The first photos have surfaced of the teen shooter who killed a student and teacher at a Wisconsin Christian school — and she’s wearing a t-shirt featuring a band favored by Columbine killer Eric Harris.
The photo of Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow, a 15-year-old student at the K-12 Abundant Life Christian School, was posted on her father’s Facebook page and shows her at a shooting range wearing a shirt from the German band KMFDM.
Harris also wore one of the band’s t-shirts in public photos before he and Dylan Klebold went on to kill 13 people in the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.
Other photos on her dad’s Facebook page show her happily romping in the leaves with two dogs.
Police said Rupnow brought a handgun to the Madison campus and opened fire at around 11 a.m. inside a classroom during study hall.
According to law enforcement, on Monday, December 16, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School, a K-12 school in Madison, Wisconsin, killing a teacher and teenage student in addition to injuring five more students and another teacher. Police also said that Rupnow died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. According to CNN, the shooting marked the 83rd school shooting recorded in the United States in 2024, surpassing 2023 for the most school shootings in a single year since the outlet began tracking such events in 2008.
“Samantha Rupnow… born a biological female but identified as a male, decides to take others out with her/him,” an X user called “Todd with Trump” wrote. “These school shootings have nothing to do with guns. NOTHING! They have EVERYTHING to do with complete and total mental illness.”
The account Charlie Kirk News tweeted to its more than 200,000 followers, “👀🚨BREAKING: The Wisconsin school sh**ter has been identified as a 17-year-old male who identifies as a trans.”
During a press conference on Monday night, a reporter asked Madison’s chief of police, Shon Barnes, about Rupnow’s gender identity.
“Chief, there’s been a lot of misinformation online including from Moms for Liberty activists in Wisconsin claiming that the shooter was transgender, which is a reaction that we see across the country in the wake of mass shootings, to claim that trans people are dangerous,” the reporter said. “Can you respond to that directly?”
“I don’t know whether Natalie was transgender or not, and quite frankly, I don’t think that’s even important,” Barnes replied. “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. And I wish people would kind of leave their own personal biases out of this.”
The teenage suspect used a handgun, police said. Authorities are investigating the origin of the firearm and searching Rupnow’s home in the the north side of the city, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said.
A motive is not clear, Barnes said at a news conference.
It is also unclear if any of the victims was specifically targeted, officials said on Monday.
Barnes also said police are not currently looking to charge Rupnow’s parents in connection with the deadly shooting.
“The parents are fully cooperating, we have no reason to believe that they have committed a crime at this time,” Barnes said.
“This has obviously rocked our school community,” said Barbara Wiers, the director of elementary and school relations for Abundant Life Christian School. “But we know it affects not just our school community, but Madison and the greater area and all schools.”
The school does not have metal detectors or a school resource officer, but has other security protocols in place, including cameras, Wiers said.
“Prior to the start of the school year, we had a retraining. 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 explained. “The training that we did with [Madison Police Department] 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.”
“I cannot, cannot tell you how well our students did in that process. They were clearly scared when they realized — when we practice, we always say, ‘This is a drill, it is just a drill.’ When they heard, ‘Lockdown, lockdown,’ and nothing else, they knew it was real,” Wiers said, adding: “But they handled themselves brilliantly.”
