THE WASHINGTON POST: Court records point to troubled home life for Wisconsin school shooter Natalie Rupnow

The 15-year-old girl who killed two people and wounded six others at her small Christian school on Monday had a turbulent home life, according to court records, which show that her parents divorced and remarried multiple times and that she had been enrolled in therapy.

Natalie Rupnow, who also went by Samantha, died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound after police say she opened fire in a study hall classroom at Abundant Life Christian School.

The academy’s tight-knit community was still stunned Tuesday, grieving the student and teacher who were killed and searching for answers to explain the latest act of violence to strike an American campus.

Police have released few details about Rupnow beyond her name, and they said they were investigating a possible motive behind the shooting.

With much still unknown, a Washington Post review of court records points to an unsettled childhood for Rupnow, whose parents’ custody agreements sometimes forced her to move between their homes every two or three days.

“There are always signs of a school shooting before it occurred,” Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said at a Tuesday news conference, where he asked the public for patience as authorities investigated Rupnow’s social media activity and state of mind leading up to the rampage.

The teen is one of just nine female school shooters in the last 25 years, according to a database maintained by The Post.

She is also among the younger recent shooters: Just over a month removed from her 15th birthday, she was about a year younger than the median age of school shooters.

And the violence unfolded at a small K-12 school with a religious affiliation, an uncommon site for such incidents, researchers say.

“A lot of this is quite surprising,” said Jillian Peterson, the executive director of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center at Hamline University.

Rupnow’s mother and father, Mellissa and Jeff Rupnow, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Police said they have been cooperating with the investigation.

How does any 15-year-old get ahold of a gun?

Rupnow’s father is a Christian who often shared pictures of his dogs and his daughter, according to a review of his Facebook profile.

The Post confirmed the account as Jeff Rupnow’s by verifying its authenticity with a person who attended school with him and by comparing the page’s contents to public records.

His posts celebrate his daughter’s achievements, such as the time she earned a purple belt in karate, and mark big life moments, like the day he bought a house. But one post, from August, has attracted more scrutiny than others.

In it, a photo appears to show Natalie Rupnow wielding a gun and taking aim at a firing range, which her father identifies as North Bristol Sportsman’s Club in nearby Sun Prairie.

In a comment accompanying the post, Jeff Rupnow wrote that he and his daughter had joined the club early this year and “we have been loving all every second of it!”

In the photograph, Natalie Rupnow is wearing a T-shirt bearing the letters “KMFDM,” an apparent reference to the German rock band whose lyrics were posted on the website of one of the shooters in the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.

Authorities declined to comment on social media posts, saying they were still investigating Natalie Rupnow’s online activity. Police have not disclosed how Rupnow was able to acquire the handgun they say she used in Monday’s shooting.

“How does any 15-year-old get ahold of a gun?” Barnes, the police chief, said Monday, adding that his team was working with federal authorities to answer that question. He did not elaborate at the news conference Tuesday.

Wisconsin is one of 26 states with laws designed to prevent children from gaining access to guns, but the state does not require unattended firearms to be stored under lock and key, and the statute applies only to kids under 14 years old.

Some elected officials have said the case highlights a need for tighter regulations.

“Our laws in Wisconsin are far too lax when it comes to access to guns by children,” said Melissa Agard, chief executive of Dane County, where Madison is located.

It’s too soon to tell what led to the violence, but Peterson — a forensic psychologist who has studied mass shooters extensively — said childhood trauma and a specific crisis often precede such incidents.

According to The Post’s review of court records, Rupnow’s parents first married in 2011, about two years after she was born.

Mellissa Rupnow had been previously married and divorced, and she had another daughter with a different man to whom she was never married. Court records indicate that this girl — Natalie Rupnow’s half sister — had other permanent legal guardians.

The Post was not able to reach the half sister, who is now 20.

Mellissa and Jeff Rupnow divorced for the first time in 2014, agreeing to joint legal custody of their shared daughter, Natalie, but specifying that she would live primarily with her mother.

The couple remarried in 2017 and divorced for a second time in 2020, again agreeing to share custody but, the court records show, dividing Natalie’s time more evenly between them.

During this period, Natalie would spend two days with her father, two with her mother, then three more with her father, before reversing the schedule the following week.

Shortly after Rupnow’s parents split up for the second time, the couple remarried once more. But by April 2021 they were petitioning for a third divorce.

A judge granted it a month later but noted that “parties [were] admonished concerning remarriage,” according to court records.

After seeking mediation to determine custody of Natalie, they agreed in July 2022 that they would share legal custody but that the girl would now live mostly with her father.

By this time, Natalie Rupnow had been enrolled in therapy, which was supposed to help guide decisions about which parent she would spend weekends with, the records show.

The 2022 custody papers said Rupnow’s parents were on cordial terms. “The parents report a generally positive co-parenting relationship,” the document reads, “and will continue to communicate with one another by text messages and phone conversations.”

At Mellissa Rupnow’s home Tuesday morning, a police officer pounded on the door, but no one answered.

He cupped his hands against the kitchen window to peer inside and walked along the front and side of the house before leaving.

No one answered the door when a reporter knocked. Neighbors said they had little contact with her.

One day earlier, police arrived at Jeff Rupnow’s house in an armored truck, wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, according to a photo provided by a neighbor.

Another neighbor, Cindy Pulvermacher, said she stepped outside when she heard a loud noise, and an officer told her to get back inside. She said she heard a pair of booms.

By that evening, the property was surrounded in crime scene tape, an officer stood guard on the doorstep, and the front door was resting on its side in the yard. As darkness fell, Christmas lights twinkled along the house’s roofline.

On Tuesday, police remained outside the home, and a blanket covered the open entryway where the front door had once been. In the late afternoon, two workers installed a new door.

Abundant Life, located just a few miles east of the Wisconsin Capitol, is a private institution with fewer than 400 students across its 13 grades.

Some parents told The Post they sent their children there because they thought it would be safer than bigger public schools, where shootings have been more common.

“These are typically happening in suburban high schools with thousands of kids where it’s easier to slip through the cracks,” Peterson said. “A school this small and close-knit is quite unusual.”

There have been 34 school shootings this year, according to a database maintained by The Post; 13 people have been killed and nearly 50 injured.

They account for just a small fraction of the country’s gun violence epidemic, but they occupy a particularly terrifying place in the national psyche, as tens of millions of children have been subjected to lockdowns and active-shooter drills since Columbine in 1999.

The Post, which tracks shootings on K-12 school properties during class hours, has tallied 426 incidents since 1999. Just 4 percent of the suspected shooters have been female.

Agard, the county chief executive, whose son attends school in Madison, said many of the area’s campuses were forced into lockdown Tuesday after several false threats. That jolt, coming so soon after Monday’s tragedy, made the day even more difficult.

“The world our kids are in now,” she said, “is very different than the one I grew up in.”

Steven Rich, John Woodrow Cox and Lucas Trevor contributed to this report.

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