Tennessee’s Antioch High School, as 17-year-old Solomon Henderson opened fire on January 22, 2025. Sixteen-year-old student Josselin Corea Escalante lost their life due to his rampage, six more were hurt, and after a quick rampage, the event ended in his suicide. The incident of mass shooting live on Kick brings calls of urgency in heated debates upon gun control and online radicalism surrounding schools.
It is then that the shooting happened, a few minutes past 11:09 a.m. local time. According to Nashville Police Chief John Drake, Henderson retrieved a firearm from one of the bathrooms and entered the cafeteria. He shot ten shots in 17 seconds and fatally injured Escalante along with grazing a similar-aged student. There was a third student who received less-serious injuries due to the commotion that arose. Police were quick to respond; they arrived in just two minutes after the first 911 call. Already, Henderson had killed himself before they could intervene. Recovered was a 9mm pistol that Henderson had bought in Arizona in 2022; nine rounds were loaded in the magazine. Online behavior and a chilling manifesto revealed an anguished young man wracked by internalized hate and extremist ideologies.
In a manifesto posted to Instagram prior to the attack, he struggled with his racial identity and admired far-right ideologies. He called himself a “self-loathing incel” while displaying antisemitic and anti-Black sentiments. The ADL said Henderson had deeply immersed himself in alt-right forums and incel communities, identifying as a “mentalcel“-a term used by people who blame intellectual or mental health issues for their lack of relationships. His writings reflected themes of hate and despair common in the manifestos left behind by previous school shooters.
Investigators also found the disturbing connection between Henderson and Natalie Rupnow, 15, who had conducted a school shooting in Wisconsin in December 2024. While it has not been established that the two were in direct contact, both shared an obsession with extremist ideologies and hailed previous school shooters online. The police, along with the FBI, are actively investigating how Henderson was able to acquire the firearm despite two guns having been previously removed from his home in 2023. Authorities are also scrutinizing his online activities, where he had mapped out the attack in detail and saved images of past school shootings.
The livestreaming of the shooting on Kick has really put it out there as far as serious concerns regard the role of online platforms in monitoring and preventing the spread of harmful content. Since then, it has promptly taken down the video, while Kick issued a statement condemning the violence, stressing cooperation with law enforcement; critics vouch that such platforms using lax content moderation policies inadvertently enable the spread of radicalizing content.
This tragedy has caused profound trauma within the Antioch High School community. More than 2,100 students and their families were directly impacted, and scenes of grief and fear unfolded outside a local hospital as parents were reunited with their children. “This is every parent’s worst nightmare,” said Adrienne Battle, Nashville’s director of schools. “We must do everything in our power to prevent another tragedy like this.”
Since then, local leaders-including Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell-have called for action to be taken at once. Still, if history is any indicator, Tennessee’s Republican supermajority legislature is far more interested in passing bills that fortify schools for active shooters rather than actually addressing the root causes of gun violence by passing stricter gun control laws. The shooting has also sparked debate again over the efficacy of current safety measures, including weapon-detecting cameras installed in schools, which did not catch Henderson’s weapon before the attack.
A partial livestream of the attack on Kick, an online platform, raises important questions about online platforms’ responsibilities to prevent the spread of violent content. Kick, founded in 2022, has looser content moderation than other platforms and bans depictions of violence and hate speech.
What Henderson has been up to on other platforms, including Instagram and BlueSky, further drives the trend of social media being exploited for radicalization. His last post on BlueSky was merely “Today is a good day to die,” which is an example of how online platforms serve as echo chambers for extremist ideologies.
