Do you remember the gun? Mhm. I remember the the rifle cuz I had gotten that a month previous as a Christmas present. Yeah, it was for Christmas. January 29th, 1979. Gunshots echoed outside Grover Cleveland Elementary. Moments later, a principal and a custodian laid dead. The shooter was a 16-year-old girl.
When asked why she did it, Brenda Spencer coldly replied, “I don’t like Mondays.” She wasn’t the only one. These are some of the youngest female school shooters in history. In just the last two hours, we learned an 18-year-old high school student at Morsville is now facing charges. Accused of planning a Valentine’s Day mass shooting at school on campus.
February 14th, 2025. The halls of Morsville High School in Indiana were supposed to be filled with Valentine’s Day cards, last minute homework scribbles, and the usual teenage drama. But instead of a day of love, it nearly became a day of horror. Authorities had just uncovered what could have been the next Parkland massacre.
A chilling plan to bring bloodshed to the school on the exact same date 7 years later. The suspect? Well, let’s just say she wasn’t the profile most people would expect. 18-year-old Trinity Shockley, a quiet senior with a troubled past, had been planning this attack for over a year. She idolized Nicholas Cruz, the shooter responsible for the 2018 tragedy at Marjgery Stoneman Douglas High School.
She would collect pictures of mass murderers like trading cards, wore pins with their faces on her backpack, and even kept a locket with Cruz’s photo inside. She also wrote about him. She imagined having kids with him. In her mind, he wasn’t a monster, but somebody who understood what it felt like to be lost, to be angry, to want the world, to feel your pain.
But here’s the thing, she didn’t just admire him. She wanted to be him. But thankfully, she made one mistake. She told someone, and that person said something. A tip was then sent to a national threat hotline. Law enforcement would scramble into action. And by the time Trinity woke up on February 13th, she was no longer preparing for this massacre.
She was being arrested. When people think of a school shooter, they picture the same thing. A young male, angry, isolated, and armed. And for the most part, that’s exactly who commits these kinds of crimes. You see, the numbers don’t lie. Less than 4% of school shooters have been female. 94% of active shooters in schools from 2000 to 2022 were male.
And in over 40 years, there have only been a handful of juvenile female shooters. So, what makes this so rare? Experts say that when girls struggle with anger or pain, they tend to turn it inward. self harm, eating disorders, depression. Meanwhile, boys are more likely to externalize it through violence, or acts of dominance. But when a girl does cross that line, it’s almost always linked to severe trauma, deep mental problems, and a desperate need to be seen.
That’s where Trinity shockly comes in. Because, let’s face the truth, nobody’s born wanting to be a school shooter. That darkness kind of builds over time, event by event, until eventually all hope is gone. For Trinity, it started with an accident. 2022, she was hit by a drunk driver. Her injuries healed, but emotionally she was never the same again.
Then she found out that the driver, the person who hit her, had taken his own life. And just like that, Trinity blamed herself. After that came the bullying, the loneliness, the spiral. Then the biggest blow of all, her mother passed away. She felt like she had lost everything. And instead of reaching for help, she reached for something darker.
She would start studying school shooters. She wasn’t horrified by them. She related to them. She would decorate her walls with their faces. She collected their quotes, their photos, their crimes. And that’s when she began planning her own mass shooting. For a year, she kept her secret. She mapped it out, picked a date, Valentine’s Day, picked her victims, bought a bulletproof vest, and then she got too comfortable.
On Discord, she would brag about her plan. She wrote on a channel, “Parkling part two, I’ve been planning this for a year.” And the most chilling part, one of the people on her target list was her best friend. That’s when someone decided to step up. A tip was sent off to the Say Something Hotline, a service set up after Sandy Hook to prevent school shootings.
Now, that tip set off a domino effect. The FBI got involved, then local police. And by the next morning, Trinity’s world had flipped upside down. When police searched her room, they found exactly what they feared. A collage of mass murderers plastered on her walls. Notebooks filled with violent writings, swastikas, and disturbing sketches.
a locket with Nicholas Cruz’s face inside. And in her father’s room, an AR-15 magazines, bullets, and a tactical vest. And when faced with the overwhelming evidence, Trinity didn’t deny any of it. When she spoke to her school counselor, she openly admitted that she was in love with Nicholas Cruz. She talked about how she wanted to have children with him, children she had already named.
She said that she both hated him and understood him because in her mind they were the same. She had lost her mother. She had been bullied. She had have been hurt. And now she wanted to hurt others. But thankfully she never got that chance. Trinity is currently locked away charged with conspiracy to commit murder and two terrorism related charges.
A judge has called her a significant threat to herself and the public and ordered full psychological evaluations before even considering bail. Morsville High School never saw an attack that day. Thank God. Students came to school, they laughed, they gossiped, they exchanged Valentine’s cards, completely unaware of how close they came to becoming a headline.
And all because one person decided to say something. And that one person stopped a massacre. I don’t sit here and and plan on how to go out and kill people and stuff like that. That’s that’s um just not that’s not how I am or who I am. January 29th would start like any other school morning. Would line up outside Grover Cleveland Elementary in San Diego, waiting for the gates to open.
Some were laughing, others half asleep, dragging their backpacks behind them. Just another Monday. Across the street though, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer sat by her bedroom window, watching them. Then she picks up a Ruger 22 caliber semi-auto rifle, a Christmas gift from her father just weeks earlier, aims it out of the window, and starts firing.
The students couldn’t imagine what was happening at first, and one by one, they started dropping, screaming, running for cover. Inside the school, the principal, Burton Rag, heard the gunshots and ran outside to help. Brenda shot him. Then, custodian Michael Sooker tried to pull a student to safety, she shot him as well. Then she kept shooting, hitting eight children and a responding police officer.
And when a reporter called her house trying to understand why, she gave the world an answer that sent chills down everybody’s spine. I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day. It was casual, nonchalant, like she was bored and decided to turn an elementary school into a shooting range just for fun.
At that moment, the world realized something terrifying. School shootings weren’t just the stuff of nightmares. They were real. And Brenda Spencer had just become one of the first modern school shooters in America. And people realized one more thing. School shooters don’t really look like monsters. Because if you had looked at Brenda Spencer before the shooting, you probably wouldn’t have seen a future killer.
She was quiet, small, barely 5’2 in tall. Not the kind of kid who starts fights. But if we look a little closer, the cracks were already there. She was living in poverty in a run-down house with her father, Wallace Spencer. After her parents’ nasty divorce, Brenda chose to stay with him, but their home life was anything but normal.
They slept on a single mattress on the floor surrounded by empty whiskey bottles. And later on she would claim that she’d been subject to total neglect from her mother and sexual abuse from her father. And so she was miserable, depressed, really angry. And at school she barely showed up. When she did though, teachers wondered if she was even awake.
She also got in trouble for petty theft, skipping class, and drugs. Then came more red flags. She hated the police and talked about wanting to shoot one. She even told a classmate that she was going to do something big to get on TV. Not to mention that she had already been arrested for shooting out school windows with a BB gun.
As if that wasn’t enough, a psychiatrist also recommended she’d be hospitalized for depression, but her father refused. And then just weeks before the shooting, her father gave her a gun for Christmas, a 22 caliber semi-auto rifle with a telescopic sight and 500 rounds of ammo. Brenda later said, “I asked for a radio and he bought me a gun. I felt like he wanted me to.
” But instead, Brenda turned it on an elementary school. She fired 30 rounds into a crowd of students. Then she stopped, put the rifle down, and barricaded herself inside the house. The police quickly surrounded the place. Snipers took positions, and she was trapped. And while everyone was outside panicking, Brenda’s inside casually taking phone calls.
A journalist from the San Diego Union Tribune somehow got through to her. And when they asked why she did it, she told them that chilling comment about hating Mondays that still haunts history. She told the police that she still had ammo and would come out shooting if they try to force her out.
And just like that, the standoff with a 16-year-old girl dragged on for six full hours. Then she finally gave up. Not because she felt guilty, not because of that SWAT team outside, but because they promised her a Burger King meal. And just like that, one of the first major school shootings in America was over. Brenda was a minor, but that crime was too brutal for the courts to just go easy on her.
She was charged as an adult. Her lawyers thought about that insanity plea, but it never happened. Instead, she plead guilty to two counts of murder and got 25 years to life in prison. Over the years, Brenda has tried to change the story, blaming her father, claiming he abused her, and that she never stood a chance.
And well, maybe in some ways that’s very true. Her life was awful, but thousands of people grow up in horrible homes, and they don’t end up firing on a schoolyard full of children. And the parole board wasn’t buying this, either. Over the years, she’d been denied parole again and again, and she’s still behind bars today.
Spencer’s name might not be wellnown today, but what she did left a permanent scar on history. Her words, “I don’t like Mondays,” became synonymous with school shootings. The phrase also inspired a song by the Boomtown Rats, which became a hit in the UK. Even Bob Gildoff, the band’s lead singer, later said that Brenda wrote to him from prison, bragging that his song made her famous.
But her crime did something far worse than inspire a song. It inspired Coline, Virginia Tech, Parkland, you name it. The prosecutor on her case put it bluntly. She hurt so many people and had so much to do with starting a deadly trend in America. Brenda Spencer wasn’t the first person to bring violence to a school, but she was one of the first to show the world just how random and senseless it could be.
And that’s what makes her story so terrifying because anyone looking for an excuse to cause pain, to lash out at the world can hear those words and think, “Yeah, I don’t like Mondays either.” And it seems that time had opened Brenda’s eyes to that same reality. She herself has admitted that her actions may have indeed led to other similar attacks.
In fact, in 2001, she told the parole board, “With every school shooting, I feel I’m partially responsible. What if they got the idea from what I did?” Every day I live with, you know, the knowledge that I I took the lives of two men, and that’s real difficult. Police in the US state of Wisconsin have identified the attacker in a school shooting as a 15-year-old girl.
A teacher and a student were killed and six students were injured. December 16th, 2024, just another day at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, with students sitting in study hall, probably counting the minutes until their next class. Nobody knew that 15-year-old Natalie Rupno was about to change everything.
At 10:57 a.m., the first shot rang out. In an instant, the calm school morning was replaced with terror as students and teachers scrambled for cover. And by the time it was over, two people were dead. Aaron West, 42, a beloved substitute teacher, and Ruby Vgara, a freshman, with her whole life ahead of her. Six others would be injured.
And at 11:05 a.m., Natalie turned the gun on herself. Just like that, it was over. No police shootouts, no demands, and no final words. Just a classroom full of shell casings and shattered lives. Now, the question on everyone’s mind was the same. Why? But as investigators started digging into Natalie’s past, her social media, her connections, they realized something disturbing.
This wasn’t random. This was planned. And in the most terrifying twist of all, she wasn’t acting alone. Natalie wasn’t the kind of kid who stood out. She was quiet and kept to herself. But if you look closer, her life was really a ticking time bomb. Her parents, Jeff and Melissa Rupno, had a messy history.
Married, divorced, remarried, then divorced again. For years, she would bounce between them, spending some weekends with her dad, some with her mom, stuck in the middle of custody battles and therapy sessions. At home, she was pretty angry, lost, and looking for control. And in August 2024, just 4 months before the shooting, she found something to hold on to.
Her dad took her to a gun range. She loved it and decided to join a gun club, and she was good at it. Her father even posted a picture of her shooting, saying they’d been loving every second of it. But what he didn’t know, what nobody realized, was that Natalie was already heading down a dangerous path.
Photos and online accounts tied to Rupnow reveal an unsettling obsession with infamous school shooters, including Coline killer Eric Harris. She had started obsessing over mass shootings. She even wore a t-shirt linked to Eric Harris, one of the Coline shooters. She would also follow neo-Nazi pages, school shooter fan accounts, and extremist forums.
As police searched Natalie’s home and comb through her digital life, they made a chilling discovery. She wasn’t just obsessed with fast shooters. She was talking to someone who wanted to be one. That person was 20-year-old Alexander Pondorf, a man living all the way in California. They’d been messaging online, sharing their anger, their plans, their violent fantasies, and he had his own target, a government building.
So on December 16th, 2024, he was supposed to carry out his attack at the same time Natalie did hers. But for some reason, he didn’t go through with it. She did. Two innocent people paid the price. By 11:14 a.m., the school had been evacuated. Students, teachers, and staff all running for safety, not knowing if this nightmare was really over.
Parents arrived, desperate for news. Were their kids okay? Some were, some weren’t. For the families of Aaron West and Ruby Vgara, and even Natalie herself, the world fell apart. That night, the Boys and Girls Club of Dayne County held a candlelight vigil. People would bring flowers, their tears, and some heartbreaking questions that follow every school shooting.
How did we not see this coming? The FBI, local police, and the ATF worked together to piece Natalie’s final months. What they found was pretty terrifying. As we mentioned, her social media was filled with posts about school shootings. But there was even more. We had a document. A manifesto started circulating online, a six-page declaration supposedly written by Natalie.
In it, the author wrote, “I’ve grown to hate people and society. It’s truly not my fault, though.” Investigators are still trying to verify if it was really hers, but that message was clear. Natalie didn’t see herself as responsible for what she had done. She blamed the world. December 7th, 2023 at gymnasium number five in Brians, Russia.
The day would start like any other. You had students settling into biology class on the fourth floor, chatting, waiting for the lesson to begin. Then at 9:15 a.m., the door opened. Standing there was 14-year-old Elena of Fanoskina. She was holding a shotgun, and before anyone could react, she raised it and fired. The first blast shattered the classroom silence.
And then there was absolute chaos. Students scrambling for cover. Some throwing themselves on the floor, others pressing against the walls in terror. But for poor Maria, there was no escape. Alina shot and killed her classmate on the spot before turning the gun on five others, wounding them all. Then, as panic spread throughout the school and the alarm rang out, Alina turned the gun on herself.
By the time police arrived, the shooting was over and two girls would never leave that classroom alive. And again, Alina was never the type you’d expect to snap. Those who knew her described her as this quiet, reserved teenager just navigating school life. But behind those closed doors, she was struggling in silence, carrying a weight no one seemed to notice until the day it all exploded.
She had been bullied since elementary school, often feeling like an outcast amongst her peers. Her relationship at school was pretty tense with ongoing conflicts and a lot of social problems. And yet, even on the morning of the shooting, no one saw it coming, not even her own twin sister, Daria, who was sitting in that same classroom when Alina opened fire.
They’d walked into school together that morning, side by side, like they always did. But this time, one of them didn’t walk out. Russian gun laws are strict, requiring guns to be locked up in safes with police inspections. But in Alena’s case, that law failed. And because of it, Alina was able to bring a gun to school and take a life.
You see, Alina didn’t get the shotgun from an underground dealer or the dark web. She got it from her own home. The BA’s three pumpaction shotgun she used in the attack belonged to her own father. And on that fateful day, she hid it inside a tube and carried it right into school completely unnoticed. By midm morning, the school was in lockdown. Students were evacuated.
Terrified parents flooded the streets, desperate for news. But for Maria’s family, there was no relief. Their daughter was gone. And for the five wounded students, life would never be the same. As for Alena’s own family, especially Daria, who sat frozen in that very classroom, watching her own twin sister take her own life, there was nothing left but questions that would never have any answers.
Investigators quickly launched a criminal case, trying to understand what pushed a 14-year-old girl to commit murder. The immediate answer was bullying. Alina had been a target of harassment for years, something her classmates admitted after the shooting. But still, is that enough to explain what she did? As investigators comb through her belongings, they found notes, some personal, some cryptic.
One of them stood out. It read, “I must definitely meet with a friend.” But who was this friend? And was there more to the story than just school drama? Not long after the shooting, a new theory had emerged. According to some reports, Alina had been communicating with extremist groups online. specifically a Ukrainian radical group banned in Russia.
The claim suggested that she had been recruited or influenced in online chat rooms. But was it true or was it a convenient explanation for something that no one wanted to believe? A girl this young acting alone capable of something this brutal? As of now, investigators have not confirmed the connection, leaving behind a question that might never have a clear answer.
The shooting shook Russia not just because of that tragedy, but because it exposed failures at multiple levels. Two people were immediately arrested. Alena’s father for negligent gun storage and allegedly driving her to suicide and a school official for negligence leading to the deaths of students. The case against Alena’s father dragged on for over a year.
When his trial final finally began in December 2024, he pled not guilty, claiming he had no idea his daughter was capable of something like this. Ultimately, he was acquitted of inciting her suicide. But was it really that simple? Would this have happened if that gun had been locked up? If Alina had never been able to get her hands on it? Nobody can know for sure.
But nothing changes the fact that Alena’s attack was Russia’s first known school shooting carried out by a female student. And while Russia might have some strict gun laws, it’s clear they aren’t foolproof. A gun in the wrong hands is still a gun in the wrong hands. And once again, the warning signs were there, but nobody saw him in time.
shooting. Authorities revealing just moments ago that the shooter this time is a sixth grader. A female student who opened fire, they say, hitting two students and a custodian before they say a teacher was able to step in and get that gun. May 6th, 2021. Just another morning at Riby Middle School in Idaho.
Students filling the halls, chatting about homework, weekend plans, and whatever middle schoolers talk about. Meanwhile, teachers were getting ready for the day. Then at 8:59 a.m. everything changed. The first gunshot rang out. For a second, no one moved. Everyone thought maybe it was something else. A book dropping, a door slamming.
But then came the second shot and the third. And there, standing in the hallway holding a gun, was a sixth grade girl. When we think of school shooters, we usually imagine angry teenagers. But this was an 11-year-old girl. Everyone was both shocked and terrified. Somewhere between math class and recess, she pulled out a handgun from her backpack and started shooting.
She hit two students in the hallway before stepping outside and shooting the school’s janitor. And just like that, three people were down. And inside her classroom, math teacher Christa Knighting was trying to make sense of it all. Christa was preparing her students for the final exams when she heard the first shot.
She ran to the door and froze. Just down the hall, she saw the janitor on the floor bleeding. Then another shot. And that’s when it hit her. It was really happening. They were in the middle of a school shooting. Her students were looking at her, terrified. She took a breath and told him, “We’re going to leave. Run to the high school.
Run hard. Don’t look back.” And so they ran. And then, as Christa turned to help the wounded, she saw the shooter. a tiny girl standing there with a gun in her hand. Nighting had seconds to react. She didn’t panic or run away. She takes a step forward and quietly asks this little girl, “Are you the shooter?” The girl didn’t answer.
She just stood there, still holding the gun. Slowly, carefully, Christa reached out, placing her hand over the girl’s hand, the one gripping the gun. And then, with gentleness that seems almost impossible in a moment like this, she slid the gun out of her grasp. The girl didn’t fight, she just let it go.
And once the gun was gone, Christa pulled this girl into a hug, held her in close, and whispered to her, comforting her. She kept telling her, “It’s okay. you’re okay. The girl started crying. Christa later reflected on this moment, saying, I just kept hugging her and loving her and just kept telling her, “We’re going to get through this together.
” Because Christa didn’t see a monster. She saw a lost child, one who had made a very terrible mistake and didn’t know what to do next. And so, she just held her until the police arrived. because I thought this little girl has a mom somewhere that doesn’t realize she’s having a breakdown and she’s hurting people.
When the officer approached, Christa gently told the girl, “He needs to put you in handcuffs now.” The girl didn’t resist. She didn’t cry out. She just let them take her away. And just like that, it was over. In most school shootings, the shooter either dies or goes to prison for life. But now, what do you do when the shooter is barely old enough to babysit? Because Idaho law protects juvenile records, we don’t know much about what happened to this girl after that day.
Her name has never been released. Her trial was sealed, and all we know is that she was charged. But more than that, we know that she was 11 years old. How the hell does an 11year-old girl get to this point? And besides, this shooting was really different. Most of these shooters are teenagers. Most have a long history of red flags.
And well, most are male. But this was a girl, a child. And unlike most stories of school violence, this one didn’t end with more bloodshed. It ended with a compassionate teacher taking a gun from the girl’s hands and choosing to hold her instead of hurt her. Kristen Nighting never spoke about the shooter with anger.
She never called her evil and never demanded punishment. Instead, she would say something that’s almost impossible for most people to accept. She’s just barely starting in life, and she just needs some help. Everybody makes mistakes. I think we need to make sure we get her help and get her back to a place where she loves herself so she can function in society.
