Divorced dad's attempt to bond with his daughter ended in tragedy... now legal experts say it could spark seismic shift in America's gun laws

A divorced Wisconsin dad's decision to introduce his troubled 15-year-old daughter to semiautomatic weapons was supposedly meant to be an act of fatherly love.

But Jeffrey Rupnow's misguided attempt at using guns to bond with his offspring, Natalie Rupnow, only ended in tragedy when the teen used one of the firearms to kill a teacher and fellow student at her Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin in 2024.

Now, the 44-year-old father is looking at jail time after prosecutors took the rare step of charging him over the bloodshed - marking the third time an American parent has been taken to court in recent years for violence inflicted by their child.

As Rupnow awaits trial and the parents of two school shooters in Michigan and Georgia serve out hefty 15-year prison sentences, prosecutors and legal experts are warning that even more moms and dad could be on the hook for crimes their murderous kids commit.

Ekow Yankah, a law professor at the University of Michigan, expects to see far more prosecutions against parents nationally should other school shooting massacres unfold - even if they didn't pull the trigger.

'Once you give DAs a new tool, they're definitely going to use it,' Yankah said of prosecutors cracking down on adults they say enable their children's gun rampages.

The trend started in 2021, almost immediately after 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley opened fire at Oxford High School in Michigan, killing four students and injuring six others and a teacher. His parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, had given him the semi-automatic pistol for Christmas and, prosecutors say, left it unlocked.

The day before the shooting, a teacher caught Ethan on his phone in class searching online for ammunition and reported it. School officials left voice and email messages for Jennifer, who didn't respond to them, but did jokingly text Ethan directly about getting busted.

'Lol. I'm not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught,' she wrote.

On the morning of the massacre, a teacher found a drawing on Ethan's desk depicting a handgun, a bleeding figure with bullet wounds, and the phrases 'My life is useless,' 'the world is dead,' 'blood everywhere,' and 'the thoughts won't stop, help me.'

The Crumbleys were immediately called to meet with a school counselor and told to put Ethan into counseling within 48 hours. But when they asked whether he could stay in school the rest of that day because they had to go to work, the counselor agreed.

Once the shooting started shortly after, Jennifer texted 'Ethan. Don't do it.'

She later testified that she sent the message because she feared he would kill himself, not because she thought he was harming others - saying she didn't yet know at that point that anyone had been hurt.

Within days, Karen McDonald, the local elected district attorney, made an unprecedented decision: charging both the Crumbley parents with four counts of involuntary manslaughter - one for each of Ethan's victims - for failing to intervene.

Legal experts doubted she would be successful, mainly because the charges break with the long held idea that people cannot be held criminally responsible for the actions of others. Under ordinary complicity law, a non-shooter is normally only as guilty as the shooter if they shared the intent to kill, which was not the case with the couple.

To many scholars' surprise, a jury bought the DA's argument, making the Crumbleys the first parents in US history convicted for a mass shooting carried out by their child. In addition to Ethan's own life in prison without the possibility of parole, both his mom and dad were sentenced to 10 to 15 years behind bars, albeit far less than the 80 years McDonald sought.

About 700 miles away and less than five months after their sentencing in 2024, Marcee Gray searched Google for 'school shooter parents charged with manslaughter' and 'safe storage gun laws in Georgia.'

That same day, she called her estranged husband, Colin Gray, multiple times, urging him to secure the guns in his house from their 14-year-old son, Colt. Colin refused, later testifying that if he'd gone into Colt's room to take a gun, it would 'cause a shitstorm,' suggesting he didn't want to deal with the confrontation.

About a week later, Colt used a semi-automatic rifle his dad had given him for Christmas to open fire at Apalachee High School in Winder, GA., killing two students and two teachers and injuring nine others.

Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith prosecuted not just the teen, who pleaded guilty to all counts and will spend his life in prison, but also his dad for ignoring warning signs. More than a year before the shooting, deputies had visited the family home after anonymous online threats to 'shoot up a school' were traced to Colt, who had built a shrine to the Parkland, Florida school shooter in his bedroom.

The judge in the case acknowledged that the elder Gray, who repeatedly bought guns and gear for his son despite those red flags, wasn't directly responsible.

'It matters that you didn't have actual knowledge that Colt was going to school to do that. It matters that you didn't intentionally commit a crime. It matters that you didn't plan an attack... It matters that you didn't pull a trigger,' he said at a hearing last month.

The judge nevertheless sentenced Colin Gray to 15 years in prison, making him the first parent of a school shooter in the US doing time for second-degree murder, an even steeper conviction than the Crumbleys.

The third case involving Rupnow - who gave guns to his daughter Natalie - is still pending in Madison, Wisconsin.

Natalie gunned down a teacher and fellow student at the Abundant Life Christian School before killing herself.

In the wake of the shooting, Rupnow told investigators he bought the Glock handgun the teen used in the rampage as a way to connect with her given she had struggled after her parents divorced in 2022.

Experts are watching closely because, unlike the Crumbley and Gray cases, Rupnow took the steps of putting his daughter through a gun safety course and keeping the family weapons in a safe - albeit one whose combination code he hinted to her.

They say that it could be a useful test case for where courts may draw the line for parents' negligence.

Across the US, parents face the prospect of being hit with manslaughter and even murder charges if their children carry out deadly shootings - a seismic shift in how the law treats family responsibility for America's gun violence epidemic.

'We owe it to the victims of gun violence to finally say enough is enough,' said McDonald.

All three cases mark new legal territory that prosecutors hope will deter parents from buying guns for their kids and urge more families to watch for their children's homicidal warning signs.

'I do think it causes parents to think more deeply about responsibility and consider foreseeable risks,' said Robert Weisberg, a criminal law expert at Stanford Law School who likens kids with guns to dangerous weapons that parents mishandle and is one of the few legal scholars we could find who supports the approach.

Others, however, consider it an overreach.

'Up until a couple of years ago, I would have said it's so outside the scope of how causation works in criminal laws that juries wouldn't buy it. But they have, and what scares me is that it pushes the boundaries of what it means to cause the death of another person,' said Ben McJunkin, a criminal law professor at Arizona State University and one of many experts tracking the shift.

If the desired effect of these cases is to encourage parents to be aware of their kids' potentially homicidal warning signs, some experts say that's naive.

'Most parents don't think their kids are capable of violence. They see them through rose-colored glasses,' UCLA law professor Shirin Bakhshay said.

Other experts warn that the threat of prosecution could prod parents to overly surveil their kids with tracking devices and by too closely monitoring their online and social lives, eroding trust in their relationships.

'If anything, it's going to have really negative effects in a world where we already have this really intense over-parenting, not letting them make mistakes and have normal adolescent development and privacy,' said Nila Bala, a children's law scholar at UC Davis School of Law.

'The last thing we need is to drive bigger wedges between parents and their kids.'