Just days before Christian students’ scheduled vacation to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, a lonely and radicalized high school student opened fire inside Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, killing two people and wounding six more.
Police say 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, who went by the name “Samantha,” opened fire with a 9mm handgun during study hall before turning the gun on herself. Now, an apparent manifesto shows the child’s turbulent home life, isolation, adoption of neo-Nazi views, idolization of school shooters, and her wish to further “evolution” drove her to the brink.
Two Remain in Critical Condition
Rupnow attended Abundant Life, a Christian school founded in 1978, with approximately 400 students from kindergarten through high school, serving 200 families across 56 churches in Dane County. She opened fire in a room of students of mixed ages, killing one teenage student and one teacher. Six people were injured: one teacher and five students. Two of the victims were released from SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital on Monday. Two victims remain in critical condition.
A second grade teacher called 911 to report the shooting at 10:57 a.m. (The local police chief originally reported erroneously that a second grade student made the call.) Police officers responded to the scene immediately, with 17 ambulances and numerous fire trucks. Law enforcement officers found Rupnow bleeding profusely from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot at 11:05 a.m. Rupnow was pronounced dead from suicide in the ambulance en route to a local hospital. The school notified parents at 11:29 a.m.
Rebekah Smith, the mother of a fellow student, told The New York Times that she believed Rupnow had enrolled as a new student in the Christian school at the beginning of the year, in hopes it would help her turn her life around.
The school does not have a metal detector or dedicated, on-campus security personnel, but has security protocols and participated in a government program to harden soft targets against mass shootings. The school kept all doors locked, conducted lockdown and evacuation drills, and broadcast an announcement telling students, “Lockdown. This is not a drill.” Pastor Kellen Lewis, whose four children attend the school, said its safety measures “probably helped save some lives” and “gave my kids that very important sense of agency—that no matter what was going on, they knew what to do.”
Parents and community leaders continue searching for what drove the teenager to murder her fellow students, with many drawing a parallel between Rupnow’s shooting and last March’s mass shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School by Audrey “Aidan” Hale. The 28-year-old Hale, who identified as transgender, killed six people: three children in the third grade class and three adults.
“I don’t know whether [the shooter] was transgender or not,” said Shon Barnes, police chief in the famously liberal city of Madison, on Monday. “I don’t think that whatever happened today has anything to do with how she or he or they may have wanted to identify. And I wish people would kind of leave their own personal biases out of this.”
“At this time, identifying a motive is our top priority. But at this time it appears that the motive was a combination of factors,” Barnes added Tuesday. Police have begun scouring social media profiles identified with Rupnow, saying she appears to have idolized school shooters and adopted the neo-Nazi views espoused by the Columbine shooters.
A purported manifesto may offer insight into the mixture of toxic traits that sent the 15-year-old over the edge.
Purported Manifesto Shows Divorce, Hatred of Humanity, Racism, and Support for ‘the Revolution’
One link on Rupnow’s social media accounts linked to a document purported to be her manifesto. A reporter for Reduxx said, after speaking with Rupnow’s boyfriend, she verified the authenticity of a six-page manifesto titled “War Against Humanity.” In it, Rupnow expresses her admiration for the Columbine High School shooters, as well as racial collectivist terrorist Patrick Crusius, and Brazilian school shooter Guilherme Taucci.
“Humanity is filth,” she wrote. “My parents are scum.” The document notes her parents divorced, although she claims it did not affect her at all.
“I’ve grown to hate people, and society,” she wrote. “[A]ll of you and the world have done is pick on me and tease me.” Rupnow wrote of “getting teased and pushed around” at school, where “I always got picked on.”
“My so-called family never included me because I was too weird for them. … My father will always make me stand out in the worst possible way,” stated the manifesto. “I hate humanity for forcing me into this little hole.”
The manifesto expresses profound isolation, which observers believe she filled with harmful online content. “[M]y parents admit they didn’t want me. … I’m always the one who sat out or sat in another room because they didn’t want to interact with me at any point in time, then I stayed in my room all day long and all night and after and before school as well,” she wrote.
“I planned on shooting myself awhile ago but I thought maybe its [sic] better for evolution” to engage in a mass shooting.
Rupnow engages in racially charged rhetoric, indicating another possible motive for her shooting.
“The human scum is color, and how people are raised,” she wrote. She also used a racial epithet for black people.
“The Revolution should be well,” she said. “I am part of the real thought and the real revolution.”
“We need revolution,” she insisted.
“The wolf hunts its prey. … There is nothing more than filth,” the document concluded.
Police are aware of the manifesto but have not officially said Rupnow authored it. “A document about this shooting is circulating at this time on social media, but we have not verified its authenticity,” said Barnes.
Democrats Promote Gun Control
Democrats seized on the tragedy to promote gun control legislation. “Jill and I are praying for all the victims today,” said President Joe Biden in a statement released Monday, before pivoting promptly to eroding Americans’ Second Amendment rights. “Congress must pass commonsense gun safety laws: Universal background checks. A national red flag law. A ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” Vice President Kamala Harris promoted a similar litany of gun restrictions Monday evening, including regulations of how law-abiding citizens store firearms at home.
None of those proposals would have apparently affected the Abundant Life Christian School shooting. “I got the weapons by lies and manipulation and my fathers [sic] stupidity,” wrote Rupnow in her alleged manifesto. “There would have been no way to change what has happened.”
A Family in Crisis
Family experts say family breakdown leads to loneliness, which can lead to resentment and online radicalization.
“This seems to be a family in crisis, and in a way, it could be really anyone’s family. She wrote about feeling very alone, and it seemed that she spent a lot of time alone and a lot of time on the internet, and she had come to sort of idolize other school shooters,” said Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for education studies at Family Research Council. “I hope that the families that are listening to this show and families everywhere will spend the holidays with their kids, really engaging with them and looking honestly at your own family and saying: ‘Is there a child of mine who’s feeling left out, who’s feeling alone? And how much time are they in their room, behind closed doors? And do I need to just go in that room with them and just sit with them and be with them?’”
Rupnow, like other recent school shooters, is female—a trend Kilgannon mourns. “We have a pornified culture, and we also have an incredible glorification of violence in our culture. Both are a function of being in a culture of death rather than a culture of life,” Kilgannon told “Washington Watch,” guest hosted by former congressman Jody Hice, on Tuesday. “The result of that is going to be that it’s not just going to be the boys who will take these aggressive actions, but you’re going to see this behavior adopted by the girls. And that really, for me as a woman, is very, very chilling and very sad.”
As of this writing, the school remains closed. It posted the following notice on its website:
In response to the devastating tragedy at Abundant Life Christian School (ALCS) on Monday, December 16, United Way of Dane County has established the Abundant Life Christian School Emergency and Recovery Fund. All funds raised will go directly to ALCS to support those impacted by the tragic events. To give, visit www.unitedwaydanecounty.org or text help4ALCS to 40403.
Barnes said, “We have to come together and do everything we can to support our students to prevent news conferences like these from happening again and again and again.”
‘Christ Came to Us in a Family’
Hice found the alleged manifesto “heartbreaking,” but said her violence should serve as a wake-up call “for those parents who think that a Christian school is all they need.”
Kilgannon agreed that, while attending a Christian school gives children “a huge advantage,” it can “never replace the relationship that we’ll have with our own children and that our children will have with each other if we’re blessed with more than one child. Christ came to us in a family. He could have come as King of the universe, but He chose to come humbly into a family.”
“He adopted us into His family,” noted Hice.
“Of course, I want to offer every parent in this situation love, consolation, and grace—whether it’s the parents of the perpetrator or her victims,” Kilgannon told The Washington Stand exclusively. “We all have questions we need to ask, and answer, as parents. Were there any warning signs missed by the parents and the school? Are there drugs (prescription or not) involved that increased suicidal ideation over time? How is her therapist coping? Are we praying for all these issues? Are we loving our difficult people enough especially in these challenging times? The family is in crisis. At this holy time of year, let’s take whatever time we have and spend it with our loved ones, aspiring to love each other more and more each day.”
