Did Two Adult Men Push The Abundant Life School Shooter to Kill?

Back in December 2024, I wrote about the school shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. It was one of those stories that started strange and only kept getting darker. On a Monday morning just before Christmas break, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, who also went by ‘Samantha,’ walked into a study hall armed with a 9mm handgun and shattered the illusion of safety that so many still try to cling to. She killed a teacher and a fellow student. Six others were injured. Then she turned the gun on herself.

The school didn’t have metal detectors. It didn’t have a resource officer. And let’s be honest, even if it had both, it’s still a coin toss whether they would have done a damn thing. Because when the threat looks like a shy teenage girl in eyeliner and a band shirt, most people don’t even see it coming. But they should have. They absolutely should have.

It didn’t take long for the social media vultures to swoop in, latching onto her use of the name ‘Samantha’ to ignite a whole trans panic circus. That’s what they do. A girl goes by a different name, and suddenly, she’s part of a conspiracy. That narrative got so loud that even the police chief had to shut it down during a press conference. But by then, the damage was already done because on the internet, bias spreads faster than facts.

In those early days, there were rumors of a manifesto. People spotted her wearing a KMFDM shirt, the same band Columbine coward Eric Harris liked, and that was enough for the armchair detectives to start drawing red string all over their timelines. We’d later find out those connections weren’t so much rumors as early warning signs. And now, months later, those signs are flashing red.

Because Natalie Rupnow wasn’t operating in a vacuum. She may have had help. Not in the literal sense, but in the grooming, validation, and encouragement that festers in the dark corners of the internet, behind the keyboards of adult men who should have known better.

Since I stopped blogging not long after the Abundant Life shooting, I missed a lot of what surfaced in the weeks and months that followed. At the time of my first post, the names of the victims hadn’t even been released yet. Now we know they were 14-year-old Rubi Patricia Vergara, a freshman student, and 42-year-old Erin Michelle West, a teacher. Two lives stolen by a girl with a gun and a head full of hate, and six more injured in the process. They weren’t just casualties in some teenage manifesto. They were human beings who deserved to live.

Investigators later found a handwritten six-page manifesto in Rupnow’s home where she expressed hatred for society, called her parents scum, and admitted she manipulated her father into helping her acquire the guns. She claimed to have used emotional tactics to get him to buy the firearms under the guise of wanting to practice at the range. If that was her plan, it worked. Her father told officers he took her shooting two years prior and that she developed an interest afterward. He also said she’d asked to go to the range several times since then.

That’s not the behavior of a ‘responsible gun owner™.‘ That’s a man who let his teenage daughter get easy access to deadly weapons. She didn’t have to steal them. She didn’t have to break into a safe. She just lied and played on his trust, and somehow that was enough. No matter how much manipulation was involved, that still puts some of the responsibility on him. Because securing your firearms is your job. Especially when there are children in the house. And especially when one of those children turns out to be a mass shooter.

What’s worse is what we’ve learned about who may have been feeding Rupnow’s fire behind the scenes. It wasn’t just a teenager spiraling alone. She was in contact with adult men who not only encouraged her violent fantasies but shared their own. Men who should have been nowhere near a vulnerable fifteen-year-old. But thanks to social media and messaging apps, they were right there in her pocket.

One of those men lived in California. He was 20-years-old at the time, and came under federal scrutiny not long after the shooting. Investigators uncovered Discord messages between him and Rupnow where the two discussed a separate mass attack on a government building. He talked about explosives and remote-detonated bombs. He gave her advice on which weapons would be most effective. He said he did it all because he had feelings for her. Because nothing says romance like fantasizing about killing people together, apparently.

He was detained the day after the shooting. No firearms were found in his home, and he hasn’t been charged with a crime. But a judge still found the conversations disturbing enough to impose a three-year gun violence restraining order. The court ruled that the threats were too recent, the research into weaponry too detailed, and the danger too real to ignore. Whether or not he ever planned to act on those fantasies himself doesn’t change the fact that he saw a teenage girl sliding toward a cliff and helped her pick up speed.

Now, I don’t think he was actually plotting an attack. There’s no indication he had a real plan or even the means to carry one out. But let’s not forget the bigger problem here. This was a 20-year-old man who was allegedly pursuing a romantic relationship with a 15-year-old girl. That’s not just wildly inappropriate, it’s illegal. The age of consent is 18 in both California and Wisconsin. You don’t get to hide behind ‘off-the-cuff’ comments when you’re trying to groom a child.

And if that’s not enough, he reportedly visited white supremacist and antisemitic websites. So not only was he engaging in dangerous conversations with a minor, he was also swimming in some of the most toxic corners of the internet. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a profile.

He told the court that the order was making it hard for him to find a job. But let’s be honest, if you’re the kind of guy who tells a 15-year-old girl how to build a bomb because you’re hoping to date her, then you don’t get to play the victim. No one’s shedding tears because your resume is collecting dust.

Then there’s the other one. The one from Florida. His name, and I swear I’m not making this up, is Damien Blade Allen. That is not a nickname. That is his legal name. Damien Blade Allen. It sounds like the name of a 90s comic book villain. The kind drawn by Rob Liefeld with more pouches on them than humanly possible. The kind who may have been cool at the time but are seen as cringe today. But this was not a graphic novel. This was real life.

According to investigators, Allen and Rupnow started talking on TikTok in May 2024. Their conversations didn’t stay casual for long. They talked about tactical gear. They talked about smoke grenades and body armor. He sent her photos of his so-called loadout (not a euphemism). She told him she had access to her father’s handguns. He told her they would go down together. She said “correct.” Then came the “I love you”’s. This was not some twisted inside joke. This was two people bonding over shared delusions of violence.

Allen told her he had seven targets in mind. One of them was a police station. Rupnow said she wanted to shoot up a Black church. She also subscribed to white supremacist beliefs. These were not empty threats made by two teens trying to shock each other. Allen was 22. A grown man. One with a fixation on power, weapons, and violent legacy. In one of their chats, he bragged about using what he called “gorilla” tactics. Which might have been funny if it were not part of a conversation about slaughtering human beings.

When authorities finally searched his home in April 2025, they found a stockpile that would make a doomsday prepper jealous. Eighteen guns. Over 12,000 rounds of ammunition. Ballistic vests. Taser-like weapons. Authentic-looking law enforcement and military uniforms. Nazi insignias. A fake badge. A 3D-printed body cam. He even filmed himself in a decked-out Crown Vic, dressed in full Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office gear, complete with a laptop and a rifle mount. This was someone who was not just talking the talk. He was trying to live the fantasy.

Allen has been charged with making written threats to conduct a mass shooting, impersonating a police officer, and unlawful use of a two-way communication device. He is currently being held without bail. Authorities also filed a risk protection order to strip him of any legal access to firearms. That was the right move, and it probably came just in time.

This was not some loner sending unhinged messages into the void. This was a man who found a vulnerable, angry 15-year-old girl and treated her like a co-conspirator. He encouraged her violence. He validated her hate. He built her up as something bigger and darker than she was. He did not stop her. He helped shape what she became.

And to be perfectly honest, I think he was the real deal. The kind of person who absolutely would have committed a shooting if given the right opportunity and the right excuse. He had the weapons, the gear, the obsession, and the mindset. He was not playing dress-up. He was getting ready.

What surprises me most is that he did not coordinate the date with his alleged girlfriend. Because if you spend any time studying the warped subculture around school shootings, you know that kind of sick coordination is exactly what they idolize. It would not have been the first time two disaffected people tried to turn violence into a shared legacy. It fits the fantasy. It fits the profile. And it nearly happened.

And again, just to really drive it home, this is a guy in his 20s. If you are in your 20s, and you find yourself forming a romantic bond with a high school sophomore over a shared hatred of society, that is not edgy or misunderstood. That is sick. And if you’re going to be a psychopathic hate-monger, maybe that’s why you are not finding dates in an acceptable age range.

What ties all of this together is that all three of them were columbiners. If you’re not familiar with that term, columbiners are people who idolize the Columbine shooters and have built online communities around that obsession. It started almost immediately after the 1999 massacre and has festered ever since. Each new generation brings a new wave of these dark fanatics. They glorify violence. They write fan fiction about school shooters. They edit videos and trade memes. And most terrifyingly, they radicalize each other.

It is not unusual for three people like this to find each other online. There are entire subcultures that exist to nurture this exact kind of toxicity. Discord servers, Tumblr blogs, locked Twitter accounts, and even encrypted chats. They use coded language, hide behind irony, and pretend it is just an aesthetic. But every now and then, someone takes it too far. Someone stops pretending.

So now we have to ask, how many more were there? How many more people did Rupnow talk to who are still out there? People who are still fantasizing about mass murder and just waiting for their own moment? That is the question law enforcement needs to be asking. And that is what happens when young people are left alone on the internet with no supervision. While Allen and the other one may be in their twenties now, they did not become columbiners overnight. This kind of rot starts early. And if no one is paying attention, it festers until it kills.

This story didn’t end when Natalie Rupnow pulled the trigger. It just fractured into pieces and scattered across the internet, where it started. One girl pulled the trigger, but two men were circling her in the shadows, feeding her delusions, helping her plot, romanticizing the violence. One of them ended up in court, the other in jail. And maybe there are more out there. Maybe there’s a whole Discord channel still sitting on someone’s server right now, full of kids and adults comparing kill counts and quoting Eric Harris like scripture.

We can’t pretend these are isolated incidents anymore. They aren’t lone wolves. They aren’t misunderstood. They are radicalized. They are connected. They find each other. And when they do, people die.

We’ve spent so much time arguing over school resource officers and metal detectors and single-entry points that we’ve forgotten the most dangerous weapons are the ones sitting in bedrooms with Wi-Fi. You leave young people unsupervised long enough in the deepest corners of the internet, and this is what happens. They start seeing murder as a legacy. They find people who cheer them on. They learn to mask it behind memes and irony until the plan becomes real and irreversible.

So here we are. A dead teacher. A dead student. Six others wounded. And three people at the center of it, all part of a fandom that never should have existed. The columbiners didn’t pull the trigger at Abundant Life, but they were there in spirit. And until we treat that subculture like the public threat it is, we’ll be here again. And again. And again.

(Sources)