Actress Melissa Joan Hart describes helping children escape Nashville shooting

Star says shooting at Covenant School is second to have happened in close proximity to her family

US actress Melissa Joan Hart and her husband, Mark Wilkerson, lived near the Sandy Hook school when that deadly shooting occurred. AFP

US actress Melissa Joan Hart has shared how she and her husband helped rescue pupils and reunite a mother with her children during the Covenant School shooting that left three children and three adults dead.

Hart, whose three children attend a nearby school, said she and her husband were close to the Christian day school in Nashville, Tennessee, when the shooting began.

“We helped a class of kindergartners across a busy motorway that were climbing out of the woods. They were trying to escape the shooter situation at their school,” she said in a video posted on Instagram.

“So we helped these tiny little kids cross the road and get their teachers over there. And we helped a mom reunite with her children.”

The Clarissa Explains It All star posted the video on Tuesday, saying her emotions were “too raw” to post it on Monday after the shooting occurred. She and her family were unharmed.

The actress said in the video that her children had also attended school near Sandy Hook Elementary, the site where 20 children and six teachers were killed in a 2012 mass shooting.

“We moved here from Connecticut, where we were in a school a little ways down the road from Sandy Hook, so this is our second experience with a school shooting with our kids being in proximity.

“I don't know what to say any more. Enough is enough.”

Hart joined actress Julianne Moore and hundreds of parents in a 2016 march across the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City to push for stricter gun control laws.

More than 400 minors have died from gun-related violence in 2023, data from the Gun Violence Archives shows. Nearly 1,000 others have been injured.