The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production.
>> The truth is, today is a sad, sad day. Not only for Madison,
but for our entire country. >> Tragedy strikes the state
when a teenage student opens fire at a school.
>> How does any 15 year old get get Ahold of a gun?
>> One of many questions for police investigators.
[MUSIC] I'm Frederica Freyberg. Tonight
on "Here& Now", the small Christian school in Madison that
became the scene of a mass shooting. A trauma expert helps
guide the way to healing. The state Office of School Safety on
its crisis response and prevention and assembly Speaker
Robin Vos on continuing to fund that office.
[MUSIC] It's "Here& Now" for December
20th. >> Funding for "Here& Now" is
provided by the Focus Fund for Journalism and Friends of PBS
Wisconsin. >> Details continue to unfold
following the devastating shooting inside a classroom at a
Madison Christian school five days ago. According to the AP, a
man in California has been ordered by a court there to turn
in his weapons and ammunition after interacting with the 15
year old shooter online about plotting a mass shooting with
her in Madison, two members of the school community were shot
to death, and the 15 year old took her own life, according to
police. The teacher killed was 42 year old Aaron Macheel West.
She was a substitute coordinator. The student, who
also died at the scene was 14 year old Ruby Patricia Vergara.
She was a freshman "Here& Now". Reporter Aditi Debnath has more
on the aftermath of the violence. Reporter to a city
mourned at a candlelight vigil outside the state Capitol.
>> Coming together following the shocking violence on Monday at
Abundant Life Christian School in Madison. That's when a
teenage girl shot and killed a fellow student. A teacher, and
then herself inside the school. I pray for you. Jackson Ida went
to the vigil to support his friends at Abundant Life.
>> It was just a whole range of like, worried ness and sadness
and confusion. >> Three dead, six wounded and
hospitalized. Two of the victims suffering grave injuries.
Executive director of the school system that manages abundant
life. Chuck Moore was at the vigil.
>> Please pray for the two that are still in the hospital. It's
life threatening and they may not survive.
>> Police are still piecing together what happened.
>> The first officers arrived at 11 a.m. And immediately went in
the building. >> After determining the shooter
had taken her own life and transporting the injured to a
hospital. Police prioritized Reunifying students and teachers
with their families. Eight miles away, police served a search
warrant at the shooter's family home looking for evidence.
>> They kind of all just swarmed right across the street to where
it happened. >> Police identified the shooter
as Natalie Rupnow, a 15 year old student at Abundant Life.
>> We're a small, private Christian school here on the
east side of Madison. >> Barbara Wiers is an
administrator at Abundant Life. She shared details about the
school's security measures, which include security cameras
and regular lockdown drills. >> When they heard lockdown,
lockdown and nothing else, they knew it was real.
>> Abundant life has been closed since the shooting. Neighbor
McKenzie Truitt visited the school to add a poinsettia plant
to a sidewalk memorial honoring the victims of the shooting.
>> My younger brother went there. I have a lot of friends,
family, friends that go there as well.
>> Truitt says her brother knows the victims personally.
>> It affects everybody. I mean, when you go through a trauma
like this, it's horrible. Even if you weren't directly
impacted, it still causes a lot of harm to you mentally. Just
knowing what other people are going through.
>> The rest of Madison schools stayed open, but some were
placed on a brief, secure hold after receiving hoax threats.
The Madison School District superintendent told those
gathered at the vigil that prevention of future school
violence goes beyond physical security.
>> I think it'd be easy to say that we're going to work on
safety, we're going to work on creating safe schools, and I
don't think that goes far enough because we know what many of
those things are. What I plead to you tonight is that we find a
new way, a deeper way, a more meaningful way to connect with
our community, children to children, children to staff,
families to families. >> For Jackson Ida School safety
is key to empowering youth and preventing violence.
>> I mean, the whole point of all of this is to be able to go
and to get education so you can become the people who will
hopefully be able to make this never happen again in the futur.
>> Reporting from Madison. I'm Aditi Debnath for "Here& Now".
>> The concentric circles of trauma resulting from this
week's shooting are most acute at the center for victims and
Loved ones. Then for the school community, the city, the region,
and the state. As people try to reconcile the horrible violence.
But how to do that? Here to help Aaron Neill, a Madison
psychotherapist specializing in trauma. And thanks very much for
being here. me.
and loved ones of those killed experiencing right now? And how
do they ever move through that? >> Yeah, I think it can be a
little bit different for everyone. Like you said, the
people that are closest to it are going to have the most
trouble right now. I think just allowing all feelings. Right.
Like there's probably grief loss for the loss of their friends
and classmates. There's confusion, anger, lots of lots
of emotions, trauma wise. You know, sometimes kids have
nightmares. They can like, kind of remember the scene that they
saw if they were there. And yeah, just also any experience
they had, like having to leave the classroom quickly. Right.
And all of that. So just kind of kind of maybe reliving that,
thinking about it more and maybe worrying about what happens next
or, you know, going back to school eventually. So, yeah, for
sure. >> So as to that school
community, it's small. >> It's really tight knit. How
does a group of people so close move through it themselves?
>> Yeah, I think actually that's an advantage for them. Having
that support of each other. Right. That they already are
such a community. They know each other. They lean on each other.
So how do they move through it? Like, yeah, being there for each
other, having memorials, things that make meaning out of the
tragedy. And then the greater Madison community in Wisconsin,
community also, Will wants to support them. You know, and so
figuring out how how to get that help to them too.
>> So there is this kind of collective heartache for all of
us. How are people to reconcile this in the midst of what should
be a warm and loving holiday season?
>> That is a really good question. Yeah, I mean, I don't
know that there's a good answer for that right now. I think,
again, like I said, I want I hope that people can let
themselves feel how they feel, grief. As humans, we don't love
to feel uncomfortable. We don't love feeling grief, but it's
okay to feel that right now and then. Yeah, I think I see a lot
of people really trying to figure out how do I make
meaning, how do I honor the victims, how do I help the
community? You know, whether it's providing meals or church
services, things like that that have happened and will continue.
>> How should parents talk about this with their children? If at
all? >> I think you need to see where
your child's at. Obviously, parents should know their kids
the best. So I wouldn't I would say kids let kids lead the
conversation. Let them bring it up. You know, check in with the,
see how they're doing. But yeah, I think in then notice. Right.
Like, is there sleep different. Are they eating different. Are
they, you know, is their play different for younger kids
right. Or teenagers. More with when you notice that. Ask them
how are they doing. You know and then explain things in a
developmentally appropriate way. Right. Like it's also okay to
share your feelings, right? To say like this is scary. This is
confusing. I do feel emotions, but parents need to keep control
of their emotions too, right? Because if you feel if you're
out of control, if you're like sobbing and weeping and things,
that's going to be hard for the kids. They might feel like they
have to take care of you. So I think it's adults taking care of
themselves as well, leaning on a partner or friends, and then
sharing appropriate amounts of emotion with kids so that they
can help share calm with kids too, and help them feel safe
again. >> How likely is it that the
loss of a feeling of being safe at school, any school, touches
families everywhere? >> Yeah, I think that touches
families everywhere. I think you can see that when you're online
and you know, I'm a parent, I have most of my friends are
parents. Like, we all this week then felt like, how do we drop
our kids off at school the next day? How do we. Yeah, so I think
it reaches everybody. That feeling of are we safe?
>> What to do about that? Anything.
>> It's tough. Yes. I think, you know, we have to, you know,
contextualize it. It is a random event. And so that's hard to
say. Like this isn't going to happen here. Right. But it's
unlikely that it's going to happen. And we do things to keep
ourselves safe. We remind ourselves that we're safe in
this moment. You use things like grounding skills where you tap
into your senses and say, okay, I'm here in this moment, I see,
you know, a green tree, a green, you know, like kind of looking
for things that are here in the present and knowing that you're
safe here. So, yeah. >> All right. Erin Neill, thanks
very much. Thanks for your help. >> Thank you.
>> The Office of School Safety within the Wisconsin Department
of Justice provides crisis response and recovery following
a school shooting as part of its mission. The office also
operates a threat tip line. Threat assessments and safety
preparedness for schools. Its director, Trish Kilpin, has been
managing that crisis response in the minutes and days following
the Abundant Life Christian School shooting. She joins us
now and thanks very much for being here.
>> Well, thank you for having me. And highlighting school
safety. response look like?
>> Well, it's very comprehensiv. We have built a coalition of
folks across Wisconsin to be part of crisis response and
recovery teams. And so we had spent time last summer, in the
summer before training folks, inviting them to an academy
where I was able to lead them through some evidence based
practices on how to help schools recover. And so we were able to
draw on those teams that we already developed, and they
supported part of the reunification process for the
school. So that every child that was able to was reunited with
their family. And now we will be working to empower staff to meet
the needs of children in ways that work, to get them back to
learning. Most effectively. >> What is that like in the
immediate aftermath of something like this? When you go in and
are literally hands on with these people who've experienced
this? >> It's heavy work. It is. It's
heavy work. And it's work that we I have a deep passion to make
sure we get right. We want to make sure that our efforts do no
harm. And really, you know, in, in the most horrible tragedies,
there's not like one thing that we can say to make it all better
for people, but we can hear them and listen to them and they can
feel the love and the warmth from the community. And so we've
created with them, had them create opportunities for their
community, their church community to gather and support
each other. And that's been really a beautiful process to
see. >> Your office also runs the
Speak up, Speak out tip line, which I understand is taken
thousands of calls in the in the past four years, including more
than 400 that were potentially life saving in the last year.
Did anyone ever call about the 15 year old student at Abundant
Life? >> We don't have any tips
pertaining to this. Prior to the incident, so nothing that came
through Souza about that individual.
>> So the police chief said in one of his briefings that this
was a targeted shooting. And you say targeted violence is
preventable. How so? >> You know, when somebody
decides that they're going to engage in a school shooting or
an act of violence, they typically behave in ways that
are observable to others. And it's somewhat predictable.
Sadly. They're in the process of unraveling as an individual and
really, most school shooters show that signs in the months
and days and weeks before the event where we see significant
depression, agitation, mood swings, and then we see that
they spend much time planning and preparing for this act,
doing research. And thats often observable to others. More than
82% of the time. Other students often know of a student's plan
to attack. So if people in the community see that somebody
could be unraveling or they're seeing signs that somebody is
thinking about school violence, they need to report that. And,
you know, we've had over 385 tips to Souza about this, about
people planning school attacks. And so we're able to get that to
the local level and have it assessed to prevent that from
happening, which, as we can see, the aftermath is so great. We
need to focus on prevention. >> What is the primary driver
for people who would commit this kind of violence? Is it bullying
online? Is it kind of engaging in the darkest corners of the
web? >> That's a really good
question. So most school shooters do start with a
grievance or an upset. And then the individual often, you know,
makes a decision and they progress down that pathway to
violence. But but newer research is really showing that it's
often a shared belief system, what we call an overvalued
belief system that they want to use violence to redress their
problem or solve their grievance. So it's not only
about the bullying, you know, it is something that we need to be
paying attention to. And resolve early. So nobody gets to that
point of desperation. But it's also about reshaping some of the
thinking that they're, you know, we often see that they find
other people who endorse their thinking, and then it grows and
it's part of child development that, you know, people are not
well versed at this, but it's also somebody who's thinking in
a really dangerous way. >> Meanwhile, the Office of
School Safety is funded only through September in the
aftermath of this shooting, it now seems, though, that
Republican legislative leaders are inclined to fund your
office. What's your reaction to that?
>> Well, I'm not surprised. Truthfully, that there's a
growing commitment to making sure that we have funding to
continue. We need to be able to keep doing what works here in
Wisconsin. There have been many school violent incidents that
have been averted, have been prevented, and we need every
tool possible. Schools deserve for, you know, to be able to
count on our office, to know that our trainings are programed
Souza is all going to be available to them. And I just
think it's very worrisome that we even consider stopping this
funding, preventing us from moving forward and giving
schools and communities and families what they need.
>> Trish Kilpin, thanks very much.
>> Thanks for having me. >> Congressman Mark Pocan this
week addressed the shooting at Abundant Life School, which is
in his district from the floor of the U.S. House.
>> The Abundant Life community, the students, the staff, the
parents are all victims of this traumatic experience. And what
happened this week will live on in our memories. I urge all of
my colleagues to think about what we can do to prevent us
from having to stand here again for yet another moment of
silence. We must do better, and we must turn these moments of
silence into moments of action. >> As we sat down with Wisconsin
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos for an end of year interview. Senior
political reporter Zac Schultz started by asking him about the
Abundant Life shooting. >> Mr. Speaker, let's start with
the tragedy at Abundant Life. This week. Is there a
legislative response that you a bill?
>> Well, first of all, my sympathies. And what a
heartbreaking situation. It's just awful. And one of the
things that I always try to do in these situations is, first of
all, wait for all the facts. You know, I have news reports, I've
read things, but I don't know what's real and what's not. So
first of all, I think that in a lot of these cases, it's almost
impossible to think what could be done differently. You know,
me like far too often it's a troubled teen who perhaps was
bullied or had issues at school. And that's awful. We've done
some good things. We have the Office of School Safety, which I
support. We certainly made it harder to get into a school by
providing funding to harden the entrances. And then lastly, we
put more money into school based mental health. I think those are
good things. I can't imagine we would, you know, we certainly
wouldn't cut any of those programs. I think we maybe could
look at potentially increasing them, but just again, a tragedy,
and I want to wait for all the facts before we make any final
decisions regarding the office of School Safety.
>> In the last budget, the Department of Justice would have
that there wasn't the full amount that they requested to be
funded, especially for the tip line. And Governor Evers stepped
in with some federal Covid funding. Do you expect to fully
fund that? The tip line this time around?
>> I mean, I'm open to looking at all the details again, I
don't know. I mean, first of all, it has to work its way
through the process. I haven't seen all the budget submissions
yet. That has to go through. Governor Evers first. So I'm
certainly open to looking at it. I want to do things that are
going to make a difference. You know, I think the worst thing we
can do is try to politicize these things or make some kind
of an ideological lens. If there are things that really will make
a difference, of course, we're going to support those, but to
just say we did something and then have it either not work or
go in the wrong direction. I also want to be careful about
doing that too. you. You did lose some members,
but you maintained a majority. But is the new makeup of the
legislature. What does that mean for you? Going forward? Well, I
think the reality is close majorities mean usually less
happens. belief that somehow if it's
close, majorities, more is going to happen. I mean, look at the
Congress. The closer the majorities, whether it's
Democrats in charge or Republicans, it doesn't really
matter. It just makes it harder to get consensus. Now, the good
news for Assembly Republicans is that for 20 years, we've
operated on a consensus model where most of the time we argue
and debate and cajole until we get to a consensus, do the same
thing. I think there's a lot of that I'm excited to work on. If
there are some of those can be And I hope all of them can be.
But I also am not going to sacrifice our principles simply
because the election had a change.
>> Democrats seem to think that they're going to have more say
or more input. This session. It's coming up to your last
question. Your last answer to that. What what role do they
have to play as opposed traditionally, where it was that
they wanted to sign on? They could, but they really didn't
legislation. to be similar. I would say this,
that the freshmen who are coming in are clearly far left, right,
many of them ran in districts as unabashed liberals, which they
have every right to. Well, we're Senate right conservatives. So
if there are areas we can find common ground and consensus, we
are going to be all ears. But the idea that we're somehow
would have or done, a policy that we wouldn't have supported
before, absolutely not. You know, it's just not going to
happen. So I hope we can find consensus. We did last time. I
mean, with big, strong majorities, we did, you know,
shared revenue package. The Brewers deal alcohol literacy,
can do those again. >> What are you expecting from
budget proposal? budget different than we've done
before. What happened last time is, of course, Governor Evers
submitted it. We threw it out. We did our own budget. We put in
reductions in taxes and spending increases. We had the biggest
increase in a generation for schools, funding for, you know,
nursing homes, all kinds of good things. And the problem was he
took almost all the spending increases and vetoed almost all
the tax reductions. So the reason that we have the surplus,
more than half of it is literally the fact that tax cuts
got vetoed and that money is now sitting in Wisconsin's treasury.
We're not going to spend that on growing government. So what
we're going to do is we're going to pass our tax cuts first.
We're going to actually find out how much money we have left
over. And then that's what we're going to invest in. Government.
We're not going to do it in reverse where we spend on all
the things that he wants, and then we don't get the tax
reductions that Wisconsinites >> When, when do you expect to
have those negotiations with the governor on what what he will
sign as opposed to what he might veto? I mean, I'm happy to do it
at any time. >> I mean, as you know, during
December, we had a caucus last week. You know, we're still kind
of finding consensus. We have to elect our leadership. The
Democrats just had their caucus. So we're kind of finding our own
consensus. First, I feel pretty good about where Assembly
Republicans are now. We have to work with our Senate colleagues
to make sure that they're in a similar place. And then we'll
sit down with the governor in January. But I just want to be
really up front about it that, you know, we're going to have a
different budget process. We are not going to have it where we
spend a bunch of money, grow the size of government, hoping for
tax cuts, and then, you know, like Charlie Brown and the
the last minute and then we're stuck just with the spending
increases and no reductions in revenues.
time. Thanks very much. >> Also this week, Wisconsin's
ten electoral votes were officially cast for Donald Trump
to be the next president of the United States.
>> The nominated presidential electors from the Republican
Party of Wisconsin are the duly appointed presidential electors
for the state of Wisconsin, electors for the Republican
Party met at the Capitol and invited the media to witness
them sign off on the formal documents that will be submitted
to Congress and officially counted on January 6th of next
year. >> This comes four years after
the Republican electors met in secret at the Capitol and signed
off on fake documents. Three lawyers for the Trump campaign
then attempted to pass those false electoral votes to then
vice President Mike pence. Those three, including Wisconsin
Attorney Jim Troupis, are now charged with 11 counts of
forgery for their roles in the scheme. Troupis and the other
lawyers have a preliminary hearing in the case scheduled
for January 28th. Also this wee, Wisconsin confirmed its first
human case of bird flu in Barron County. The person who tested
positive is a farm worker and one of 19 people exposed to the
poultry flock. There, where avian flu was detected. State
health officials say the worker came down with influenza like
symptoms. >> Those people who are exposed,
we tell them very distinctly if they have any kind of symptoms
of at all, and it has to be broad symptoms, very broad
symptoms, you know, not anything that would indicate something
that's very severe. We would like to have those people teste.
>> The flock in Barron County was destroyed to prevent the
spread of the virus in environmental news, nearly
70,000 gallons of oil spilled from a pipeline in Jefferson
County. It started leaking more than a month ago. Canadian
company Enbridge operates the pipeline and says the spill,
quote, involved a faulty connection on a pump transfer
pipe within the Enbridge Cambridge station, which has
been repaired. Investigation and remediation began immediately
upon discovery and continues removal of impacted soils is
continuing. We estimate roughly 60% of the volume has been
recovered so far. This spill was discovered the same week the
Wisconsin DNR issued initial permits for the controversial
line five. That's the Enbridge pipeline reroute around Bad
River tribal land in northern Wisconsin. Environmental
advocate Toni Wilkin Gibart says the DNR's reasoning for
approving line five defies common sense.
>> In Jefferson County, the spill happened. For an extended
period of time without the spill being detected, and that
happened at Enbridge's own facility. So the idea that
Enbridge will with any reliability, be able to detect a
leak across a 40 mile segment through pristine wilderness in
northern Wisconsin is highly, highly questionable.
>> For more on this and other issues facing Wisconsin, visit
our website at PBS Wisconsin. Org and then click on the news
tab. That's our program for tonight. I'm Frederica Freyberg.
We're off next week for the holidays, but we'll be back the
following week for our first program of 2025.
[MUSIC]
>> Funding for Here and Now is provided by the Focus Fund for