A violent online community radicalized a school shooter — and 6 others

MADISON, Wis. — Madison school shooter Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow is being idolized and copied in the same violent online community that helped radicalize her — a group that has ties to six other recent K-12 school shooters, experts say.

Rupnow opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School on Dec. 16, 2024, killing a teacher, Erin Michelle West, 42, and student Rubi Patricia Vergara, 14. Rupnow wounded six others before killing herself.

Researchers soon found that Rupnow had immersed herself in a dark social media world that idolizes mass shooters, spreads gore and promotes white supremacist content. They call the loose network the True Crime Community, or TCC.

Rupnow’s digital extremism has had far-reaching consequences.

Her online interactions prompted law enforcement action against two young men in Florida and California. And since Rupnow’s death, the online persona built around her became a warped, idealized character within the TCC. This persona has served as a source of inspiration for three school shooters in Tennessee, Minnesota and Colorado, as well as a teen who bombed his high school’s mosque in Indonesia.

“This is not theoretical,” K-12 school shooting researcher David Riedman said. “The last seven school shootings back to January 2024 all have connections to TCC.”

The TCC is not a formal organization but a social media trend centered on gore-sharing and idolization of mass shooters, Riedman said. A small subset encourages violence, and a tiny fraction actually commits it.

Allizandra Herberhold, a de-radicalization expert with Parents For Peace, said about 95% of TCC participants never harm others and are often struggling with mental health issues. She said they’re much more likely to hurt themselves than others.

“Just because someone has an infatuation with a specific shooter doesn't mean that they want to carry out an attack,” Herberhold said. “There have to be multiple compounding factors.

“A lot of times, these kids, they need help,” she added. “They need the parents to take their computer away.”

Rupnow’s descent into violent extremism

Rupnow’s online radicalization began on WatchPeopleDie, according to an Anti-Defamation League analysis.

WatchPeopleDie is a forum tied to the TCC where users share photos and videos of ISIS beheadings, rapes, murders, dismemberments, torture, suicides, accidents and other violence.

Rupnow joined in June 2023 when she was only 13.

Over the next 18 months, she consumed increasingly hateful content across multiple platforms, following white supremacist accounts, liking Nazi posts, watching violent TikToks and engaging with shooter-idolizing material, the Anti-Defamation League found.

Her extremism escalated to the point that she criticized the TCC for not being violent enough, extremism researchers Jean Slater and Ry Terran said.

Slater and Terran use pseudonyms in their research to protect themselves against doxing and violence from the extremists they monitor.

After Rupnow’s attack, Slater and Terran realized they had been monitoring Rupnow within a more extreme network: the “Soyjak Attacker Video Fandom,” or SAVF.

SAVF is a tighter-knit, more violent online cluster where youth spread child sexual abuse material as well as memes and inside jokes. The group is more active in pushing children to commit real-world violence than the TCC, Slater and Terran said.

SAVF participants were among the first to circulate a group chat with the livestream of a stabbing attack in Turkey in August 2024, Slater said. Rupnow was the fourth person to join the group chat, Anti-Defamation League senior research director Carla Hill said. Rupnow commented in the chat, praising the 18-year-old attacker.

“It starts by, you’re following edgy stuff,” Hill said. “You start reposting … then you start creating your own. And then, by the end of it, you’ve actually adopted extremist views.”

In her “manifesto,” Rupnow used racist and homophobic slurs, praised the Columbine school shooters and white supremacist attackers, and wrote that she would “always hate humanity.”

Idea of Rupnow warps online

Since her death, Rupnow has turned into a romanticized character in the TCC networks she once frequented.

Users create artwork, mimic her photos and produce video edits of her, Herberhold said. Some form parasocial attachments to the fictionalized versions of her. 

Others post sexualized content about Rupnow, despite her being 15. Herberhold has seen violent fan fiction and discussions about raping her.

“It’s disgusting,” Slater said.

Slater said the TCC is influenced by incels, a group of men and boys who blame women and society for their romantic failures and spread hateful, misogynistic content. Some view Rupnow as an “idealized, unattainable, romantic ideal,” Slater said.

Importantly, Rupnow was not an influential figure in the TCC or SAVF before she died, Slater said. Her manifesto was “not particularly sophisticated,” Slater said. And she failed to make the document public. Her now-popular photos were private, surfacing only after her attack.

Rupnow’s elevated image is a post-mortem creation, Slater said.

“They’re not mimicking her, the person,” Slater said. “They’re mimicking an idea that has been created.”

How is Natalie Rupnow connected to new school shooters? 

According to Anti-Defamation League research, the last three K-12 shooters referenced Rupnow before their attacks:

• Antioch High School shooter Solomon Henderson, 17, posed like Rupnow in photos, made a TikTok celebrating her, wrote her name on his weapons and called her a saint. He said she inspired his attack. He killed one person and wounded two before killing himself Jan. 22 in Nashville, Tennessee.
• Annunciation Catholic School shooter Robin Westman, 23, wrote Rupnow’s name, as well as other mass killers popular in the TCC, on weapons used in the attack. Westman killed two people and injured 21 before dying by suicide Aug. 27 in Minneapolis.
• Evergreen High School shooter Desmond Holly, 16, idolized Rupnow online and replicated her poses in photos. Holly wounded two before killing himself Sept. 10 near Denver.

Rupnow, Henderson and Holly also mirrored each other in their online pathways to violence, Hill said. The three became part of WatchPeopleDie early on, then grew more extreme.

Henderson and Rupnow both joined the platform in June 2023 and committed their shootings about a year and a half later, the Anti-Defamation League found. They followed each other on the social platform X, which Henderson bragged about, Wisconsin Watch first reported. Both eventually became SAVF participants, Slater said.

Like Rupnow, Henderson and Holly engaged with white supremacist and TCC content, held neo-Nazi beliefs and drew inspiration from racist attackers, according to the Anti-Defamation League and Riedman. Henderson and Holly also both interacted with incel content.

The influence extends worldwide. A 17-year-old who bombed his school’s mosque in Jakarta injured nearly 100 people and cited Rupnow among his inspirations, Indonesian authorities told Jakarta’s Metro TV news network. The teen was also influenced by Columbine and white supremacist content.

“It’s a global problem,” Hill said. “We see this happening in countries all over the world.”

‘Pipeline’ to violence

Riedman said the three K-12 shooters prior to Rupnow in 2024 were also pulled into an online “world of violence” by the TCC. According to research for his K-12 School Shooting Database:

• The Perry High School shooter in Iowa joined a Discord discussion group called “School Shooting Massacres” and referenced Columbine online.
• The Mount Horeb Middle School student in Wisconsin, who was killed by police, wrote online that he was “addicted to Columbine.” He expressed anger toward Black people, Jews, LGBTQ+ people and feminists.
• The Apalachee High School shooter in Georgia made school shooting threats on Discord and kept a shrine to school shooters in his room.

“It's a repeatable, accelerated pipeline that demands a coordinated response from law enforcement to school officials to parents,” Hill said.

The Anti-Defamation League sent its study on Rupnow’s and Henderson’s similar online footprints to more than 16,000 schools. Hill said they want to empower schools to explore ways to prevent students from going down TCC rabbit holes. The league suggested websites schools could block on school computers.

Riedman would like to see the government increase the regulation of social media. In recent years, platforms have loosened safeguards that protect against violence, contributing to a rise in hateful content.

And the proliferation of AI models has made the problem worse, Riedman said. It’s easier for children to create TCC content because they can have ChatGPT make fan art, memes and cartoons of school shooters for them.

Riedman said the internet has become “a much more dangerous place for children and teenagers.”

The men Rupnow met online

The online communities Rupnow was part of also introduced her to two men in Florida and California who shared extremist views.

Damien Blade Allen, 23, was arrested in Florida April 29 in part due to his TikTok communications with Rupnow throughout 2024. He faces multiple felonies, including threatening to conduct a mass shooting.

Slater said Allen was active in the TCC and emulated Columbine shooters.

According to the probable cause affidavit, Allen and Rupnow discussed the guns and ammunition they possessed. Allen told Rupnow there were seven places he would “strike” with “gorilla warfare tactics, ambushing and blitz.” Rupnow told him that she “wanted to do a black church that was near me.”

They also exchanged “I love you,” even though Allen was 21 and Rupnow was only 14.

“We go down together,” Allen messaged Rupnow on June 7, 2024.

Allen pleaded not guilty. He is being held without bond in the Palm Beach County Jail. His next court date is Jan. 8.

In California, FBI agents detained 21-year-old Alexander Paffendorf Dec. 17, 2024, because he was allegedly “plotting a mass shooting” with Rupnow, according to court records.

Paffendorf admitted to the FBI that he told Rupnow he planned to arm himself with explosives and a gun and target a government building, according to a gun violence emergency protective order. Paffendorf had to turn over his guns and ammunition to police in December 2024.

In April, a judge finalized the protective order, barring Paffendorf from purchasing, owning or possessing firearms for three years. No criminal charges have been filed. The FBI’s San Diego office declined to comment on whether it continues to investigate Paffendorf.

Slater said some people want to portray Rupnow as a victim groomed into committing violence, but that wasn’t the case. She had online relationships with men, but “they didn’t coerce or trick her.”

“The people around her helped make her more lethal, which is very different from grooming,” Slater said. “She was wanting to do this for years.”

Still, Slater said, Rupnow could have been helped.

“She did a terrible act,” Slater said. “She was a racist. She absolutely believed in violence as a preferred method of attaining her worldview. And that included murder.

“But she herself was a vulnerable child who had been suicidal and was also having homicidal ideations for years.”

Parents need to step in

Herberhold said parents should monitor their children’s online activity for warning signs, especially since some have faced criminal charges for failing to intervene.

Natalie Rupnow’s father, Jeffrey W. Rupnow, 43, is charged with contributing to the delinquency of a child and providing a dangerous weapon to a minor. If convicted, he could face up to 18 years in prison for the felonies.

Prosecutors say he bought the Glock handgun used in the shooting and told Natalie the gun safe combination was his Social Security number backward. Jeffrey has argued in court filings that prosecutors lack proof that he intentionally gave her access to his safe.

But Natalie could have gotten the number from her mother, Jeffrey’s ex-wife, or observed him entering the combination into the safe, prosecutors argue.

Natalie’s mother, Mellissa Rupnow, died by apparent suicide in August.

In her "manifesto," Natalie Rupnow wrote that she hated her father and saw both her parents as failures. She said she felt alone and neglected.

Court records show Rupnow engaged in self-harm and told her father she wanted to die, which he didn’t take seriously. Her therapist said she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after her parents’ 2022 divorce.

Herberhold said many youth drawn to the TCC come from unstable home environments, struggle to make friends and seek out connections online. She urged parents to engage with their children and ask questions about the content they consume.

She and Riedman recommend that parents:

• Watch a YouTube video essay about Columbine to learn imagery repeated in the TCC.
• Watch episode 60 of Riedman’s “Back to School Shootings” podcast, which explains TCC memes and fan art.
• Read trainings from Safer Schools Together. 
• Be concerned if a child suddenly begins extensive late-night journaling. “Look in their journal and make sure that they’re not writing about being suicidal or wanting to carry out an attack,” Herberhold said.
• Put confusing memes or posts into ChatGPT to understand them.
• Monitor social media accounts, especially private chats on Discord.
• Do not allow children on Telegram, which Herberhold said is “full of gore and child porn.”
• Block WatchPeopleDie and check browser histories.
• Seek help from Parents for Peace or a local mental health professional if a child becomes radicalized. 

Many parents hesitate to intrude on children’s privacy, but Herberhold said safety must come first.

“Privacy is a privilege. Having a cell phone and access to the internet is a privilege. It's not a right,” she said. “If they’re engaging with stuff online that you know is bad for them, take their phone away.”

“If some of the parents of previous shooters would have just removed some of the privacy and regained some of the control over their child it would have helped,” Herberhold added.

“If your child does do something, that’s something you have to live with for the rest of your life.”

Wisconsin State Journal reporter Chris Rickert contributed to this report.