Authorities have charged the father of the 15-year-old shooter who killed two people and injured six others at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, in December, police said on Thursday.
Jeffrey Rupnow, 42, is accused of giving his daughter access to the pistols that she used in her attack, ABC News reported. The teenage female shooter, who just four months prior had started attending Abundant Life, opened fire in a study hall on December 16, killing teacher Erin Michelle West and 14-year-old student Rubi Bergara. The shooter, who will not be named per Daily Wire policy, then turned the gun on herself and was found dead by responding officers.
Rupnow faces two counts of intentionally giving a dangerous weapon to a person under 18, causing death, and contributing to the delinquency of a child, the New York Post reported. He is scheduled to make his first court appearance on Friday.
The criminal complaint against Rupnow says that his daughter spiraled after her parents divorced, expressing a hatred of humanity, according to ABC News. Court records showed that the shooter was in therapy over her troubled home life and would often bounce back and forth between her mother and father. Her parents divorced in 2014, remarried in 2017, divorced again in 2020, and then remarried for a second time, The Washington Post reported. By April 2021, the couple petitioned for a third divorce and were “admonished” by a judge “concerning remarriage.”
The criminal complaint states that Rupnow attempted to bond with his daughter through firearms. According to the complaint, Rupnow bought his daughter a 9mm pistol and a .22-caliber Sig Sauer pistol. Rupnow allegedly bought the Sig Sauer pistol for Christmas in 2023, when she would have been just 14 years old.
The father told investigators that following the divorce, his daughter started cutting herself so badly that he had to lock up all the knives in his home. After taking her shooting with him on a friend’s property to connect with her, Rupnow told investigators he was stunned at how quickly her interest in guns “snow balled.”
Rupnow kept the guns he got for his daughter in a gun safe, but gave her the combination to open it. Just ten days before the deadly attack on the Christian school, Rupnow texted a friend that his daughter would shoot him if he left “the fun safe open right now,” according to the complaint. The father expressed regret to investigators about teaching his daughter about firearms and urged police to encourage people to change the combination on their gun safes frequently.
Investigators discovered a six-page manifesto in the shooter’s bedroom in her father’s house, along with maps of the school and a schedule of how she would carry out the attack. In her manifesto, which was titled “War Against Humanity,” the shooter wrote that 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,” ABC News reported.
The felony charges against Rupnow continue a new practice of prosecutors going after the parents of mass shooters. Last year, both parents of the Oxford, Michigan, high school shooter were convicted of involuntary manslaughter, becoming the first parents convicted of crimes connected to their child carrying out a mass shooting. The father of a 14-year-old boy who opened fire and killed four people at a high school in Georgia last year also faces second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter charges.
