Jesse Van Rootselaar, an 18-year-old transgender, who was born male, murdered her mother and 11-year-old stepbrother at their home before walking into Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and opening fire — killing six more children ages twelve and thirteen, in the library of the small British Columbia school. Van Rootselaar then took his own life.
RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald identified Van Rootselaar at a press conference on Wednesday, February 11. The confirmed death toll stands at eight victims plus the shooter, Twenty-seven others were treated for injuries, including two with serious wounds.
Tumbler Ridge is a remote municipality of around 2,400 people in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in northern British Columbia — roughly 717 miles northeast of Vancouver. The kind of place where a school shooting isn't supposed to happen. The secondary school serves about 160 to 175 students in grades seven through twelve.
At approximately 1:20 p.m. local time on February 10, Tumbler Ridge RCMP received a report of an active shooter at the secondary school. An emergency alert was broadcast to mobile phones around 2:00 p.m. The school was locked down for more than two hours. About 100 students were evacuated.
RCMP Sergeant Vanessa Munn confirmed the victims at the school included three 12-year-old female students, two male students ages 12 and 13, and one educator. Six victims were found dead inside the school, and another died on the way to the hospital. Van Rootselaar's mother, Jennifer Strang, 39, and the 11-year-old stepbrother were found dead at a connected residence.
Two firearms were recovered at the school: a long gun and a modified handgun. Neither was registered to Van Rootselaar, the New York Post reports.
RCMP Superintendent Ken Floyd, the North District commander, addressed reporters Tuesday evening:
"This was a rapidly evolving and dynamic situation, and the swift cooperation from the school, first responders, and the community played a critical role in our response."
Van Rootselaar was not currently attending the school, having dropped out about four years ago. But the trail of red flags stretches back much further than that — and every one of them passed through official hands.
McDonald revealed that police had visited Van Rootselaar's residence on multiple occasions over the past several years, dealing with concerns about the suspect's mental health. On more than one occasion, Van Rootselaar was taken into custody for assessment under the Mental Health Act. The last interaction police had with the shooter was in the spring of 2025, related to mental health.
In 2024, firearms were seized from the home. The lawful owner — unnamed by police — successfully petitioned for their return. It was not immediately clear whether the firearms recovered at the school were the same ones.
Police knew this individual had serious mental health problems. Firearms were seized from the home. They were returned. According to reports, Van Rootselaar's own firearms licence expired in 2024, yet she showed up at a school with two weapons.
A system that was supposed to intervene had contact with this person. None of them stopped what happened Tuesday.
When asked whether there was any correlation between Van Rootselaar's transgender identity and the shooting, McDonald said it was "too early to say." Floyd, asked at Tuesday's briefing about the suspect, said authorities are "not in a place now to be able to understand why and what may have motivated this tragedy."
Fair enough — investigations take time. But the pattern is becoming harder to ignore. This is not the first mass shooting carried out by a person identifying as transgender:
Noting a pattern is not an accusation against an entire group. It is what investigators are supposed to do. Yet every time this particular pattern surfaces, the institutional reflex is to change the subject — to gun control, to mental health in the abstract, to anything that avoids asking uncomfortable questions about ideology, online radicalization within certain communities, or whether a culture that treats grievance as identity might produce individuals who act on it with violence.
No serious person argues that being transgender causes someone to commit mass murder. But no serious person should pretend the pattern doesn't warrant examination, either. When the Covenant School manifesto was suppressed for months, the public was told it was to protect the investigation. When details about the Minneapolis shooter's disillusionment with trans identity emerged, they were treated as irrelevant. At a certain point, the refusal to ask the question becomes its own answer — not about the cause, but about the priorities of the people in charge of finding it.
Prime Minister Mark Carney cancelled his trip to the Munich Security Conference and ordered flags at half-mast on federal buildings and Parliament Hill for seven days.
Canada's political class has spent years tightening firearms restrictions on lawful owners while doing remarkably little about the kind of systemic failures that let an 18-year-old with an expired licence, a documented mental health history, and prior police contact walk into a school armed with two weapons. The firearms were seized once already. Someone gave them back.
This is the paradox of the gun-control state: the rules multiply, the bureaucracy grows, and the people who follow the law bear the burden — while the people who don't follow it find a way regardless. Van Rootselaar didn't have a valid licence. The guns weren't registered to her. Every regulation on the books applied, and none of them mattered on Tuesday afternoon.
One detail from Tuesday's press briefing deserves mention. During the exchange with reporters, Superintendent Floyd referred to Van Rootselaar as "the deceased gunperson." The term reportedly originated from a reporter's question, and Floyd adopted it in his response.
Set aside intent. The word itself tells you where institutional culture has drifted. Eight people are dead — most of them children — and the linguistic priority is making sure the shooter's reference is sufficiently neutral. There is no universe in which the vocabulary used to describe a mass killer should be a sensitivity exercise. That it even entered the conversation, at a press briefing about murdered twelve-year-olds, tells you everything about what Canadian officialdom considers important in a crisis.
CTV News identified Van Rootselaar's mother as Jennifer Strang. In July 2024, Strang — described elsewhere as a conservative-leaning libertarian — posted on Instagram with a trans-inclusive pride flag:
"I really hope the hate I see online is just bored old people and not true hatred. Do better and educate yourself before spewing bulls–t online."
"Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate?"
She used the hashtag #ProtectTransKids.
Jennifer Strang was the first person her child killed.
There is nothing to say about that which isn't diminished by saying it. A mother advocated publicly for her child, and her child murdered her. Whatever political conclusions people want to draw, that human fact sits at the center of it, and it is devastating.
Police have not established a motive. No note has been mentioned. The investigation is ongoing, and the community of Tumbler Ridge — a place small enough that everyone knows everyone — is burying children.
The political machinery will do what it always does. Gun control advocates will demand new restrictions that would not have prevented this shooting. Mental health funding will be discussed in the abstract and forgotten in the concrete. The transgender dimension will be either obsessed over or aggressively suppressed, depending on the outlet, and neither approach will be honest.
What ought to happen is simpler and harder: an honest accounting of why an individual known to police, previously taken into custody under the Mental Health Act, with an expired firearms licence, was able to arm herself and walk into a building full of children. The systems existed. The contacts were made. The flags were raised.
Eight people are dead because every one of those flags was lowered again.
