Kelsea Ballerini pays tribute to victims of Nashville shooting with moving CMT Music Awards intro

By Alli Rosenbloom, CNN

Kelsea Ballerini opened the CMT (Country Music Television) Music Awards ceremony on Sunday with a moving tribute to the victims of last week’s shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School in Tennessee.

“On March 27, 2023, three nine-year-olds — Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs, along with Katherine Koonce, Cynthia Peak and Mike Hill walked into the Covenant School and didn’t walk out,” Ballerini solemnly said right at the top of the show.

“The community of sorrow over this, and the 130 mass shootings in the US this year alone, stretches from coast to coast,” Ballerini continued.

A shooter entered the elementary school with three firearms on Monday, and killed six people before being shot killed by responding police officers, according to authorities. The attack was the deadliest school shooting in nearly a year.

Ballerini also spoke of her own personal experience having witnessed a classmate die in a shooting at her Knoxville, Tennessee high school.

“I wanted to personally stand up here and share this moment because on August 21, 2008, I watched Ryan McDonald, my 15-year-old classmate at Central High School, lose his life to a gun in our cafeteria.”

She added that Sunday’s broadcast was dedicated to the “ever-growing list of families, friends, survivors, witnesses and responders whose lives continue to forever be changed by gun violence.”

Kane Brown and Ballerini hosted Sunday’s CMT Awards. This is the first year the CMT Awards were held in Austin, Texas after previously being held in Nashville.

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CNN’s Eric Levenson, Jennifer Henderson and Theresa Waldrop contributed to this story.