Transgender Teen Arrested for Montgomery County School-Shooting Plot
ArchiveThe Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD) arrested an 18-year-old transgender high-school student on Wednesday in connection with a plan to commit a school shooting.
Andrea Ye of Rockville, Maryland — who goes by the name “Alex” — authored a 129-page manifesto detailing her desire to attack an elementary school, writing that she wants to be famous and describing her strategy for carrying out the shooting, Montgomery County police announced in a Thursday press release.
After obtaining a search warrant, MCPD found internet searches, drawings, and other documents related to and threatening mass shootings. The police department said in its statement that it has worked with the county’s public-school district to increase security at local schools.
Ye, currently in custody at the Montgomery County Central Processing Unit awaiting a bond hearing, was charged with threats of mass violence.
Authorities have not indicated whether they will release Ye’s manifesto nor the contents of her internet searches or drawings. The information available at this time is similar to another school shooting, the March 2023 attack on the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennesee, in which Audrey Hale, a biological woman identifying as a transgender man named “Aiden,” killed three nine-year-old children and three adults before being shot and killed by police.
Nashville police refused to release that shooter’s manifesto, though it was later leaked and the veracity of its contents confirmed.
As National Review reported at the time, the transgender activist group Trans Resistance Network released a statement mourning Hale’s death, saying that — after first acknowledging that “the first tragedy is the loss of life of three children and adults” — “the second and more complex tragedy is that Aiden or Audrey Hale, who felt he had no other effective way to be seen than to lash out by taking the life of others, and by consequence, himself.”
