LAST UPDATED 12-19-24 AT 6:50 a.m. PACIFIC
The Dane County Medical Examiner’s office on Wednesday confirmed the identities of the two victims killed in Monday’s mass shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School as 42-year-old teacher Erin M. West and 14-year-old student Rubi P. Vergara.
West was an in-house substitute teacher and coordinator at the school, and Vergara was 9th grade student, reports NBC News.
Investigators are still trying to determine the motive of the shooter.
LAST UPDATED 12/18/24 at 8:50 a.m. EST
MADISON, Wis. — Two people were killed and six others were injured in a shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin.
Officers responded to the school around 10:57 a.m. on Monday morning, ABC reports. Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said a teacher and a teenaged student were killed and five students and one teacher were injured. Two students have life-threatening injuries while the other four victims have non-life-threatening injuries. Two of the victims were released from the hospital Monday night. Police previously said during a news conference that at least four people were killed but corrected it in a statement a short time later.
The suspected shooter, who has been identified as 15-year-old Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow, is also dead. She was a student at the school and was found with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Officers did not fire their weapons. She died while in transport to the hospital.
Police have yet to release the names of the victims. When asked about the victims’ identities during a press conference Tuesday, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said it is up to law enforcement when that information will be revealed.
“All right, I’m going to say this, and then we are done: It is absolutely none of y’all’s business who was harmed in this incident,” she said. “Please have some human decency and respect for the people who lost loved ones or were injured themselves or whose children were injured. Just have some human decency, folks. Leave them alone. Let them grieve, let them recover. Let them heal. Don’t feed off their pain.”
Abundant Life Shooting Took Place in Study Hall
Barnes said the shooting took place in a study hall filled with students from different grades, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports. During a press conference Tuesday afternoon, Barnes said his previous statement that a second grader was the first person to call 911 was incorrect. It was a second grade teacher, he said, noting he takes full responsibility for the error.
John Diaz De Leon, who lives near the school, told ABC News he saw officers with long guns at the scene and older students running across the parking lot.
“Later on, very slowly in a more orderly fashion, the younger students holding hands were let out to go across the parking lot,” he said.
Students were bussed to the nearby SSM Health Urgent Care where they were reunited with their families. Barnes said police conducted multiple clears of the building, and that a third check was conducted using bomb-sniffing dogs “just in case.”
Footage from the scene shows mental health specialists arriving at the school with emotional support animals. Barbara Wiers, director of elementary and school relations at Abundant Life Christian School, said the school’s goal is to have staff get together early in the week and then have community support opportunities for students to reconnect before the winter break.
Abundant Life Shooter’s Motive a ‘Combination of Factors’
Barnes said the parents of the suspected shooter are cooperating with police and they have searched her home. The teen used a 9mm pistol and investigators are working to determine how she got the gun.
“We really have to do a better job not only in our communities but in our country with making sure that our young folks don’t have access to weapons and firearms and certainly making sure that we’re paying attention to the mental health of our children,” Barnes told CNN. “We also want to look at if the parents may have been negligent. And that’s a question that we’ll have to answer with our district attorney’s office. But at this time, that does not appear to be the case.”
Barnes said it appears a “combination of factors” motivated the deadly shooting and that “everyone was targeted in this incident.” Police are interviewing students to see if bullying may have played a role.
Parent James Smith told ABC News that Abundant Life Christian School welcomes students who may have been bullied or had a tough time at other schools.
“We, as a school, desire to help those who are having troubles, to be able to provide a safe space for them to grow, at the same time balance across a safe space for the rest of our student body,” he said.
The teen had a “turbulent home life,” according to court documents, the Washington Post reported. Her parents reportedly divorced and remarried multiple times and their daughter was enrolled in therapy to guide her through their custody arrangements.
Police are also investigating online posts and a possible manifesto written by the shooter.
“We are working to authenticate the document that you see online that some are referring to as a manifesto,” Barnes said, urging people not to share it until it is verified by investigators.
During Tuesday’s news conference, Barnes urged anyone who knew the suspect or had insights into what she may have been going through to call Madison Area Crime Stoppers at 608-266-6014.
5% of School Shooters Are Females
When asked by a reporter Monday if the suspect was transgender, Barnes said he did not know and “quite frankly, I don’t think that’s important at all.”
“I don’t think that whatever happened today has anything to do with how she or he or they may have wanted to identify,” he said. “And I wish people would kind of leave their own personal biases out of this.”
According to the Violence Prevention Project database, of the 197 mass shooting incidents that occurred since between 1966 and 2019, 192 of the shooters were male, four were female, and just one was transgender.
A school shooting database created by the Washington Post found females make up just 5% of school shooters. Since 1999, just nine female students have carried out a school shooting.
Abundant Life Christian School Staff Recently Had Active Shooter Training
Wiers said staff had active shooter training with the Madison Police Department before the start of the school year.
“We train on this. We do lockdown drills, we do evacuation drills as part of our standard drill protocols. Our students are versed in that. Our faculty are well versed in that,” she said. “The training that we did at the very beginning of the year, prior to the students returning to campus, had some new updates, and so we had looked at some of those things. So I think everything was very fresh for our faculty.”
Wiers said the school does not have a school resource officer or metal detectors. Instead, every student is “visually scanned” by staff as they arrive at school. She also said cameras in the building are monitored and doors are always locked.
Barnes said Madison Police train for active shooter situations “almost quarterly,” noting they had most recently conducted the training roughly two weeks ago, Fox News reports.
“The protocols are simple: Stop the killing, stop the dying, find out who’s doing this,” he said in a news conference. “The officers did that.”
The school serves approximately 390 students from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and about 200 families representing more than 50 local congregations enroll their children at the school, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It shares a 28-acre campus with Campus for Kids Learning Center, a program for infants through age four, and the City Church Madison, a Christian nondenominational church.
False Threats Made Against Several Madison Metropolitan Schools
During Tuesday’s news conference, Barnes said numerous Madison Metropolitan School District campuses received swatting calls in the aftermath of the shooting. Swatting is the act of reporting fake threats to emergency responders to elicit a large law enforcement response. Barnes said none of the threats have been deemed credible.
“Let me be clear on this point — making false threats is a crime and we will work with the district attorney to prosecute these crimes,” he said.
The Green Bay Area Public Schools also announced on social media Monday that police were investigating potential school shooting threats at two of its high schools. Three persons of interest had been identified and it was determined there was no ongoing threat, police said.
Historically, threats of school violence surge following high-profile shootings. In the three weeks following the Apalachee High School shooting on Sept. 4, more than 700 children and teens were arrested for allegedly making violent threats against schools in at least 45 states.
RELATED ARTICLE: School Shooting Threats Continue to Skyrocket on Social Media After Apalachee Shooting
In an attempt to curb the increase in threats, some law enforcement agencies released the names and images of children and teens accused of making them. In Florida, Volusia Sheriff Mike Chitwood began the controversial practice of posting videos of handcuffed students being led into detention areas.
“Parents, if you don’t wanna raise your kids, I’m gonna start raising them,” he said during a Sept. 13 news conference. “Every time we make an arrest, your kid’s photo is going to be put out there and if I could do it, I’m going to perp walk your kid so that everybody can see what your kid’s up to.”
Second Christian School Shooting in Under 2 Weeks
This is the second shooting at a Christian school in less than two weeks. On Dec. 4, a gunman critically injured two kindergarten students while they were on the playground at the Feather River Adventist School in Oroville, California. He then took his own life. The school, which has only 35 students, is run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
In March 2023, three students and three adults were murdered at Nashville’s Covenant School, which is also a private Christian school.
Monday’s shooting is also the second school shooting in Wisconsin this year. In May, police responded to Mount Horeb Middle School after a 911 caller said someone approaching the school appeared to have a long gun. The 14-year-old boy reportedly pointed the gun at responding officers when they told him to put it down. Officers shot at the teen, who died on the scene. No one else was injured. It was later determined the teen was armed with a long-barrel pellet gun.
Politicians Speak Out About Gun Safety Laws
President Joe Biden issued a statement following the shooting Monday, calling on Congress to pass commonsense gun safety laws.
“Today, families in Madison, Wisconsin, are grieving the loss of those who were killed and wounded at Abundant Life Christian School. It’s shocking and unconscionable. We need Congress to act. Now,” he wrote. “From Newtown to Uvalde, Parkland to Madison, to so many other shootings that don’t receive attention – it is unacceptable that we are unable to protect our children from this scourge of gun violence. We cannot continue to accept it as normal. Every child deserves to feel safe in their class room. Students across our country should be learning how to read and write – not having to learn how to duck and cover.”
On Tuesday, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) called on Congress to act on gun reform after the shooting, calling it a “uniquely American problem.”
“First, we have to accept we have a problem with guns in this country, and we do. No other country has the same problems with mass shootings like we do,” he said. “Until we accept that, we’re going to work around the edges.”
“Thoughts and prayers without action means more school shootings, more dead kids,” he also wrote in an X post on Monday afternoon.
