TUMBLER RIDGE — The person behind one of British Columbia’s worst mass killings has been identified as an 18-year-old who killed family members at home, then gunned down students randomly at a school before firing at police and killing herself as officers closed in.
Among the dead: five students of Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, an educator, and the shooter’s mother and stepbrother, who both died in the home they had shared with Jesse Van Rootselaar in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.
Police found Van Rootselaar dead at the school from a self-inflicted wound.
RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald said Van Rootselaar was assigned male at birth but started transitioning six years ago, before quitting school about two years later. She had a history of involvement with police related to her mental health, he said.
McDonald told a news conference the tragedy began Tuesday when Van Rootselaar killed her mother and stepbrother at their home before heading to the school.
There, she opened fire on students and staff alike. A 39-year-old female teacher, three girls aged 12 and two boys aged 12 and 13 were killed, apparently at random. One body was found in the stairwell. Others were in the library.
As darkness began to fall over the remote community in northeastern B.C. Wednesday evening, a day after the tragedy, a couple of hundred people gathered for a candlelit vigil at an outdoor plaza about a block from the school.
There were tears and a prayer.
“In our grief, may we hold one another closer,” one prayer leader told the crowd, bundled up against the cold. “Let us remember them,” he said of those killed.
District of Tumbler Ridge Mayor Darryl Krakowka told the vigil that “it’s OK to cry.”
“We used to think that’s a sign of weakness. It’s not,” he said, a sob catching in his throat. “It’s a sign of strength.”
One by one or in pairs, community members placed flowers and stuffed toys at the base of a tree in the centre of the plaza, encircled by mourners holding candles.
B.C. Premier David Eby was among them. Later, tears filled his eyes at a news conference as he described how a 12-year-old girl named Maya had gone to school on Tuesday “full of joy and love” but was now “clinging to life in hospital.”
Maya Gebala “needs a miracle,” her mother Cia Edmonds said in a social media post. She shared a photo of her daughter lying gravely injured in a hospital bed
