The first alerts arrived on phones before most parents had even had time to feel afraid.
A terse message, the kind that barely fits on a lock screen: reports of gunfire at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School. Shelter in place. Do not approach the area. In a town of barely a few thousand people in the forests of north‑eastern British Columbia, every name in that building is someone's child, someone's neighbour, someone you have queued behind at the post office.
By the time police sirens began to echo off the low hills, the ordinary winter school day was already gone. Within hours, Canada would know a new name – and another community would be forced into the bleak fraternity of places marked forever by a school shooting.
On Wednesday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police confirmed that 18‑year‑old Jesse Van Rootselaar had been identified as the suspect in the Tumbler Ridge attack. Officers said she was the lone assailant and insisted there was no ongoing threat to the public – a sentence that sounds almost meaningless when an entire town has just watched its sense of safety shatter.
According to police and local reports, the violence did not begin at the school. Before heading to her former secondary, Van Rootselaar allegedly killed her mother and stepbrother at a nearby home. Only then did she move on to Tumbler Ridge Secondary, turning the building where she once studied into a crime scene.
What followed is now grimly familiar, even in a country that still likes to think of itself as insulated from this kind of horror. Shots fired. Classrooms locked down. Teachers pushing desks against doors, trying to sound calm while telling 12‑ and 13‑year‑olds to stay quiet. Police sweeping corridors one by one as parents cluster outside the cordon, staring at their phones and willing a message from their children to appear.
Al Jazeera, citing police briefings, reported that among the dead at the school were a teacher and five students – three girls and two boys, all aged between 12 and 13. More than 25 others were wounded, two of them critically. In a town this small, those figures are not statistics; they are, quite literally, half a generation.
The RCMP has confirmed that the shooting extended beyond the school grounds, with officers responding to multiple scenes linked to the same suspect in quick succession. Only once next of kin had been notified did they formally release Van Rootselaar's name, stressing that the identification followed standard protocol.
What they have not yet been able to offer is a reason.
At a press conference, RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald said Van Rootselaar had faced mental health challenges in the past and had been taken into care for evaluation under British Columbia's Mental Health Act on multiple occasions.
Source: International Business Times UK
