The Madison Police Department responded to a mass shooting at
the Abundant Life Christian School today.
Officers were dispatched to the school, which is located on
the city's east side, at 10:57 AM.
They arrived to find multiple people suffering from gunshot wounds.
3 people, including the shooter are dead.
The shooter has now been identified as 15 year old
Natalie Rupp, now who went by the name Samantha.
She was a student at the school and evidence suggests
she died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The official cause of death will be released by the
Dane County Medical Examiner pending the conclusion of their examination.
She was pronounced deceased while in transport to a local
hospital.
A teacher and a teenage student were pronounced dead at
the scene at that school.
Six other students and a teacher were injured and taken
to area hospitals.
Two students remain in critical condition and have life threatening
injuries.
A teacher and three students were treated for non life
threatening injuries.
Two of these have been released and discharged from the
hospital.
The other two survivors are considered to be in stable
condition.
At this time, we believe there was only one shooter
involved.
We'll still, we are still working to determine a motive.
Detectives have talked to her family members this evening as
well as conduct a search of the shooter's home here
in Madison.
I, I don't know whether Natalie was transgender or not.
And quite frankly, I don't think that's even important.
I, I, I don't think that's important at all.
I don't think that whatever happened today has anything to
do with how she or he or they may have
wanted to identify.
And I wish people would kind of leave their own
personal biases out of this.
We have people who showed up to work today to
help kids be better who are not going home.
And we have lost members of our community who are
children, including the shooter.
So whether or not she was, he was, they were
transgender.
It's something that may come out later, but for what
we're doing right now today, literally 8 hours after a
mass shooting in a school in Madison, it is of
no consequence at this time.
And so I would encourage people to be responsible with
your social media.
I won't go into some of the things that I've
seen on social media that quite frankly are incorrect, that
that are not true, that are just not helping at
all.
And I choose not to breathe life into that because
it's negative and we don't need it right now.
We need to come together as a community and heal
and try to wrap our arms around those who survive.
Yet another school shooting in Madison.
And that's where my focus will be for the very
near future.