On February 10, 2026, a mass shooting occurred in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada. On that afternoon, Jesse Van Rootselaar killed her mother and half-brother at their home before going to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where she killed six people and injured 27 others before killing herself. Van Rootselaar was a former student of the school.
An investigation found that Van Rootselaar had a ChatGPT account that was banned in June 2025 for making violent queries and discussing gun violence, but OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, declined to contact law enforcement. Victims' families and the province of British Columbia subsequently filed more than thirty lawsuits against OpenAI, alleging that the shooting could have been prevented. In October, a 30-year-old US citizen was arrested in Washington state for aiding Van Rootselaar in planning the shooting.
The incident was the deadliest mass shooting in Canada since the Nova Scotia attacks in 2020 and the deadliest school shooting in Canada since the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989.
Background
Tumbler Ridge is a small mining town with a population of 2,399, according to the 2021 census. Tumbler Ridge Secondary School is a public secondary school operated by School District 59 Peace River South, and it is the designated secondary school for the town's primary school. For the 2025–26 school year, the school had 191 students from grades 7 to 12.
Gun control legislation in Canada was greatly reinforced with the passage of the Firearms Act in 1995, following the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal. After the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks, such restrictions were further strengthened, with the sale, transport, importation or use of certain models of "assault-style" firearms banned via an Order in Council, with the deadline for firearm disposal set at October 30, 2026. The Canadian Firearms Program of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is tasked with enforcing the act.
Attacks
Shooting of family members
The attacker's mother and 11-year-old half brother were shot and killed with a shotgun at their home at Fellers Avenue in Tumbler Ridge. Police had already been called to the school when a surviving resident of the home and neighbours alerted them to this attack; the Vancouver Sun reported that the surviving resident was the 8-year-old half-brother of the shooter.
According to the US criminal complaint unveiled on October 6, 2026, co-conspirator James Cody Bryant was in contact with Van Rootselaar in the minutes immediately after the home shooting, explaining to Van Rootselaar, "who didn’t know how to drive," how to start the family's car in order to proceed to the high school to kill the other victims. A neighbour observed Van Rootselaar driving into a snowbank.
School shooting
Van Rootselaar then went to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and opened fire, first killing a victim in a stairwell. She killed five others in the school's library and fatally shot herself shortly after police arrived. At approximately 2:20 p.m. MST, RCMP received a report of an active shooter at the school, which is approximately 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi) from the family home. An alarm in the school instructed students to close the doors for a lockdown. Students then barricaded the doors with tables. A 17-year-old student in the school gym reported hearing "12 shots ring out in quick succession". An Alert Ready emergency alert was released in the region by the RCMP at around 3:15 p.m. MST, asking residents to shelter in place due to the active shooter situation. Other schools in the area were also placed on lockdown. The police emergency alert was cancelled at 6:45 p.m. MST. Premier of British Columbia David Eby said the police had reached the school within two minutes of the initial reports. The attacker shot at the four responding RCMP officers before shooting herself. Police recovered a long gun, said to have been the weapon mainly used in the shooting, and a modified rifle, initially reported to be a handgun, at the scene.
Later on the day of the shooting, School District 59 announced that both schools in Tumbler Ridge would remain closed for the rest of the week.
Victims
Six people were found dead inside the school; a seventh was mistakenly reported as deceased en route to the hospital but survived. The dead at the school were identified as a 39-year-old education assistant Shannda Aviugana-Durand, three female students all aged 12, and two male students aged 12 and 13. Two people were found dead at a residence in Tumbler Ridge. RCMP confirmed that they were the perpetrator's mother, Jennifer Strang, and the perpetrator's 11-year-old half brother. Both had been shot before the perpetrator attacked the school.
Twenty-seven other people were treated for injuries, including two with serious injuries. A Shock Trauma Air Rescue Service aircraft was dispatched from Grande Prairie, Alberta. In a press conference, the British Columbia RCMP confirmed that two injured people were airlifted to Vancouver hospitals. One, a 19-year-old woman, was released from the hospital on February 16, while a 12-year-old girl with multiple gunshot wounds to the head and neck was airlifted to British Columbia Children's Hospital in Vancouver, and required several surgeries. She sustained a catastrophic brain injury that left her with permanent cognitive and physical disabilities. She was subsequently released from the intensive care unit in April 2026 after her condition stabilized.
Perpetrator
Jesse Van Rootselaar (August 4, 2007 – February 10, 2026), also known as Jesse Strang, was identified as the suspected shooter by RCMP deputy commissioner Dwayne McDonald, after initially being described by the RCMP as "a female in a dress with brown hair".
McDonald stated that Van Rootselaar was a trans woman who had dropped out of school at age 14, about four years prior to the shooting. Under the law, education is compulsory until age 16, but "it appears that no one intervened to keep her in school." According to McDonald, there was no information to suggest that Van Rootselaar had been bullied at school.
Family
Jesse Van Rootselaar was born to Justin Van Rootselaar and Jennifer Strang. Jesse Van Rootselaar was estranged from her father, which he blamed on choices made by her mother. Her father also said that she never used his last name, Van Rootselaar. Instead, she used her mother's last name, Strang.
Van Rootselaar and her siblings had been the subject of custody disputes between their parents, and they had moved between Newfoundland and Labrador, including the town of Lawn where Jennifer Strang grew up, and parts of Western Canada, including Grande Cache, Alberta and Powell River, British Columbia, multiple times between 2010 and 2015. Jennifer Strang was in the process of divorcing her husband, who was the father of three of her children (including the 11-year-old son killed alongside her) and who resided in Alberta at the time of the attack.
Interest in guns and violence
Van Rootselaar's YouTube profile picture featured an anime-style mascot and a rifle set against a pink-and-white-striped background. A TikTok account, which used the same profile image under the username "jessestrangg", featured multiple reposted videos of the transgender mass shooter who killed six people at a Christian school in Nashville in 2023. In a social media post in c. 2022, Van Rootselaar's mother "promoted the teenager's YouTube channel ... noting that her child 'posts about hunting, self-reliance, guns'". The Daily Telegraph reported that videos on the YouTube channel show Van Rootselaar "firing a high-powered Desert Eagle handgun at a shooting range ... carrying out target practice with a tactical 12-gauge shotgun and firing a semi-automatic carbine at targets". A Reddit account linked to the shooter posted a video in 2023 at a firing range.
About five months before the shooting, she created an account on WatchPeopleDie.tv, a web forum dedicated to gore videos and violence that has been frequented by multiple other mass shooters, including Natalie Rupnow, whose profile was visited by Van Rootselaar. Van Rootselaar's posts on the website included multiple photos of firearms, including an SKS rifle and a KRISS Vector gun, and videos of her firing them. Van Rootselaar created a mall shooting simulator game on Roblox, according to the platform's administrators.
Van Rootselaar had previously held a valid minor's licence (12–17), which only allows for temporarily borrowing a non-restricted (ordinary rifle or shotgun) firearm for approved purposes; it had expired in 2024. She was not the owner of any firearms because acquiring and possessing firearms is not allowed with a minor's licence. According to McDonald, Jennifer Strang "had a valid firearms licence but did not have any restricted firearms that would require registration". RCMP confirmed that in a previous police visit in the past two years, "firearms were seized under the Criminal Code", but that "the lawful owner of those firearms petitioned for them to be returned, and they were". A relative told The Globe and Mail that the seized guns had been returned "roughly a month" prior to the shooting.
In June 2025, OpenAI had banned a ChatGPT account belonging to Van Rootselaar due to violent queries. However, administrators had opted not to report the account to authorities at the time. The Wall Street Journal reported that Van Rootselaar's conversations with the chatbot "described scenarios involving gun violence over the course of several days", and that these messages were "flagged by an automated review system". At that time, about a dozen OpenAI employees debated turning the chatlogs over to law enforcement. A spokeswoman for OpenAI confirmed that the company had banned Van Rootselaar's account. However, the official stated that it determined that her activity did not meet the criteria for reporting to law enforcement.
Drug use and mental health
Van Rootselaar wrote on social media that she "regularly took DMT" and tried to "burn [her] house down after using psychedelic mushrooms". The mother of one of the victims, who was also friends with the shooter's family, confirmed that Van Rootselaar had "tried to light a mattress on fire 'and burn the house down'". After using psilocybin mushrooms in October 2023, Van Rootselaar wrote: "I had a complete break from reality and did a lot of irrational things, I felt like I was dreaming. Many consequences ensued." She claimed in 2023 to be treating ADHD and OCD with antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs.
Van Rootselaar had a history of poor mental health. Police had responded to mental health-related calls several times previously, including multiple cases of hospitalization under the province's Mental Health Act. In 2023, Van Rootselaar "spent weeks receiving treatment in Prince George". The police had last visited the home in spring 2025 regarding mental health issues, including self-harm.
Investigation
RCMP superintendent Ken Floyd stated at a press conference the day of the shooting that they were investigating how the shooter was connected to the victims. McDonald said in a February 11 press conference that police believed that Van Rootselaar had acted alone, and that they had not found a note or other communication from the shooter. Police recovered a long gun and a modified rifle from the school. The RCMP expected to have completed their investigation at the residence on the weekend of February 14, but noted that the forensic investigation at the secondary school will take "much longer".
On February 13, McDonald said that two firearms were recovered at the school. The "main firearm believed to be the one that caused the most damage" at the school is of an unknown origin, having never been seized by the RCMP, as is the shotgun found at the residence. He also stated that "there was no specific targeting of ... any individuals" at the school, but that the perpetrator was "for lack of a better term, hunting ... engaging anybody and everybody they could come in contact with".
On April 29, families of the victims filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. On September 2, thirty more lawsuits were filed on behalf of the victims.
In September 2026, the province of British Columbia sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that the Tumbler Ridge school shooting could have been prevented. The lawsuit stated that the shooter had used ChatGPT to plan the attack and that OpenAI's safety team had flagged her conversations in June 2025 and recommended contacting law enforcement, but company leadership, including Altman, overruled the recommendation.