscriptions about sexual dynamics and relationships between men and women, typically casting women as villains for rejecting partnerships with the men who make up the movement. Incel forums are home to violent fantasies and extreme misogyny. 

Henderson was preoccupied with the aesthetics of mass shooters, noting to himself that he needed to learn to pose like Dyann Storm Roof, a shooter who killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Other photos showing Henderson with a pistol against his head mimic photographs taken by Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, as well as several others. 

His writings indicate a deep hatred of those around him—defining hate as the only “true emotion—including his family, who he accuses of abusing him from a young age. The diary and manifesto do not single out any individuals who were targeted at his school, only his intent to join the ranks of his idols and his goal of achieving a significant “high score,” referring to killing as many people as possible.

While Henderson also had multiple accounts across mainstream platforms like Instagram, X, BlueSky, and others, he also had accounts on niche forums and alternative platforms that discuss and share footage of mass violence. Many of these are listed in the final pages of his manifesto. 

   

Ideologies and Inspirations

    

Henderson’s online activity and writing explicitly name several distinct ideologies and schools of thought within both far-right and terminally online sub-cultures. It is difficult to precisely pin down his belief system, as he is often contradictory and ironic. Like other manifestos by similar spree killers, it is meant to create speculation and notoriety around the perpetrator. 

Reviewing the themes that are consistent in a manifesto can be more important than specific references, as is the context in which he names certain individuals. Some references, like those to certain spree killers, seem genuine and important to Henderson. References to other recognizable figures may be less serious, something his writings acknowledge.

Henderson repeatedly expressed admiration for National Socialist and militant accelerationist attackers, particularly other youths who achieved significant body counts. He often is critical of those he feels failed to enact a high enough death toll, mocking them for failing to prepare properly.

He expresses support for militant accelerationist groups, while at the same time debasing them as failures. He speaks similarly of the Incel ideology, saying that he knows he will be considered to be part of the subculture and shows a familiarity with the slang and terminology used by the community. His writing also includes links to the published works and a documentary created by the Terrorgram Collective—a transnational network of neo-Nazi content creators producing works meant to inspire and instruct radicalized individuals to carry out attacks—as well as multiple manifestos and white supremacist extremist literature. 

While Henderson’s writings are certainly a bizarre and dark original work, many lines in the document are altered or direct quotes from the manifestos that came before him. 

He also repeatedly refers to himself as a Groyper, a name used by fans of white nationalist live streamer Nick Fuentes, while in other portions mocking the network and its leader, saying he used the title for attention. 

Based on the images and writings, Henderson was a participant in the True Crime Community (TTC), a subculture that shares footage and images of violent attacks, often forming fandoms around the perpetrators and their actions. Some members go further, encouraging similar violence. In 2016, a seventeen-year-old in La Loche, Saskatchewan killed five people after researching and watching videos of school shootings, including Googling the names of the Columbine shooters in the hours before his attack. He was named as a “saint” in Henderson’s manifesto. 

Many images shared by Henderson’s various social media accounts and in the documents he released reference members of the Com network, a community that primarily shares copied and self-created content showing criminal acts through Discord and Telegram. One of the most harrowing branches is sometimes referred to as “Extortion Com.” This subsection focuses on obtaining sexually explicit or compromising images of individuals, usually minors, and then using those to extort further actions like self-harm. These materials often include child sexual abuse material. 

Images in the manifesto reference one of the better-known Com groups, 764, as well as the Maniac Murder Cult (MKY). Henderson distances himself from this network, explicitly stating he is not part of 764, but demonstrates a familiarity with some of its members, mentioning them in his manifesto. 

In July and August 2024, the RCMP issued notices warning of a “violent online network” targeting children from ages eight to 17, “particularly 2SLGBTQIA+ youth, racial minorities and those with mental health issues.” The notice named several groups from the Comm networks.

Isolated and with an extensive knowledge of some of the worst modern mass killers, Henderson's work and online history show a boy consumed by insecurity and self-hatred. A Black school shooter regurgitating neo-Nazi rhetoric and extreme right-wing internet slang seems to defy conventional understanding of the motivation of extremists, but exemplifies an emerging ideology and subculture where the influence and notoriety for committing harm are more important than the political ends of the attack. This would place Henderson among what researcher Marc-André Argentino has referred to as “nihilistic accelerationism.”

The acts are recorded and shared, aiming to amplify the notoriety and infamy of the mass murderers and the other individuals and networks that incite them. By repeating the actions, aesthetics, and even the words used by previous shooters, perpetrators are looking to make themselves the next saint or martyr. 

Latest news

Email: