Five members of the Metro Nashville Police Department were awarded the Medal of Valor, the nation’s highest award for valor by a public safety officer, for the “swift response and bravery” displayed during the 2023 Covenant School shooting.
President Joe Biden presented the awards to Dets. Michael Collazo, Ryan Cagle, and Zachary Plese, Sgt. Jeffrey Mathes and Officer Rex Engelbert during a White House ceremony on Friday.
“The officers rushed to the scene, and as they arrived, the shooter opened fire on them,” reads a White House statement commending the Nashville officers. “Still, the officers entered the school, cleared classroom after classroom, and ran towards the sounds of gunfire where they encountered the shooter. They took down the shooter.”
“They allowed people to continue their lives in ways that they never would have been able to,” Biden told reporters following the ceremony. “There’s a lot fewer empty chairs around the kitchen table and dining room table because of what these guys did.”
The eyes of the nation followed Nashville in the days and weeks after the shooting, in which a former student killed three children and three adults at the Green Hills day school. Media positively contrasted Nashville’s police response, in which armed officers entered the school and killed the shooter, with ongoing reporting about law enforcement’s delayed reactions during a May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
Memes and tribute videos floated across the internet praising the Nashville police officers, sometimes comparing them to superheroes and video game characters. The positive press was a welcome change at MNPD, which has weathered public scrutiny for multiple police killings of unarmed residents in recent years. In May 2024, a report from a former MNPD lieutenant described widespread internal impropriety, further worsening the department’s already tense relationship with Metro’s civilian Community Review Board.
Also recognized at Friday’s ceremony was Lincoln, Neb., Police Sgt. Tu Tran, who saved a drowning woman in February 2023; New York City Fire Department Lt. John Vanderstar who rescued a mother and child from a burning apartment in October 2022; and fellow New York City firefighter Brendan Gaffney, who in February 2023, rescued an unconscious pregnant woman and an unconscious child from an apartment fire.
According to a White House news release, the nominees were recommended by the U.S. attorney general and the Medal of Valor Review Board, and the recipients exhibit “exceptional courage — disregarding their own personal safety — in attempting to save or protect human life.”
One week after the Covenant School shooting which killed three students and three staff members, MNPD held a press conference where the officers spoke about their actions that day.