MADISONS, Wisconsin — Wisconsin prosecutors accused the father of a teenage girl who killed a teacher and fellow students during a school shoot last year, allowing them access to the semi-automatic pistol they used in the attack.
Madison’s criminal charges against 42-year-old Jeffrey Lupnow detail her daughter, 15-year-old Natalie Lupnow, struggled with her parents’ divorce and showed anger in a written work entitled “War on Humanity.” Her father tried to connect her through a gun, the complaint said she tried to connect her through the lawsuit, even if she meticulously planned the attack, including building a cardboard model for the school and scheduling the shooting to end with her suicide.
Prosecutors filed a complaint on Wednesday but did not seal it until Jeffrey Lupneau was arrested Thursday and taken to the Dane County Jail. He faces two counts: intentionally giving people under the age of 18 a dangerous weapon, causing death and contributing to the delinquency of a child. All charges are felony.
He was scheduled to appear in his first court on Friday. Online court records did not list his attorneys. Madison Police Chief John Patterson said he was supportive throughout the investigation. No one left a voicemail left for him and his ex-wife, Melissa Lupneau.
The attack left two deaths and six injured.
Natalie Lupnow entered the Christian School of Rich Life, a religious school in Madison that offers kindergarten through high school classes on December 16th, and fired in the study hall. She killed teacher Erin Michelle West and 14-year-old student Rubi Vergara, who injured six other people before she killed them.
According to the complaint, investigators recovered 20 shell casings from the study hall, where they fired fire.
They also recovered a 9mm Glock handgun that Jeffrey Lupnow purchased for her from the room and a .22 caliber Sig Sore pistol from the bag the girl was carrying, the complaint said. Jeffrey Lupnow had given her the gun as a Christmas present in 2023, the complaint said.
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The bag also featured three magazines with .22 ammunition and a 50-round box of 9mm ammunition. She wore a black T-shirt with bull’s eyes adorned during the attack.
Natalie Lupnow struggled with divorce from her parents
Jeffrey Lupnow told investigators that his daughter lived with him but struggled with divorce from her mother in 2022, telling her that she disliked life and wanted to kill herself. He said she had cut herself to the point where she had to lock up all the knives in her house.
She was undergoing treatment before the attack to learn how to be more sociable until spring, he told investigators. Her mother, Melissa Lupnow, told detectives that the therapist told her that Natalie suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder caused by her divorce. One of Natalie’s friends told investigators that Jeffrey Lupnow was “often verbally offensive” with Natalie, and that she said her father was a “drinker.”
Jeffrey Lupnow told investigators Natalie fired alongside him on a friend’s land about two years before the abundant life attacks. She enjoyed it and he came to see the gun as a way to connect with her. However, he was shocked by how her interest in firearms was in “snowball,” he told investigators.
He kept Natalie’s pistols in the gun safe and told her that if she needed them, his Social Security number went backwards. About ten days before the school attack, he texted a friend and said that if Natalie leaves “fun safe open now”, Natalie will shoot him.
The day before the school attack, he pulled Sig Sauer out of the safe, so Natalie was able to clean it up. However, he was distracted and didn’t know if he had put the weapon back into the safe or locked it.
“War on Humanity against War” Natalie’s room search netted a six-page document entitled “War on Humanity.” She described humanity as “filth,” and began her work by saying that she dislikes people who don’t care, “sucking and drinking as much as she likes her father.”
She wrote about how she praised the school shooter, how her mother was not in her life, and how she got her weapon “by lies and manipulation, and by my father’s stupidity.”
Investigators also discovered a map of the school and cardboard models of the building, attacked at 11:30am, and a handwritten schedule detailing how to clear the first and second floors of the school by 11:55am.
She had communicated online with people all over the world about her fascination with school shootings and weapons, Madison Police Chief John Patterson said Thursday.
My father calls for gun safety to be taught to the “bigest mistake.” Jeffrey Lupnow sent a message to detectives two weeks after the school shooting and complained that his biggest mistake was teaching Natalie how to handle guns safely, and that he was urging police to warn them to change the safe combination of guns every two or three months.
“The kids will be smart and they will understand that,” he wrote. “Like someone is trying to hack your bank account. I just want to protect other families from experiencing what I’m experiencing.”
According to the complaint, after learning that Natalie is a shooter while talking to the police officer, Melissa Lupneau began breathing very quickly through her nose and screaming something.
The charges are the latest in a series of cases against parents in school shootings.
The mother and father of a Michigan school shooter who killed four students last year in 2021 were each convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The mother was the first parent in the United States to be held responsible for a child carrying out a massive school attack.
The father of a 14-year-old boy, accused of fatally shooting four people at Georgia High School, was arrested in September and faced charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for making his son possess a weapon.
In 2023, the father of a man who was charged with a fatal parade shooting in suburban Chicago pleaded guilty to seven misdemeanors related to how his son obtained a gun license.
By Scott Bauer and Todd Richmond
