The father of a teenage girl who fatally shot a teacher and a fellow student at a Christian school in Madison, Wis., in December was arrested on Thursday and charged with felonies in connection with the case, the authorities said.
Jeffrey Rupnow, 42, of Madison was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a child and two counts of providing a dangerous weapon to a person under 18 resulting in death, police records showed.
John Patterson, the acting police chief in Madison, Wis., said at a news conference on Thursday that both of the guns the girl, Natalie Rupnow, 15, had at the time of the attack had been bought legally in Dane County by Mr. Rupnow.
Mr. Rupnow, who would face up to 18 years in prison if he is found guilty on all counts, had a gun safe in the home, Chief Patterson said. “Her father knew that she had them, or at least had access to them,” the chief said. He said that it was unclear whether she had taken the guns from the safe or from outside the safe.
Bail for Mr. Rupnow was set at $20,000 on Friday. A phone call and email to his lawyer, Bruce Davey, were not immediately returned on Friday afternoon.
The authorities have not stated a motive for the shooting, but charging documents in Mr. Rupnow’s case show that Natalie Rupnow, a student at Abundant Life Christian School who was known as Samantha, struggled after her parents’ divorce in 2022. She died after the attack from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the police said.
The shooter opened fire in a study hall for students from several grades at the school on Dec. 16.
She had been communicating online with people around the world about her fascination with violence and school shootings, Chief Patterson said. He said that the authorities had found a “manifesto” entitled “War Against Humanity.” They also found a cardboard model of the school, maps of the building, and a handwritten timeline for when she would begin her attack, according to charging documents.
According to the criminal complaint against Mr. Rupnow, he told investigators that Natalie, who lived with him, hated her life and wanted to kill herself. He said she used to cut herself frequently. “There was one point where every knife in my house was locked up,” Mr. Rupnow said.
He had tried to bond with her, he said, through guns. He took her shooting on a friend’s property about two years before the attack. She seemed to enjoy it, he said, and her interest “snow balled.” He told Natalie that if she ever needed guns, the access code on his safe was his Social Security number entered backward.
He said that she had been in therapy to learn how to be more social until a few months before the attack.
About 10 days before the school attack, Mr. Rupnow sent a message to a friend, saying that he feared that Natalie would shoot him if he left the gun safe open.
On the day before the shooting, he said, he took a handgun from the safe, so that she could clean it. He could not remember whether Natalie returned it to the safe, Mr. Rupnow told investigators. That gun was used in the attack, and the second gun, Mr. Rupnow said, must have come from the safe.
The two people who were killed were identified as Rubi P. Vergara, 14, a student, and Erin M. West, 42, who was listed in a staff directory as the substitute coordinator at Abundant Life, which offers prekindergarten through high school classes for about 400 students.
Two other students were critically injured in the attack and have since recovered, officials said. Four others — three students and a teacher — were hospitalized with less serious injuries.
The shooter had two handguns with her, the authorities said in December, though the police said that they believed she had used only one of them in the attack.
Two weeks after the school shooting, Mr. Rupnow sent a message to a detective, writing that his biggest mistake was teaching Natalie how to handle guns safely.
“I thought locking my guns in the safe was enough as a parent,” he wrote, expressing regret that had not changed the code to the safe every two to three months.
“Kids are smart and they will figure it out,” he said. “I just want to protect other families from going through what I’m going through.”
Mr. Rupnow is the latest parent to face charges associated with a school shooting. James and Jennifer Crumbley were each sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison in April 2024. They had been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for failing to prevent their teenage son from killing four fellow students at a Michigan high school in November 2021.
The Crumbleys were the first parents to be directly charged for the deaths caused by a child in a mass shooting at a school. Their son Ethan, who was 15 at the time of the shooting, pleaded guilty to 24 charges, including first-degree murder, and was sentenced in 2023 to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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