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Adam De Wilde was taking out the trash at around 12:30 p.m. Monday when he noticed something unusual.
Some 90 minutes earlier, a student at the Abundant Life Christian School — roughly eight miles away from the tidy 3-bedroom home he and his wife share in Madison, Wisconsin’s Sherman Village section — had fatally gunned down a classmate and a teacher, and wounded six others.
But De Wilde did not yet realize that his neighbor, 15-year-old Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow, who would not be identified publicly by police for another several hours, was the person responsible for the unthinkable bloodshed.
“I saw that there were a bunch of cop cars, probably between eight and 12 vehicles, which is not normal for this neighborhood,” De Wilde told The Independent. “… You rarely see a single cop car driving down the street [around here] with its lights on.”
De Wilde, 45, said on Tuesday that he watched as the Madison PD’s SWAT team positioned “an armored personnel carrier-type of thing” in front of a house almost directly across from his, while a clutch of heavily armed officers took cover behind it. The entry team stayed behind the SWAT vehicle “for quite some time, until they eventually drove right up to the door of the house and set off two explosive charges — one for the door and one for the window,” De Wilde continued, thinking at first that he was witnessing a drug bust.
Photos from the scene showed the door blown completely off its hinges and an adjacent window shattered by the blast.
After the officers went inside, “[I]t was just sort of waiting, waiting, waiting,” De Wilde recalled.
Finally, De Wilde said, the police emerged with the Rupnow family’s dog, a boxer seen in multiple photos posted on social media by Natalie’s father, Jeff, which was taken away by animal control.
“There were no people in there,” De Wilde went on, grateful that what could potentially have been another deadly situation instead remained otherwise “uneventful.”
Suzy De Wilde said she and her husband moved in about four years ago and that she regularly saw Natalie Rupnow hanging out in the park next to their property.
“Every day, I wash my dishes and I see that house,” she said. “It’s f*****g crazy that that’s where the shooter lived… Every day, I get to look at that front door now. How do you live with these reminders everywhere?”
Crime scene tape continues to surround the property, and detectives are still searching for further evidence. Rupnow shot herself before police arrived, and was pronounced dead. Her parents, Jeff and Melissa Rupnow, are reportedly cooperating with police. The Abundant Life Christian School serves roughly 400 students, from kindergarten through 12th grade. A second-grade teacher was the first to call 911 and alert police to Monday’s deadly gunfire, which rang out during a mixed-grade study hall shortly before 11 a.m.
Rupnow, who police say used a 9mm semi-automatic handgun to commit the 325th school shooting of 2024, joins an exceedingly short list of female school shooters. An alleged manifesto she left behind has emerged, but Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes, himself a former public school teacher, said investigators have not been able to verify its authenticity.
“I’ve talked to a couple of [other] neighbors, and it’s just sadness,” Adam De Wilde said. “It’s just sad to think that a kid woke up in the morning and grabbed a gun and went to school, and they’re your neighbor. Everybody’s surprised. It’s a quiet neighborhood.”
Two students injured in Monday’s ghastly rampage remain in critical condition, with what authorities described as “life-threatening injuries.” Three students and one teacher were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries; two of the survivors have been released, while two are considered stable. Detectives have not yet determined a motive, according to Barnes.
To Suzy De Wilde, a trained paramedic who works at an area healthcare clinic, yesterday’s shooting is “all I’ve heard patients talking about, it’s all I’ve heard staff talking about.”
“The flags are at half-mast, it hurts,” she said. “Everybody I’ve talked to has a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of something, and I assume that will last for a while. I saw people on Facebook offering to send Uber Eats to families who were affected, but nobody really knows what to do.”
A former coworker of Jeff Rupnow’s said news of the shooting came as a shock, and the fact that his ex-colleague’s daughter was behind it made it even harder to comprehend.
“You don’t expect something like that to happen in your town, and then you find out that you somehow knew somebody involved,” Aaron Harter told The Independent. You never know what’s going on in somebody’s life.”
When he got home on Monday night, Harter said he “hugged both my boys tight.”
A candlelight vigil hosted by the Boys and Girls Clubs of Dane County is scheduled to take place outside the State Capitol on Tuesday. Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway and Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Joe Gothard are expected to attend. The FBI and ATF are assisting the Madison PD in its investigation, which remains ongoing, and the Dane County District Attorney’s Office has mobilized resources, including social workers, attorneys, victim advocates, and others, for anyone who needs help.
Meanwhile, Suzy De Wilde spent the first half of Tuesday preparing for a holiday party at work, as the aftershocks from yet another mass shooting continue to reverberate throughout Madison.
“We dont have children,” she said. “But if we did, this isn’t the world I would want for them.”
