May 9, 2025:
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The father of a Wisconsin teenage girl who killed a teacher and fellow student in a school shooting has been charged with felonies in connection with the case. The shooting occurred at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison last December. The shooter’s father, Jeffrey Rupnow, 42, of Madison, was charged Wednesday (May 7, 2025), but the counts weren’t unsealed until he had been taken into custody Thursday. He faces charges of contributing to the delinquency of a child and two counts of providing a dangerous weapon to a person under 18 resulting in death. Rupnow’s daughter, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School, killing a teacher and a 14-year-old student before killing herself. Two other students were critically injured.
Story Body
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin prosecutors have charged the father of a teenage girl who killed a teacher and fellow student in a school shooting last year with allowing her access to the semiautomatic pistols she used in the attack.
The criminal complaint against 42-year-old Jeffrey Rupnow of Madison details how his daughter, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, struggled with her parents’ divorce, showing her anger in a written piece entitled “War Against Humanity.” Her father tried to bond with her through guns, the complaint said, even as she meticulously planned the attack, including building a cardboard model of the school and scheduling the shooting to end with her suicide.
Prosecutors filed the complaint Wednesday (May 7, 2025) but didn’t unseal it until after Jeffrey Rupnow was arrested Thursday and taken to the Dane County Jail. He faces two counts of intentionally giving a dangerous weapon to a person under 18 causing death and contributing to the delinquency of a child. All of the charges are felonies.
He was scheduled to make his initial court appearance Friday. Online court records did not list an attorney for him. Acting Madison Police Chief John Patterson said he was cooperative throughout the investigation. No one returned voicemails left at possible telephone listings for him and his ex-wife, Melissa Rupnow.
Attack left 2 dead, 6 injured
Natalie Rupnow entered Abundant Life Christian School, a religious school in Madison that offers prekindergarten through high school classes, on Dec. 16 and opened fire in a study hall. She killed teacher Erin Michelle West and 14-year-old student Rubi Bergara and injured six others before she killed herself.
According to the complaint, investigators recovered 20 shell casings from the study hall where she opened fire.
They also recovered a 9 mm Glock handgun that Jeffrey Rupnow had purchased for her from the room and a .22-caliber Sig Sauer pistol from a bag the girl was carrying, the complaint says. Jeffrey Rupnow had given that gun to her as a Christmas present in 2023, the complaint says.
Also in the bag were three magazines loaded with .22 ammunition and a 50-round box of 9 mm ammunition. She wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a bull’s-eye during the attack.
Natalie Rupnow had been struggling with parents’ divorce
Jeffrey Rupnow told investigators that his daughter lived with him but had been struggling with his divorce from her mother in 2022, saying she hated her life and wanted to kill herself. He said she used to cut herself to the point where he had to lock up all the knives in his house.
She had been in therapy to learn how to be more social until the spring before the attack, he told investigators. Her mother, Melissa Rupnow, told detectives that the therapist told her that Natalie was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from the divorce. One of Natalie’s friends told investigators that Jeffrey Rupnow was “frequently verbally aggressive” with Natalie and that she had told him that her father was a “drinker,” according to the complaint.
Jeffery Rupnow told investigators that took Natalie shooting with him on a friend’s land about two years before the Abundant Life attack. She enjoyed it, and he came to see guns as a way to connect with her. But he was shocked at how her interest in firearms “snow balled,” he told investigators.
He kept Natalie’s pistols in a gun safe, telling her that if she ever need them the access code was his Social Security number entered backward. About 10 days before the school attack, he texted a friend and said that Natalie would shoot him if he left “the fun safe open right now,” according to the complaint.
The day before the school attack he took the Sig Sauer out of the safe so Natalie could clean it. But he got distracted and wasn’t sure if he put the weapon back in the safe or locked it, according to the complaint.
‘War Against Humanity’
A search of Natalie’s room netted a six-page document the girl had written entitled “War Against Humanity.” She started the piece by describing humanity as “filth” and saying she hated people who don’t care and “smoke their lungs out with weed or drink as much as they can like my own father.”
She wrote about how she admired school shooters, how her mother was not in her life and how she obtained her weapons “by lies and manipulation, and my fathers stupidity.”
Investigators also discovered maps of the school and a cardboard model of the building, along with a handwritten schedule that detailed how she would being the attack at 11:30 a.m. and wipe out the first and second floors of the school by 11:55 a.m. She planned to end the attack by 12:10 p.m. with a notation “ready 4 Death.”
She had been communicating online with people around the world about her fascination with school shootings and weapons, Acting Madison Police Chief John Patterson said Thursday.
Father calls teaching her gun safety ‘biggest mistake’
Jeffery Rupnow sent a message to a detective two weeks after the school shooting saying that his biggest mistake was teaching Natalie how to handle guns safely and urging police to warn people to change their gun safe combinations every two to three months, the complaint said.
“Kids are smart and they will figure it out,” he wrote. “Just like someone trying to hack your bank account. I just want to protect other families from going through what I’m going through.”
According to the complaint, after learning that Natalie was the shooter while talking to a police officer, Melissa Rupnow began breathing very quickly through her nose and yelled something, to the effect of, “I’m going to kill him, I’m going to kill him,” apparently referring to her ex-husband.
Charges are latest in string of cases against parents in school shootings
Jeffrey Rupnow is the latest parent of a school shooter to face charges associated with an attack.
Last year, the mother and father of a school shooter in Michigan who killed four students in 2021 were each convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The mother was the first parent in the U.S. to be held responsible for a child carrying out a mass school attack.
The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting four people at a Georgia high school was arrested in September and faces charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for letting his son possess a weapon.
In 2023, the father of a man charged in a deadly Fourth of July parade shooting in suburban Chicago pleaded guilty to seven misdemeanors related to how his son obtained a gun license.
December 19, 2025:
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Police say the shooter who killed a student and teacher at a religious school in Wisconsin this week brought two guns to the school. The 15-year-old girl also was in contact with a man in California who authorities say was planning to attack a government building. The new details became public Wednesday in court documents and interviews with authorities investigating the teenager who took her own life on Monday (Dec. 16, 2024) after opening fire in a study hall at Abundant Life Christian School. Madison authorities also identified those killed as 42-year-old Erin Michelle West and 14-year-old Rubi Patricia Vergara. The Associated Press could not immediately reach family members.
Story:
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The shooter who killed a student and teacher at a religious school in Wisconsin brought two guns to the school and was in contact with a man in California who authorities say was planning to attack a government building, according to authorities and court documents that became public Wednesday.
Police were still investigating why the 15-year-old student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison shot and killed a fellow student and teacher on Monday (Dec. 16, 2024) before shooting herself, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said. Two other students who were shot remained in critical condition on Wednesday.
“We may never know what she was thinking that day, but we’ll do our best to try to add or give as much information to our public as possible,” Barnes said.
A California judge, meanwhile, issued a restraining order Tuesday under California’s gun red flag law against a 20-year-old Carlsbad man. The order requires the man to turn his guns and ammunition into police within 48 hours unless an officer asks for them sooner because he poses an immediate danger to himself and others.
According to the order, the man told FBI agents that he had been messaging Natalie Rupnow, the Wisconsin shooter, about attacking a government building with a gun and explosives. The order doesn’t say what building he had targeted or when he planned to launch his attack. It also doesn’t detail his interactions with Rupnow except to state that the man was plotting a mass shooting with her.
The student who was killed in Monday’s school shooting was identified in an obituary released Wednesday as Rubi Patricia Vergara, 14, of Madison. She was a freshman at the school and “an avid reader, loved art, singing and playing keyboard in the family worship band,” according to the obituary. The Associated Press’ attempts to reach the girl’s family by phone and email on Wednesday evening were unsuccessful.
The Dane County medical examiner Wednesday evening identified the teacher who was killed as 42-year-old Erin Michelle West, after initially identifying her as Michelle E. West. A man who answered the phone at a number listed for West in public records hung up when reached by a reporter Wednesday evening.
The school’s communication director, Barbara Wiers, said in a statement Wednesday evening that Vergara had attended the school since kindergarten.
West worked as a substitute teacher for three years before accepting a position as the school’s substitute coordinator and an in-building substitute teacher, Wiers said.
“Our hearts are heavy with these losses,” Wiers wrote in an email to The Associated Press.
Police, with the assistance of the FBI, were scouring online records and other resources and speaking with the shooter’s parents and classmates in an attempt to determine a motive for the shooting, Barnes said.
Police don’t know if anyone was targeted in the attack or if the attack had been planned in advance, the chief said.
“I do not know if if she planned it that day or if she planned it a week prior,” Barnes said. “To me, bringing a gun to school to hurt people is planning. And so we don’t know what the premeditation is.”
While Rupnow had two handguns, Barnes said he does not know how she obtained them and he declined to say who purchased them, citing the ongoing investigation.
No decisions have been made about whether Rupnow’s parents might be charged in relation to the shooting, but they have been cooperating, Barnes said.
Online court records show no criminal cases against her father, Jeffrey Rupnow, or her mother, Mellissa Rupnow. They are divorced and shared custody of their daughter, but she primarily lived with her father, according to court documents. Divorce records indicate that Natalie was in therapy in 2022, but don’t say why.
The school shooting was the latest among dozens across the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut, Parkland, Florida, and Uvalde, Texas.
But the Wisconsin shooting stands out because school shootings by teenage females have been extremely rare in the U.S., with males in their teens and 20s carrying out the majority of them, said David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database.
Abundant Life is a nondenominational Christian school that offers prekindergarten classes through high school. About 420 students attend the institution.
___
This story has been updated to correct the name of the teacher killed to Erin Michelle West, according to the medical examiner’s office, which initially identified her as Michelle E. West. It has also been updated to correct the day the restraining order was issued against the California man.
Comments