Abundant Life Christian School shooting

• 1. Introduction

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  The Abundant Life Christian School shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, began with a phone call at 10:57 a.m. on the 16th of December 2024. A second-grade teacher, standing inside the building, dialed 911 and became the first person to raise the alarm.

  Police, federal agents and reporters would spend the following months trying to understand what that call set in motion. Who was responsible, and how did a student come to be armed on school grounds? What did investigators find when they searched her home? And why, in the months afterward, did people in other states keep invoking her name?

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• 2. A Private School Beside a Church

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  In 1978, Abundant Life Christian School was founded as a private Christian school serving students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Its building stands next to City Church Madison.

  The school and the church share a 28 acre campus with the Campus for Kids Learning Center, which cares for children from infancy up to kindergarten.

  Children from about 200 families attended the school. Enrollment stood at about 390 students when the shooting took place.

  Security there looked much like it does at other private schools of its size. Cameras were installed, but the school had no metal detector and no school resource officer.

  The church at the center of that shared campus would soon host a funeral for one of the students.

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• 3. The Study Hall

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  The shooting happened inside a classroom that was being used as a study hall. Students of mixed ages and grades were gathered together in that room.

  The shooter was armed with two handguns, but used only one of them. Investigators later recovered 21 shell casings from the school.

  At 11:05 a.m., law enforcement arrived and found the shooter dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Early reports described the suspect as a teenage juvenile and a student at the school. The shooter was declared dead while being transported to the hospital.

  At 11:14 a.m., staff and students were evacuated from the building. None of the responding officers fired their weapons.

  After an initial sweep of the school, police officials said there was no further threat to the public. A public safety alert reached nearby phones at around 11:20 a.m.

  The first count of the dead given to reporters would soon turn out to be wrong.

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• 4. The Victims

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  At an initial news conference, officials from the Madison Police Department said that five people were dead. They later amended that figure and said three people were dead, including the suspected shooter.

  The Dane County Medical Examiner's Office identified the two victims. They were Erin West, a 42-year-old teacher from DeForest, and Rubi Vergara, a 14-year-old student.

  Six other people were injured, two of them critically. Police Chief Shon F. Barnes did not provide the ages or genders of the injured.

  A spokesperson for SSM Health St. Mary's Hospital in Madison said the hospital treated four patients from the shooting. Two were later discharged. The other two remained hospitalized in stable condition.

  The day after the shooting, the city would find its first public place to gather.

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• 5. A Community in Mourning

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  On the day after the shooting, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Dane County hosted a candlelight vigil on the grounds of the state capitol.

  A memorial also grew on a sidewalk near the school. Former students and others left offerings there, including poinsettia flowers.

  On the 18th of December, a local funeral home published an online obituary for Rubi Vergara. Her funeral service took place on the 21st of December at City Church in Madison.

  By then, officials from the school's own Facebook page to the White House had already begun to speak.

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• 6. Voices of Officials

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  Shortly after the shooting, the school's Facebook page announced that it had experienced an active shooter incident and asked for prayers.

  Wisconsin governor Tony Evers ordered the United States and Wisconsin flags flown at half-staff. In a statement on X, he said he was closely monitoring the shooting and was praying for the students, educators and community.

  Senators Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson each posted a separate statement offering condolences and prayers. Both said they would keep monitoring the situation and assist law enforcement as needed.

  President Joe Biden condemned the shooting as "shocking and unconscionable." He urged Congress to act immediately on gun violence and to protect children in schools more strongly.

  Biden named the laws he wanted passed. They were universal background checks, a national red flag law, and a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

  Chief Barnes spoke about the whole building rather than only the casualties. "Every child, every person in that building, is a victim and will be a victim forever. These types of trauma don't just go away," he told the media.

  At the vigil, Madison Metropolitan School District superintendent Joe Gothard said the tragedy had happened less than two blocks from his childhood home. He argued that promising better safety was not enough.

  He said, "We need to connect like we are tonight, each and every day and make a commitment that we know we're there for one another, hopefully to avoid preventable tragedies like yesterday."

  Those statements said little about the student at the center of the case, whose life police were only beginning to reconstruct.

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• 7. The Student Behind the Attack

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  Natalie Lynn "Samantha" Rupnow was born on the 7th of November 2009. She lived in the Madison area her entire life, with family ties in both Friesland and Randolph, Wisconsin.

  Her parents had divorced and remarried. By July 2022 she was in therapy, which was meant to help guide decisions about which parent she would spend weekends with.

  Before that therapy, she had threatened to kill herself and had harmed herself, until her father locked up the knives in his house.

  In June 2022, when she was 12, Rupnow began contact with a 22-year-old man from Illinois who claimed to be 17. After he sent multiple lewd messages, he arranged to meet her, and he did so on at least one occasion. Police eventually discovered the relationship and charged him with child enticement.

  At her house, investigators found a document in which she wrote about humanity with contempt and about school shooters with admiration. She also wrote about her mother's absence.

  Her alleged social media accounts expressed alienation. On Telegram, she had been invited to a group chat where the attacker in a 2024 mosque stabbing in Eskişehir had posted his manifesto shortly before that attack.

  The Anti-Defamation League said she possibly had a TikTok account that carried white supremacist memes. A photo also emerged of her in a KMFDM T-shirt, similar to one worn by Eric Harris, one of the 1999 Columbine High School attackers, in amateur videos.

  The Institute for Strategic Dialogue reached a different conclusion about motive. Its researchers said she was primarily motivated by membership in the True Crime Community fandom, and they described her as a nihilistic violent extremist.

  How she had come to be armed would soon put her father under scrutiny of his own.

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• 8. What Investigators Found

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  Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were at the scene right after the shooting. A spokesperson said the bureau had recovered the 9mm handgun used and was running a trace on it.

  Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation spoke with the shooter's family and with students, hoping to establish a motive. Her family cooperated with law enforcement throughout.

  On the 17th of December, Chief Barnes told reporters that investigators were examining a "combination of factors." One possibility was that Rupnow had been bullied.

  Barnes also said he knew an alleged manifesto from the shooter was circulating online, but he could not confirm that it was authentic. He asked the ATF to speed up its work on how she obtained the firearm, and he was unsure whether her parents owned the weapon.

  The same day, law enforcement searched her father's home to collect computers and other devices that could reveal her digital footprint. Police also visited her mother's home, but according to neighbors and eyewitnesses, nobody appeared to be there. Neighbors said they had little contact with her mother.

  Inside the Rupnow home, officers found a cardboard model of the school and several maps. They also found a schedule for the attack, which began with gunfire at 11:30 a.m. and aimed at "wiping out" the first and second floors. It ended at 12:10 p.m.

  Her father told police that her interest in firearms had "snowballed." He said he had given her the combination to the gun safe where her firearms were kept. He had also posted on Facebook that the two had joined a gun club and were "loving every second of it."

  Ten days before the shooting, he texted a friend that his daughter would shoot him if he opened the gun safe. In her own writing, Rupnow said she had obtained firearms through "lies and manipulation, and my fathers stupidity."

  On the 8th of May 2025, her father, Jeffrey Rupnow, was charged with two counts of giving, selling or loaning a dangerous weapon to a person under 18. He also faced one count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. All three charges were felonies, and bond was set at $20,000 on the 9th of May.

  On the 1st of August 2025, her mother, Mellissa Rupnow, was found dead in an apparent suicide.

  On the 18th of December 2024, FBI agents detained a 20-year-old man from Carlsbad, California, in connection with the shooting. He was suspected of coordinating a mass shooting at a government building together with Rupnow.

  He allegedly told her that he would arm himself with explosives and a gun and start shooting in a government building. It remains unclear how the two knew each other, and the FBI declined to comment.

  A San Diego County judge approved a gun violence emergency protective order against him. It required him to turn over his firearms and not to possess any while it was in effect.

  On the 3rd of January 2025, he appeared by video at a hearing in San Diego County Superior Court. He apologized, expressed regret and said he was willing to face the consequences. The judge postponed the hearing until the 4th of April because he was under criminal investigation and had no attorney. On the 28th of April, a three-year restraining order was granted.

  On the 22nd of January 2025, a 17-year-old student who followed Rupnow's X account opened fire at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee. One student was killed and another was injured before the shooter died by suicide.

  On the 29th of April 2025, police in Loxahatchee, Florida, arrested a 22-year-old man for plotting seven separate mass shootings at seven locations. They included at least one police station and a church. Investigators found he had exchanged messages with Rupnow before her death. He possessed 18 firearms and over 12,000 rounds of ammunition.

  On the 27th of August 2025, a 23-year-old attacker killed two children and injured 30 other people at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then died by suicide. She had written Rupnow's last name on the gun she used.

  On the 10th of September 2025, a 16-year-old student opened fire at Evergreen High School, injuring two students, and then died by suicide. He had idolized Rupnow online and took a photo of himself imitating her before the attack.

  In November 2025, police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, detained a 15-year-old boy who threatened a local school on TikTok. He had timed the threat to fall on the same date as the Madison shooting.

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