by Aliyya Swaby, ProPublica, and Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

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Long before 17-year-old Solomon Henderson walked into his school cafeteria with a gun, authorities in Tennessee were alerted to his threatening and violent behavior.

In 2020, when he was 13, his mom called the police, saying he punched her in the face and tried to hit her with a chair after she asked him to clean up the backyard. An officer with the Clarksville Police Department charged Henderson with simple assault, according to an incident report that ProPublica and WPLN News obtained through a records request. The arrest has not been previously reported.

In 2023, Nashville police officers visited the family’s home and said they removed two guns. A Police Department spokesperson said the guns belonged to adults in the home, but the incident report could not be released because the visit involved a minor.

At Antioch High School a year later, Henderson pulled a knife on a 15-year-old girl. For that, he was charged with reckless endangerment, according to a court document the girl’s mother shared with ProPublica and WPLN. School officials responded by suspending Henderson for two days, according to WSMV-TV, which obtained a disciplinary record that refers to the weapon as a “box cutter.”

Two months after that, in December 2024, a user on X flagged one of Henderson’s accounts and tagged the FBI, encouraging the agency to look into his connections with school shooters. Henderson’s accounts, which did not use his first or last name, were suspended in December and in January for violating “rules against perpetrators of violent attacks.” In school, his grades were slipping. A teacher told WSMV that Henderson was a “walking red flag.”

On Jan. 22, Henderson came to school with a pistol. He fired 10 shots in 20 seconds in the cafeteria, killing 16-year-old Josselin Corea Escalante before he turned the gun on himself.

It’s unclear how many of Henderson’s red flags were heeded. In response to questions about Henderson’s past interactions with law enforcement, the Metropolitan Nashville........

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