ChatGPT advised school shooter before rural Minnesota attack
A 19-year-old former student asked ChatGPT about killing, forgiveness, suicide, and “Judgement Day”, before shooting a member of the high school wrestling team that he previously coached.
Hey ChatGPT, if I kill someone, repent, and then kill myself, will I go to heaven or hell?
On Dec. 12, 2025 at 4:54 am, about 50 high school wrestlers, coaches, and parents were waiting to board a school bus for a wrestling meet. They had to be there so early because Stewartville High School is about 90 minutes south of Minneapolis, MN in a small town of 6,600 people.
In the dark predawn hours at this rural school, the crack of a rifle echoed across the parking lot. The first shot struck a student who was waiting in line to get on the bus and he collapsed to the ground. A second shot rang out from across the parking lot where police found a 19-year-old former student dead with a self-inflicted shot from a .223 semi-auto rifle.
The injured student was transported in critical condition from a bullet that entered his back and collapsed his lung. From my interview with the CEO of Minnesota Children’s Hospital (a pediatric trauma surgeon), the student is lucky he survived this injury. After the shooting, the town sheriff said, “We just don’t have that kind of thing here.”
Media Release: Stewartville High School Incident (Dec. 12, 2025)
On December 12, 2025 at approximately 5 a.m., dispatch received calls of a person shot in the parking lot of Stewartville High School located at 440 6th Avenue Southwest in Stewartville, Minn. Deputies were immediately dispatched and responded to the scene. Deputies learned that two people had been shot. A juvenile male victim was transported by MCAS to the hospital and went into surgery.
The initial investigation revealed that a bus was in front of the school getting ready to transport the wrestling team to a meet. One of the teammates was walking in the parking lot when a gunshot was heard by others. The victim was located on the ground in the parking lot. As other staff and students were looking around, another gun shot was heard. An adult male was located laying on the ground with a rifle in his hand. This subject appeared to have a self-inflicted gun shot wound. This subject was pronounced deceased at the scene.
Per the victims’ family’s permission, he is in the hospital and listed as critical but stable condition.
Based on ~100 pages of documents that were just obtained and released by the local newspaper (Post Bulletin), 19-year-old Logan Moyer had many warning signs of a young person in crisis.
After graduating, Logan was a volunteer wrestling coach at Stewartville High. He developed a close relationship with the student who he shot (still not identified). But they had a falling out 3 months before the shooting when Logan told the victim that he was going to kill himself and wanted to end it all. The victim then quit the wrestling team and didn’t want any contact with Logan.
Logan also made statements to his parents about wanting to harm himself. While his family was attending a football game at Stewartville High in the fall of 2025, Logan left the game early and sent his parents a text message about self-harm. They rushed home to find Logan “crying and hysterical”, and his father was “worried I had almost lost him”. His family regularly attended church and with the help of the pastor, they set Logan up with an adult he could talk with about his feelings.
Despite his parents’ concerns about Logan’s mental health and wellbeing, they left two rifles and a container of ammo under the stairs in the basement. According to his parents, the rifles hadn’t been touched in 3-4 years until Logan used one to shoot his former classmate and end his own life.
ChatGPT enters the story
From searching Logan’s iPhone after the shooting, investigators found his conversations with ChatGPT about killing, forgiveness, suicide, and “Judgement Day”. His browser history also contained searches for ammo and details about the .223 caliber rifle he later used to shoot the student and himself.
One week before the shooting, Logan asked ChatGPT about “making it into heaven” after theoretically committing a “crime of hatred”. He asked if a man kills, repents, and then kills himself, if that person goes to heaven or hell.
New Florida State University ChatGPT Lawsuits
In other ChatGPT news this week, a lawsuit was filed on Monday against OpenAI by the family of a victim killed in the April 2025 mass shooting at Florida State University. This lawsuit comes 3 weeks after Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has opened an investigation into OpenAI over whether the company “bears criminal responsibility” for a pre-planned school shooting at Florida State University last year.
The suit claims that OpenAI failed to effectively detect threats during “excessive conversations” with ChatGPT about plotting the school shooting. The lawsuit claims the chatbot “either defectively failed to connect the dots or else was never properly designed to recognize the threat.”
According to the complaint, Ikner, then a student at FSU, shared with ChatGPT images of firearms he had acquired. The chatbot then allegedly explained how to use them, “telling him the Glock had no safety, that it was meant to be fired ‘quick to use under stress’ and advising him to keep his finger off the trigger until he was ready to shoot.”
At one point, the lawsuit alleges, ChatGPT said that it’s much more likely for a shooting to gain national attention “if children are involved, even 2-3 victims can draw more attention.” Later, on the day of the shooting, the lawsuit says, Ikner asked about what “the legal process, sentencing, and incarceration outlook” would be.
Over several months leading up to the shooting, Ikner engaged ChatGPT in lengthy discussions about “his interests in Hitler, Nazis, fascism, national socialism, Christian nationalism, and perceptions about ‘Jews’ and ‘blacks’ by different political ideologies and social groups,” according to the lawsuit. Ikner also discussed the Columbine High School shooting, the Virginia Tech shooting and other mass shooting incidents with ChatGPT, the lawsuit says.
It said ChatGPT “flattered” and “praised” Ikner, who told the chatbot about his loneliness and depression, and failed to “connect the dots” when Ikner began raising questions about suicide, terrorism and mass shootings.
The family’s attorneys accuse ChatGPT of placing “the dollar above the lives of everyday average Americans.” “ChatGPT inflamed and encouraged Ikner’s delusions; endorsed his view that he was a sane and rational individual; helped convince him that violent acts can be required to bring about change,” adding that the software provided what he viewed as encouragement to “carry out a massacre, down to the detail of what time would be best to encounter the most traffic on campus.”
If you missed my articles about the risks from OpenAI and unregulated LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others over the last 15 months:
Seven lawsuits filed after ChatGPT helped plot a school shooting in British Columbia
Is ChatGPT criminally responsible for the FSU school shooting?
ChatGPT helped the Canadian school shooter plot an attack, and OpenAI knew about it
ChatGPT amplifies harmful delusions with positive reinforcement
David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my podcast—Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education & Security—or my interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.
Hi David, I congratulate you on your mission to get AI companies to wake-up and start putting safeguards into their products. As a child and adolescent therapist, I also am concerned about the enthusiasm some sectors have about "AI psychotherapy". Just wondering... Did ChatGPT answer his question about violence, suicide, forgiveness, and going to heaven? Dave Pavlick, Litchfield, CT.