The legal team for Jeffrey Rupnow has asked a judge for something I didn’t see coming: the entire prosecutor’s file from a 2022 case in which his daughter, Natalie, was the victim of a sex crime. Attorney Lisa Goldman filed the motion on October 23rd and followed up with a letter four days later saying the file “likely contains exculpatory evidence” for her client, according to Madison.com. She did not say what she expects to find, and Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne told the paper he hadn’t even seen the motion yet, so for now the rest of us are left guessing.
If you’ll recall, Natalie Rupnow was 15 when she opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison on December 16th, 2024, killing teacher Erin West and freshman Rubi Vergara, wounding six others, and then taking her own life. Her father was arrested in May of 2025 and charged with two felony counts of providing a dangerous weapon to a minor resulting in death, along with one count of contributing to the delinquency of a child.
Prosecutors allege that one of the guns used in the shooting was a Christmas gift from Jeffrey Rupnow, that he gave his daughter access to the gun safe, that he let her pack firearms for range trips on her own, and that he handed her a pistol the day before the shooting. He has pleaded not guilty, and the trial is currently set for March.
In June of 2022, Natalie was 12 years old when she connected through social media apps with a man named Christian Szewczul, who lived in Illinois. Both of them listed their age as 17 on one of the apps, but he was actually 22, and he sent her sexually explicit messages before the two made plans to meet. On June 15th, after her father had left for work, Szewczul picked her up at the house and drove her to a hotel on Madison’s east side, where, according to the court documents, they had sexual contact.
A 22-year-old with a 12-year-old is not a gray area, and the Journal Sentinel reports that the police report called it immediately obvious she was prepubescent, even though he claimed he didn’t know she was underage.
Jeffrey Rupnow came home from work, tracked her phone to the hotel, confronted Szewczul, and called the police, and credit where it’s due, that is what a parent should do. Szewczul pleaded guilty in October of 2023 to child enticement involving sexual contact, with a first-degree child sexual assault count dismissed but read in, and in June of 2024 he was sentenced to 12 months in jail, 15 years on the sex offender registry, and eight years of probation.
It’s unclear what counseling or other help Natalie received afterward, and the Journal Sentinel suggests a shortage of resources may have played a part.
Now, Rupnow’s defense attorney hasn’t said what she’s after, so I’m speculating here, but it’s not hard to imagine how that night might fit into a defense. A father who tracks his daughter’s phone, shows up at a hotel, and calls the cops looks like an attentive parent, and attentive parents are not supposed to be the ones prosecutors portray as handing a troubled kid a loaded handgun.
I can see why a defense attorney would want that story front and center. The problem is that it only goes so far. Being attentive on one night in June of 2022 doesn’t erase what Rupnow is accused of doing in the two years leading up to December of 2024, which is allegedly giving his daughter a gun for Christmas, letting her pack firearms on her own, and leaving her an easy path into his gun safe. Real responsible gun ownership isn’t a character reference, it’s a daily habit, and the allegation is that he didn’t keep it up.
And we shouldn’t forget about everything that happened online after that hotel room. As I’ve previously posted, a 20-year-old California man was talking with Natalie on Discord about an attack on a government building, and a 22-year-old Florida man named Damien Blade Allen was telling her they would go down together after the two met on TikTok in May of 2024.
Neither man is accused of directing the attack at Abundant Life, and the California man was never charged, though he did end up with a three-year gun violence restraining order. Both allegedly came from the same corners of the so-called True Crime community, where Natalie spent her time, and both allegedly treated a 15-year-old girl as a romantic partner and a co-conspirator. If her father was watching her phone closely enough in 2022 to find a hotel, it’s fair to ask what he knew about who was talking to her in the lead-up to the shooting.
Natalie Rupnow was a victim, and not just once. A 22-year-old preyed on her when she was 12, and two more adult men allegedly fed her violent fantasies when she was 15, so by the accounts we have, she was groomed by multiple men over a span of years. But she stopped being a victim the moment she pulled the trigger, because Erin West and Rubi Vergara were victims too, and they didn’t get a say in any of it. Nothing that was done to her excuses what she did, and nothing she did erases what was done to her.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Rupnow did the right thing on one awful night in June of 2022. Yet intervening in that one incident didn’t prevent much of anything at all, not the predators who came next and, if prosecutors are right, not the gun that ended up in his daughter’s hands.
A jury will get to decide whether the law holds him criminally responsible for that. But, whatever Goldman finds in that 2022 file, it won’t change what happened in that study hall.
(Sources)
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