The father of the teenager who shot and killed two people at a Madison private school and took her own life five months ago was arrested Thursday and charged with three felony counts in connection with the December shootings.
Jeffrey Rupnow, 42, was charged with two counts of intentionally giving a dangerous weapon to a person under the age of 18 and one count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. All are Class H felonies under Wisconsin law, subject to a fine of up to $10,000 or a prison sentence of up to six years, or both.
Rupnow was booked into the Dane County jail just before 5:30 a.m. Thursday, according to the jail’s online records.
He is the father of Natalie Rupnow, the 15-year-old student at Abundant Life Christian School on Madison’s east side who entered the school in the middle of the morning on Dec. 16, 2024, shot and killed a teacher and a student, wounded six other people and then took her own life, all within a matter of minutes.
According to the criminal complaint, which was unsealed Thursday after Rupnow’s early morning arrest, Rupnow purchased two guns for his daughter: a 22-caliber handgun and later a Glock 9 mm pistol — the weapon that was used in the shooting. He said Natalie helped pay for the Glock and he purchased it for her from a gun store, the complaint states.
“All of these weapons, including [a third] one that was about to be gifted to the same teen, were purchased legally,” Madison Police Department Acting Chief John Patterson said at a Thursday afternoon press conference.
“There was a gun safe in the home. Based on our investigation, it did not stop the teenager from having regular access” to the contents, he said.
Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said the case “is a call and an action to hold parents accountable … if their children can access their firearms.”
Rhodes-Conway said she wanted to see the Legislature take up “a number of really common sense proposals that have been around for years” to reduce gun violence. Those include measures such as universal background checks before people can purchase a gun as well as “red flag” laws that empower the courts to remove guns from owners who may represent a credible threat to others.
“The other piece of this is really making sure that responsible gun owners are doing everything they can to make sure that those guns do not fall into the hands of people who should not have them,” she said.
Patterson said Rupnow has been cooperative with police throughout the investigation.
In interviews with police, Natalie’s parents as well as two friends described her behavior as depressed and sometimes angry at her parents, who are divorced.
“Why would a 15-year-old open fire in her school and murder a teacher, classmates, and injure six others? We may never fully understand that horror,” Patterson said. “We do know the teenager had a fascination with weapons and school shootings.”
The complaint states that in June 2022 Madison police officers told Jeffrey Rupnow “of high-risk behavior that [Natalie] was engaging in via the internet.” The complaint does not elaborate further on that report. “I can’t speak further to the follow-up that was done” at that time, Patterson said.
Patterson said the investigation remains open in the case. He declined to comment about reports that people in other states were in touch with Natalie Rupnow online.
According to the complaint, Jeffrey Rupnow told police he had 11 guns, including two that were considered Natalie’s. He told police his daughter became interested in guns after he took her to a friend’s farm to shoot guns about two years ago and that they would occasionally go to a shooting range.
Because of her interest, Rupnow told police he bought her a 22-caliber handgun and later the Glock, according to the complaint.
The complaint states that Rupnow described occasional comments by his daughter about wanting to kill herself, but that he generally viewed those remarks as attention-seeking behavior.
Rupnow told police he had a gun safe where he kept all of the guns, including those he had purchased for his daughter. The safe was locked with a security code. He told police he had not told his daughter the code itself, but that he had told her that it was his Social Security number backwards, in case she needed to get into it.
The complaint states that police found maps of the school and a cardboard mockup that appeared to be of the school building among Natalie Rupnow’s things at home.
Police also found notebooks and what Patterson called a “manifesto” — a six-page document titled “War Against Humanity.” That and other documents suggested a fascination with other mass shootings, including one in 2007 by an 18-year-old in Finland, which she noted in one of her writings took place two years after she was born.
In addition, police found and reviewed 30 sets of camcorder videos, some of them with Natalie handling weapons and some depicting what appeared to be animal mutilation, according to the complaint.
According to the complaint, Natalie took both of her handguns to the school on Dec. 16, the day of the shooting, but apparently used only the Glock.
The complaint states she arrived at the school just before 10:40 a.m. and entered a classroom just before 10:50 a.m.
A student in the classroom, a study hall, told police that once in the classroom, Natalie held the gun with both hands and aimed it at the teacher who was sitting at her desk in the front of the room. The student said he heard gunshots and ran to the back of the room, where he hid behind a beanbag chair.
After the shooting stopped, the student, who was wounded in the leg, saw Natalie Rupnow lying on the floor on her back, with the gun in her hand. The student told police he removed the gun from her hand and put it in a drawer “because he wanted to make sure that no one else got a hold of it,” the complaint states. The police later retrieved the gun from the drawer.
The teacher, Erin Michelle West, and one student, Rubi Bergara, were both killed, according to the Dane County Medical Examiner’s office. Six other students were wounded. One remains hospitalized, Patterson said.