Natalie ‘Samatha’ Rupnow, the 15-year-old suspect in the Wisconsin Abundant Life Christian School shooting, called her parents ‘scum’ in the alleged manifesto doing the rounds on social media. She also described her relationship with her parents as “extremely difficult”. Court documents now reveal that her parents divorced 10 years ago leading to a custody chaos which might have made Natalie’s life difficult.
According to court documents, Rupnow was placed in the primary care of her mother Mellissa Rupnow following their divorce in 2014. For the next eight years, the parents fought over the custody that also involved a remarriage and a second divorce, and in 2022, the primary custody of Rupnow was earned by the father, Jeffrey Rupnow.
The parents got remarried in 2017, according to one document which then asked to set child support to zero and adjust the custody of Nataliue to equal shared placement. The couple filed for a second divorce in 2021 and agreed to a shared placement of Natalie. In a mediated agreement filed in July 2022, Natalie’s father Jeffrey was granted primary placement of Natalie and the parents agreed that their goal was to work toward equal placement.
A teacher and a student of the school died and six people were injured after Natalie shot up a room filled with study-hall kids before shooting herself. A combination of factors has been blamed for the shooting spree including her very disturbed family life. The cops are also probing an angle of bullying and the exact motive is not yet known. “On the question of bullying, we’re talking to students to understand whether bullying was one of those multiple factors that I mentioned earlier,” Madison Police chief Shon Barnes said adding that the authenticity of the manifesto was yet to be ascertained.
“I’ve grown to hate people, and society, it’s truly not my fault though, it never was. but all of you and the world have done to me is pick and tease me, you’ve pushed me into a corner with no help whatsoever,” the manifesto read.