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Court records reveal that the 15-year-old school shooter Natalie Rupnow had been in therapy dealing with a troubled life at home as her parent continually divorced and got back together, according to The Washington Post.
Rupnow, who also went by the first name of Samantha, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after killing two people and wounding six others at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. She opened fire in a study hall classroom.
Much remains unknown about the shooting, including a motive, with police looking into her social media activity and state of mind ahead of the shooting. Police have said that Rupnow’s parents have been cooperating with the investigation.
Court records show that her parents’ custody agreement forced Rupnow to move between their homes every two to three days, The Post reported.
Rupnow is one of just nine female school shooters in the last quarter century and she’s about a year younger than the median age of those who have opened fire at American schools. Researchers have also noted that the site, a religiously connected K-12 school, was unusual for a shooting.
In a photo on her father’s Facebook page, Rupnow appears to be holding a firearm at a firing range, wearing a t-shirt with the letters “KMFDM.” It was seemingly a reference to a German rock band whose lyrics were posted on the website maintained by one of the shooters in the 1999 Columbine High School shooting.
Police haven’t revealed how Rupnow got ahold of the gun used in the shooting Monday.
The executive director of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center at Hamline University, forensic psychologist Jillian Peterson, told The Post that childhood trauma and a particular crisis often come before a shooting.
She said shootings “are typically happening in suburban high schools with thousands of kids where it’s easier to slip through the cracks. A school this small and close-knit is quite unusual.”
There have been 426 school shootings since 1999, with only four percent of the shooters being female, the paper noted.
The Post found that Rupnow’s parents married initially in 2011, about two years after her birth. They divorced for the first time in 2014, agreeing that they would have joint custody but that Rupnow would live mostly with her mother.
They married again in 2017 and divorced in 2020, agreeing this time for a more even split in custody. She would be at her father’s for two days, then with her mother for two days, then with her father for three days, before doing the opposite the next week.
It wasn’t long before her parents remarried yet again. In April 2021, they were going through a third divorce. They were “admonished concerning remarriage,” court records state.
In July 2022, they agreed on shared custody but that Rupnow would spend most of her time with her father. She was now in therapy, intended to help decide where she would spend her weekends, court records reveal, according to The Post.
“The parents report a generally positive co-parenting relationship and will continue to communicate with one another by text messages and phone conversations,” the 2022 custody papers state.
