Getty Images

An ally of Michael M. Bell, the Kenosha father who has been campaigning for a decade for a new look at the police killing of his son 20 years ago, is suing the Wisconsin Department of Administration for records in a dispute with the state Department of Justice and the Wisconsin Crime Victims Rights Board (CVRB).

Russell Beckman filed the open records lawsuit Tuesday in Dane County circuit court in response to the administration department’s denial of billing records from a private law firm that had a contract with the victims rights board.

In the lawsuit, which he filed without a lawyer, Beckman states that he “believes the Department of Administration is attempting to conceal these records because they may contain information that constitute evidence of misconduct and unlawful collusion between high ranking Wisconsin State officials and citizen members of the CVRB.”

Michael M. Bell’s son, Michael E. Bell, was killed in November 2004 by a Kenosha Police Department officer after an altercation in the driveway of the home where the younger Bell lived. A department internal investigation found no wrongdoing on the part of the officers on the scene.

Michael M. Bell subsequently campaigned for a Wisconsin law, enacted in 2014, that requires fatalities at the hands of police to be investigated by another department

Since settling a civil lawsuit with the city of Kenosha arising from the killing, the elder Bell has sought to reopen the investigation into the death of his son. The younger Bell was being physically restrained by police when an officer shot and killed him, eyewitnesses and police reports agree. The police account reported that officer fired the shot after another officer at the scene, who was standing near the 21-year-old, shouted that Bell had grabbed his holstered service handgun.

Citing discrepancies between the official police account of the incident and eyewitness testimony as well as physical evidence at the scene, Michael M. Bell has maintained that his son probably never touched the second officer’s weapon, none of the officers were in danger of being shot by the younger Bell, and that the killing was unnecessary.

The elder Bell has said the second officer may have been sincere in his assumption that his gun had been grabbed. Based on eyewitness accounts, however, he thinks  the second officer was not where his son could have grabbed the gun. Bell believes the officer who fired the fatal shot was in a position to know that the second officer was mistaken and did not need to take his son’s life.

Bell’s repeated attempts to persuade authorities to reinvestigate the events of that night have been unsuccessful, including multiple appeals to Attorney General Josh Kaul.

In December 2022, Beckman, a retired Kenosha police detective who has been assisting the elder Bell for more than a decade, filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Crime Victims’ Rights Board on Bell’s behalf.

The complaint charged Kenosha police and city officials had concealed information about Michael E. Bell’s death, and in the process committed “alleged crimes [that] included the felonies of perjury, destruction of public records, misconduct in public office and conspiracy to commit these crimes.”

The complaint also charged that Kaul “and high ranking subordinates” at the state Department of Justice repeatedly ignored attempts by Beckman and Bell to bring their concerns to the attorney general’s attention.

In June 2023, Madison attorney Hal Harlow emailed parties in the case — Beckman, Bell and a DOJ lawyer — that he had been “retained to act as legal counsel to the Wisconsin Crime Victims Rights Board” in the matter.

In November 2023, the CRVB decided it lacked probable cause for the complaint, holding Michael M. Bell didn’t have “victim status” in connection with the complaint’s allegations. “The alleged conduct is against the government and its administration, not against individual persons,” the decision stated.

After that ruling, according to the lawsuit, Beckman “filed a number of public records requests with the CVRB, seeking records that may have evidence supporting his belief that Attorney General Josh Kaul and/or his staff may have colluded with the CVRB to influence their decision to dismiss the complaint.”

The board supplied records that have become part of the appeal that Beckman has filed on Bell’s behalf. The appeal is now before the Wisconsin Appeals Court District IV in Madison after being dismissed in circuit court.

Meanwhile, Beckman filed an open records request with the Department of Administration seeking attorney billing records for the Crime Victims Rights Board in connection with the Bell complaint.

The department issued a blanket denial of Beckman’s request. DOA cited the ongoing litigation over the lawsuit against the board and asserted that “those records and that information would reveal strategy and efforts that would affect the ongoing litigation.” The department also denied a request to reconsider its denial, and a request for a copy of the contract for the outside law firm.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday argues that the denials violate Wisconsin’s open records law. The attorney billing records, the contract and its addendums are not “attorney work product” and are not privileged attorney-client communications, Beckman argues.

Beckman said in an interview Tuesday he wants the billing records and contract because they might shed light on interactions between the DOJ and the Crime Victims Rights Board, which are supposed to operate independently of each other. He said he’s learned other unexpected information in his work with Bell over the years that turned up by perusing attorney billing records. 

Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

No.

A 2024 RAND report and four experts in mass shootings said they know of no research concluding that the presence of armed officers deters school shootings.

The armed officers claim was made Dec. 19 by school safety advocate Ryan Petty in an interview about a mass shooting Dec. 16 at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. 

That school didn’t employ an officer.

Petty’s daughter was killed in the 2018 mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, school, which did.

Petty said the connection is “proven.” He didn’t cite research to Wisconsin Watch.

Whether arming school resource officers “leads to net harms or benefits … could be addressed with strong scientific research designs or observational studies,” RAND said.

A 2023 University at Albany-RAND study found school resource officers reduce some violence and increase weapon detection, “but do not prevent gun-related incidents.”

A 2021 U.S. DOJ-funded study said “data suggest no association” between armed officers and deterring mass shootings.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• RAND: The Effects of Laws Allowing Armed Staff in K-12 Schools
• Metro State University professor James Densley: Email, 12/19/24
• University of Alabama professor Adam Lankford: Email, 12/19/24
• Armed American Radio: Ryan Petty interview, 12/19/24
• University at Albany-RAND: The Thin Blue Line in Schools: New Evidence on School-Based Policing Across the U.S.
• U.S. Justice Department: Presence of Armed School Officials and Fatal and Nonfatal Gunshot Injuries During Mass School Shootings, United States, 1980-2019

Has research found that armed officers deter school shootings? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The school shooting this week at Abundant Life Christian in Madison, Wisconsin, is tragic and senseless, but it’s not at all shocking. Deliberately planned school shootings happen multiple times every school year, mostly in smaller rural and suburban communities. The perpetrators of these attacks are almost always actively suicidal current or former students at the school they target.

Back in April, I wrote an article for the 25th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting. This trend line turned out to be sadly accurate. With the shooting at Abundant Life Christian, there have been five pre-planned attacks at schools this year.

Regardless of how you measure school shootings — guns fired, wounded, killed, active shooter, planned attacks, or near misses — the trend line is going up. While these planned school shootings have taken place since the 1960s, the frequency of the attacks is steadily increasing.

Like the other planned attacks this year in Perry, Iowa; Mount Horeb, Wisconsin; Apalachee, Georgia; and Palermo, California, these incidents have common patterns and connections to prior school shootings. The number of “near misses” where a school shooting almost happens are also going up.

Columbine connection

The father of the 15-year-old Madison, Wisconsin, school shooter posted a Facebook photo of his daughter at a shooting range in August. His cover photo shows Natalie Rupnow, who went by the name Samantha.

Natalie can be seen wearing a black shirt with the name of the band KMFDM. The German industrial rock band’s lyrics were thrust into the dark subculture of school shooters by the students who carried out the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School.

In the Columbine “basement tapes,” Dylan Klebold can be seen wearing the same shirt. It’s critical for parents to study prior school shooters, know their names and faces, and recognize symbols like KMFDM that represent idolization of prior attacks.

In January 2024 at Perry High, the 17-year-old student perpetrator entered the school with a shotgun, pistol, knife, and IED inside a duffel bag (important note: both planned attacks at schools in the spring of 2024 involved IEDs). He spent 22 minutes inside a school bathroom where he posted photos of himself with the gun, posted on a Discord “school shooting massacres” channel, posted the same KMFDM song played by the Columbine shooters, and started a livestream on social media.

Insider attacks

The Madison shooting follows the common patterns with planned attacks at schools. The perpetrator was a student (insider), committed a surprise attack during morning classes and died by suicide before police arrived.

Most school shootings are committed by current or former students who are “insiders” at the school and know the security plan/procedures.

Since an insider is someone who is allowed to be inside the school, most of these attacks are committed by current students.

Female school shooter

I co-published an article in the Los Angeles Times: Here’s what is so unusual about the Wisconsin school shooting — and what isn’t:

Inside during morning classes

Pre-planned school shootings usually take place during morning classes or at the start of the school day when the building is open before classes start.

Just like the shooting in Wisconsin this week, the most common outcome is the teenage student shooter commits suicide, surrenders or is subdued by students or staff before police intervene.

Begins and ends in the same room

While “active shooter training” videos produced by the Department of Homeland Security and ads by security tech vendors portray assailants roaming throughout a building while searching for every possible victim, most school shootings begin and end in the same room.

There isn’t much use for a ballistic chalkboard, drop bar lock on the door or panic button when the victims are all in close proximity to an armed assailant who is inside the same room with them.

Following this pattern, the shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, took place in a classroom during study hall, and the victims were in the same age group. The teenage shooter didn’t roam the building looking for the elementary school kids; she killed herself before police arrived.

Police usually don’t stop these single shooter insider attacks because they are very short duration incidents that are usually over within the first two minutes.

Concealed handguns

When a student is committing a surprise attack inside a school, the easiest weapon to sneak inside is a handgun. Most students who are arrested inside schools with guns have a handgun hidden inside their backpack. Because of that, it’s not a surprise that a handgun is the most common weapon used during a school shooting by an insider.

During just these deliberately planned attacks over the last 60 years (these victim counts in the chart do not represent all shootings on school property), there have been roughly twice as many victims killed or wounded with handguns versus rifles.

This doesn’t mean that rifles aren’t as dangerous. At Apalachee High, a student committed an insider attack by sneaking an AR-15 into the building inside a posterboard. Until the last decade, AR-15s weren’t cheap and easily accessible. As there continue to be more school shootings involving rifles, this chart will likely even out over time (unless we take meaningful action to stop these attacks).

Preventing the next school shooting

I spoke to NBC 5 Investigates on Monday afternoon right after the school shooting. I said that this shooting at Abundant Life Christian School followed a common pattern in that it was carried out by an “insider” — a student familiar with the school grounds.

“We need to understand the actual nature of this problem and apply solutions towards identifying the student who has a grievance, identifying a student who is talking about students and realizing that these are rarely random acts. All the opportunities to prevent it happen before they ever come to campus with a gun,” Riedman told NBC 5 Investigates.

Riedman said the focus should not be on fortifying schools with additional weapons detectors or metal detectors but focusing on the students’ behaviors that may help foretell a future incident — adding that there is a need to “dispel the myth that these school shootings are committed by scary outsiders,” when data shows that they are often committed by those who are familiar with the school and have a grievance that ends in violence.

“We will probably hear in the coming days about a series of missed warning signs, social media posts, a manifesto and so on,” he said.

Analysis: Six common factors in the school shooting at Abundant Life Christian is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

A 15-year-old student killed a teacher and another teenager with a handgun Monday at a Christian school in Wisconsin, terrifying classmates. A second-grade teacher made the 911 call that sent dozens of police officers rushing to the small school just a week before its Christmas break.

The female student, who was identified at a press conference Monday night, also wounded six others at a study hall at Abundant Life Christian School, including two students who were in critical condition, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said. A teacher and three students had been taken to a hospital with less serious injuries, and two of them had been released by Monday evening.

“Every child, every person in that building is a victim and will be a victim forever. … We need to figure out and try to piece together what exactly happened,” Barnes said.

Barbara Wiers, director of elementary and school relations for Abundant Life Christian School, said students “handled themselves magnificently.”

She said when the school practices safety routines, which it had done just before the school year, leaders always announce that it is a drill. That didn’t happen Monday.

“When they heard, ‘Lockdown, lockdown,’ they knew it was real,” she said.

Police said the shooter, identified as Natalie Rupnow, was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound when officers arrived and died en route to a hospital. Barnes declined to offer additional details about the shooter, partly out of respect for the family.

He also warned people against sharing unconfirmed reports on social media about the shooter’s identity.

“What that does is it helps erode the trust in this process,” he said.

Abundant Life is a nondenominational Christian school — prekindergarten through high school — with approximately 420 students in Madison, the state capital.

Wiers said the school does not have metal detectors but uses other security measures including cameras.

Children and families were reunited at a medical building about a mile away. Parents pressed children against their chests while others squeezed hands and shoulders as they walked side by side. One girl was comforted with an adult-size coat around her shoulders as she moved to a parking lot teeming with police vehicles.

A motive for the shooting was not immediately known, but Barnes said they’re talking with the parents of the suspected shooter and they are cooperating. He also said he didn’t know if the people shot had been targeted.

“I don’t know why, and I feel like if we did know why, we could stop these things from happening,” he told reporters.

A search warrant had been issued Monday to a Madison home, he said.

Barnes said Tuesday the first 911 call to report an active shooter came in shortly before 11 a.m. from a second-grade teacher — not a second-grade student as he reported publicly Monday.

First responders who were in training just 3 miles away dashed to the school for an actual emergency, Barnes said. They arrived 3 minutes after the initial call and went into the building immediately.

Classes had been taking place when the shooting happened, Barnes said.

Investigators believe the shooter used a 9mm pistol, a law enforcement official told the AP. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.

Police blocked off roads around the school, and federal agents were at the scene to assist local law enforcement. No shots were fired by police.

Abundant Life asked for prayers in a brief Facebook post.

Wiers said the school’s goal is to have staff get together early in the week and have community opportunities for students to reconnect before the winter break, but it’s still to be decided whether they will resume classes this week.

Bethany Highman, the mother of a student, rushed to the school and learned over FaceTime that her daughter was OK.

“As soon as it happened, your world stops for a minute. Nothing else matters,” Highman said. “There’s nobody around you. You just bolt for the door and try to do everything you can as a parent to be with your kids.”

In a statement, President Joe Biden cited the tragedy in calling on Congress to pass universal background checks, a national red flag law and certain gun restrictions.

“We can never accept senseless violence that traumatizes children, their families, and tears entire communities apart,” Biden said. He spoke with Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway and offered his support.

Evers said it’s “unthinkable” that a child or teacher would go to school and never return home.

The episode was the 323rd shooting at a K-12 school campus thus far in 2024, according to researcher David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database. The database uses a broad definition of shooting that includes when a gun is brandished, fired or a bullet hits school property.

“This shooting follows the common patterns with planned attacks at schools. The perpetrator was a student (insider), committed a surprise attack during morning classes, and died by suicide before police arrived,” Riedman wrote Monday on his website.

It was the the latest among dozens of school shootings across the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas.

The shootings have set off fervent debates about gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children are growing up accustomed to doing active shooter drills in their classrooms. But school shootings have done little to move the needle on national gun laws.

Firearms were the leading cause of death among children in 2020 and 2021, according to KFF, a nonprofit that researches health care issues.

Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said the country needs to do more to prevent gun violence.

“I hoped that this day would never come to Madison,” she said.

Wisconsin Watch contributed information to this story.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Teacher and a teenage student killed in a shooting at a Christian school in Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.