Asked to reflect on some of the cases he was personally involved in, both major and minor, the first thing Nashville podcaster and 911 dispatcher Brandon Hall points out is that unlike the scripted podcasts he writes from start to finish, he doesn’t usually learn the final outcome of breaking incidents until much later.

“We don’t get the endings a lot,” Hall explains. “With the true crime stuff, you know exactly what happened because you’re doing the research. On the job) I take a phone call and I’m onto the next call.”

And then he obliges and talks about two of Nashville’s biggest cases from recent years.

Christmas Day bombing

Hall’s shift started that morning at exactly the time the bomb exploded in an RV parked on historic Second Avenue. It disrupted telecommunications, destroyed property and caused damage in the tens of millions of dollars. Reconstruction is ongoing.

“We barely get any calls on Christmas. I mean, I could sit there for sometimes 20 minutes and not receive a phone call, which is really odd,” Hall recounts. “I walk in and ask the dispatch that’s sitting there what’s going on, because there was a lot of people up walking around. Usually when that happens, there’s been an officer shot or there’s some sort of big something going on.

“And they were like, oh, there’s an RV parked downtown and it’s got a message playing saying there’s a bomb and it’s about to explode. And then he puts his hand on his headset and he goes, ‘and it just exploded.’ And I said, ‘OK, pop up and let me just jump in.’

“So at that point I started doing all the notifications – the bomb squad, FBI, ATF – just talking to whoever I had to and all the extra units. As one might expect, there was only a skeleton crew of officers working downtown that early Christmas morning. But that changed quickly.”

Covenant mass shooting

On the morning of March 27, 2023, a lone shooter entered the private school in Green Hills and killed three children and three adults before police stormed in and killed her. The whole incident lasted just nine minutes.

Hall was working that day but was assigned to work with the Hermitage police precinct when it happened in the Midtown precinct.

“It was insanely busy. When the first (911) calls went up … they put it out on all radio ears so everybody can hear it and everybody’s tension just kind of goes up,” Hall says. “We’re sitting there waiting to find out what it is, and I’ve got my own radio and I’ve got a handheld walkie listening to the Midtown radio.

“Once they go in, they start saying, you know, ‘shots fired,’ … ‘I’m taking rounds’ because the shooter was upstairs and … shooting down at the police cars they were coming in. Little did the shooter know that officers were coming up behind her.

“So yeah, it was really tense listening to it. I’ve heard officers on the radio multiple times with shots being fired, them getting shot or doing some shooting themselves. It’s never easy to hear that. You hear an officer who deals with hard core stuff out on the street every single day. They get excited, it’s pretty serious.”