In December 2024, Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisc., killing two and injuring six before taking her own life. A month later, Solomon Henderson shot and killed one person and wounded another at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tenn., before also killing himself.

What ties the two heinous acts together, a new report from the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism suggests, is an online community of white supremacists increasingly recruiting and inspiring school shooters like Rupnow and Henderson.

The research, published Thursday as an interactive timeline, analyzes the two school shootings that occurred weeks apart. Despite happening in different states, the report found overlapping online activity between the young perpetrators. 

In the months leading up to the shootings, both perpetrators were active on the website WatchPeopleDie, a forum where users can post and view real images and videos of violence — including murders, torture, rape, executions, beheadings, suicides, dismemberments, accidents and animal killings. 

Rupnow and Henderson carried out their attacks 18 and 19 months after creating WPD accounts, respectively. Both shooters posted, reposted, endorsed, replied to or otherwise engaged with extremist content on the site. 

ADL researchers found that extremist material — such as white supremacist and antisemitic manifestos and videos of white supremacist and antisemitic mass murders — was widely accessible on WPD, which originated as a forum on Reddit but is now independent after being banned from the site in 2019 after a user livestreamed the white supremacist Christchurch shooting in New Zealand.

Many videos of extremist mass killings, including those that were livestreamed as they occurred, remain accessible on the site, including the 2022 Buffalo Tops supermarket attack and the 2019 Halle synagogue shooting in Germany. 

Clips from attacks and images of shooters using stylized filters and text, set to music that glorifies the killers, are also popular on the site. Henderson posted one such graphic depicting Payton Gendron, the gunman who killed 10 Black people in the Buffalo supermarket shooting, as a saint holding his manifesto in place of a Bible.

The ADL said it plans to share the timeline with 16,000 school superintendents, urging them to “consider how their students may be able to access the type of dangerous content highlighted in the timeline while on their campuses and in their classrooms.” 

“Kids and teens today have lived their entire lives with easy internet access, putting them even more at risk of encountering violent extremism online,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the group’s CEO, said in a statement. “Extremist ideas combined with gore websites can inspire users to seek out more extremist content, while violence on extremist platforms can inspire others to look for even more violent content. It’s a vicious cycle, especially for young people. We hope this research guides all stakeholders in taking action to prevent future attacks.”