Thursday declared day of mourning in British Columbia
Canada in shock after worst school shooting in decades
We’re live with coverage of one of Canada’s deadliest school shootings in decades.
Police found six people dead and dozens injured when they arrived at a high school in Tumbler Ridge, a town of just 2,400 people in northeast British Columbia, early on Tuesday afternoon.
Another person died en route to hospital, police said.
The suspected shooter, who was found dead at the school with a self-inflicted injury, is believed to have killed two more people, whose bodies were discovered at a home in the township.
Two victims were airlifted from the school to hospital with serious or life-threatening injuries. And about 25 other people were also being treated at a local medical center, police said.
What we know so far about the alleged attacker
In an emergency alert which went out to residents’ phones, authorities described the suspect as a brown-haired woman wearing a dress, according to CNN affiliate CBC News.
Police know the identity of the suspected shooter but did not give further details, and declined to say if they were a child.
Officers did not name any of the victims on Tuesday night and would not say how many of the dead were children.
School shootings of this scale unheard of in Canada
Mass shootings are rare in Canada, a country with much stricter gun laws than the US, and school shootings of this scale are almost unheard of.
In 2023, 38% of homicides in Canada involved a firearm, while 76% of homicides in the US were firearm-related, according to an analysis by Canada’s national statistics body using police-reported data from the Uniform Crime Reporting programs in both countries.
Gun ownership in Canada is also far less common than in the US. According to the Small Arms Research project, there are 121 firearms for every 100 residents in the US compared to an estimated 35 guns per 100 residents in Canada.
Canadian police identify suspect in Tumbler Ridge shootings
Police have identified the person they suspect of killing eight people and injuring dozens in a shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada.
The suspect is an 18-year-old female named Jesse Van Rootselaar, Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald, commanding officer of the British Columbia Royal Canadian Mounted Police (BC RCMP), said at a news conference Wednesday.
McDonald said that the suspect was assigned male at birth and began transitioning to female six years ago.
The suspect was a resident of Tumbler Ridge, the officer said.
The shooting is one of Canada’s deadliest in decades. Authorities revised the death toll to eight this afternoon, saying one of the victims who was thought to have died from injuries survived.
Shooting occurred soon after Canada began a buy-back program for assault rifles
While Canada has tighter restrictions on gun ownership than the United States, guns are nonetheless a hot-button political issue in the country, which is still trying to implement gun laws passed after a deadly mass shooting in 2020.
“Canada actually has a fairly high rate of civilian gun ownership compared to other advanced democracies,” said Blake Brown, a professor at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia and expert on Canadian gun control.
The country has around 37.4 civilian firearms per 100 people, compared to 14.5 in Australia, according to a 2017 release from the Small Arms Survey.
Brown noted that Tuesday’s shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, occurred soon after the federal government had unveiled a much-debated, long-awaited buy-back program for prohibited firearms, first proposed after the country suffered its worst mass shooting in 2020.
In mid-January, Ottawa announced that owners of any of the 2,500 prohibited makes and models of assault-style firearms – including AR-15s – have until March 31 to turn in their weapons and receive compensation. After that date, gun owners won’t be compensated – but they’ll still have to return their firearms.
“The promise (in 2020) was that they were going to purchase these weapons, to offer owners of them money to get these guns back,” Brown said. “And that’s been very, very slow to happen.”
Part of the reason for that delay is pushback from gun owners. Though Canada’s gun lobby is much smaller than its counterparts in the US, Brown says that they are still “sizeable.”
There’s also been opposition from the country’s Conservative Party. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has frequently slammed the buy-back program as a “gun grab” that would harm law-abiding gun owners.
There are also implementation issues. Some provinces, like Alberta, have said it won’t participate in the buy-back at all.
“I think many people might assume that Canada’s a place without many guns or really strong gun laws,” Brown said. “And in fact, there are a fair number of guns and the gun laws – although they’re good in some ways – there’s still weaknesses that get exploited.”
Local pastor urges Tumbler Ridge to keep family of unnamed shooter in their thoughts
A local pastor has urged the heartbroken community of Tumbler Ridge to remember the family of the unnamed shooter.
George Rowe of Tumbler Ridge Fellowship Church told Canada’s CBC News that he left his house to visit the scene of the shooting as soon as the lockdown was lifted. “What I saw was devastating,” he said.
Rowe, who was once a substitute teacher at the school, described scores of parents gathered around the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) hoping to receive information about their children. “Just waiting for the news of whether their child had survived the shooting or not,” he said.
According to Rowe, the RCMP provided little information on the status of individuals, which he said caused confusion among the parents.
Rowe said speculation around the identity of the shooter is rife, with rumors spreading quickly throughout the town. “Everybody here practically, they know everybody,” he said, “And I don’t think it will be a big surprise when the name is released.”
Here’s what we know about the alleged shooter in British Columbia
Police identified the alleged shooter in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, as Jesse Van Rootselaar, an 18-year-old female resident of the town who had “dropped out of school approximately four years ago.”
Van Rootselaar “was not currently attending school,” Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald told reporters Wednesday. Authorities found her dead, of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, in the school.
McDonald said that police had visited Van Rootselaar’s “residence on multiple occasions over the past several years, dealing with concerns of mental health with respect to our suspect.”
Later, McDonald said that the most recent occasion for a police visit was the “spring of last year,” over “concerns regarding mental health, self harm.”
“I can say that on different occasions, the suspect was apprehended for assessment and follow up,” McDonald said. Firearms were seized from the home, and later returned after the owner petitioned for them.
Asked whether Van Rootselaar was transgender, McDonald said that police were identifying her “as they chose to be identified in public and in social media.”
“I can say that Jesse was born as a biological male who approximately six years ago began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly,” McDonald said.
There is no information that suggests Van Rootselaar experienced “bullying” at school related to her transition, McDonald said.
Among the victims of Tuesday’s shooting were Van Rootselaar’s mother and step-brother. McDonald said that the two were found in a residence after the school shooting, when a young female relative alerted a neighbor.
