Flowers are laid in Tumbler Ridge the day after the mass shooting.JESSE WINTER/The Globe and Mail
The nightmare began in a two-storey wooden house with a brown paint job, a bike lying in a dune of crusted snow out front, a bare birch tree reaching toward the sky.
This is where 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar began killing on Tuesday, Feb. 10. The day would end with nine dead, including her, along with two critically injured − one of the bloodiest mass shootings in Canadian history.
Police tape surrounds the house of the shooter on Wednesday.Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters
The home at 112 Fellers Ave. in Tumbler Ridge, a northeast B.C. town of 2,400, had not always been a happy place since the family bought it in the spring of 2023. Police were frequent visitors. At least twice she had been taken for psychiatric assessment under the Mental Health Act.
Someone else had guns in the house. Police had seized them for reasons that are unclear and then, about a month ago, given them back after the lawful owner – who was not the shooter – successfully petitioned for their return, according to a family friend.
It is not known exactly when the killing began. But at some point that morning or early afternoon, Jennifer Strang, also identified by police as Jennifer Jacobs, 39, and Emmett Jacobs, 11, the shooter’s mother and half-brother, were shot down inside the house they shared.
It was two kilometres by road, or about 900 metres as the crow flies, to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where the shooter had dropped out four years earlier. She is believed to have arrived around 2 p.m. at the low-slung brown-brick structure with a Canadian flag flying outside and snow heaped in the parking lot.
Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where the shooter had dropped out four years earlier.Jesse Boily/The Canadian Press
Students had recently returned from their lunch break, when some had ordered meals at the Freshmart on Front Street, as they often did.
The shooter had two firearms: a long gun and a modified handgun.
At around 2:20 p.m., a student returning to teacher Jarbas Noronha’s classroom said he’d heard what sounded like gunfire.
Two minutes later, another student approached Mr. Noronha and told him the principal had just come to the door to say the school was in lockdown. An alarm began sounding.
The applied science and shop teacher barricaded the door with metal benches and planned an escape route while taking a head count.
Jarbas Noronha, a teacher at Tumbler Ridge secondary.Supplied
“If by any chance anybody starts knocking on the door to try and break in, we have plenty of time to open this garage door,” Mr. Noronha told his class, pointing to the large doors that open into the school’s backyard.
If it came to it, the students should move carefully, with their hands raised, he told them. “We have a lot of cops outside, and they are nervous.”
Elsewhere in the school, 13-year-old Mya LaRocque hid in a closet with more than a dozen other classmates. As she crouched in the tight space, she heard gunshots ring out. She was scared and confused.
Some students huddled in the library. The shooter entered and opened fire.
Police received reports of an active shooter at 2:20 p.m. When Rev. Gerald Krauss of the New Life Assembly church got the alert on his phone, his first reaction was disbelief. “I thought, really? In Tumbler Ridge?” Not long after, the wail of sirens confirmed the worst.
Police arrived at the school within two minutes. The shooter fired at them as they approached. They did not return fire.
Police received reports of an active shooter at 2:20 p.m and arrived at the school within two minutes.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
Soon after, the shooter fatally shot herself.
When police entered, they found five others dead, some in the library, one in the stairwell: Abel Mwansa Jr., 12, a budding scientist; Kylie Smith, 12, an aspiring artist; caring and strong-minded Zoey Benoit, 12; hockey star Ezekiel Schofield, 13; Ticaria Lampert, 12, a precocious and goofy lover of dad jokes; and educational assistant Shannda Aviugana-Durand, 39.
Twelve-year-old Maya Gebala was airlifted to a Vancouver hospital with bullet wounds to the head and neck. Paige Hoekstra, another student, was also airlifted after being shot in the chest.
Twelve-year-old Maya Gebala.Supplied
Paige Hoekstra in an undated handout photo.HO/The Canadian Press
Soon after, police received a call to 112 Fellers Ave. and found the bodies of Jennifer Strang and Emmett Jacobs. The death toll was now eight victims.
Students and faculty in hiding waited for about two hours before they were given the all-clear by police. Mya came out of her closet. Mr. Noronha’s students emerged from his shop class. More than 100 people were ushered outside with their hands in the air, so police could see they weren’t holding weapons.
Families were waiting outside to receive the news they had been desperate for, or the news they feared. Some families got both. Lori Hayer hugged her nephew and felt relief wash over her as her son appeared too. Then she waited for her daughter Zoey Benoit, and waited. “We didn’t know if she was hurt or where she was,” Ms. Hayer later wrote on Facebook.
Students exit the school building with their hands up.Western Standard/ Jordon Kosik/Reuters
Police eventually brought parents to the local community centre to wait for news about their children. Linda LaRocque had a joyful reunion with her granddaughter Mya. “We found our baby,” she said.
Once the community-wide instructions to stay inside were lifted, Mr. Krauss and his wife, Tracy Krauss, who co-pastors with him, headed to the community centre. He said parents were notified by RCMP as details became available, but it was a slow process.
“Some parents were finding their children, and some were not,” Mr. Krauss said.
Tracy Krauss, co-pastor at New Life Assembly, sits in her church in Tumbler Ridge on Thursday.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
All but one family had been told the condition of their child by midnight, he said.
He and his wife were among those who stayed out in the community until 4 a.m., comforting families whose children never arrived.
A family places flowers at a memorial in Tumbler Ridge.JESSE WINTER/The Globe and Mail
“It’s a beautiful town, and now it’s all changed.”
Through the night, Maya Gebala fought for her life in a Vancouver hospital, intubated and with her head heavily bandaged.
On Facebook, her mother, Cia Edmonds, expressed the shock of a traumatized community.
“It was just a normal day. What happened.”
With reports from Matthew Scace, Mike Hager, Maura Forrest, Alanna Smith, Andrea Woo, Tom Cardoso, Mariya Postelnyak, Justine Hunter, Jesse Winter, Meera Raman, Rachel Levy-McLaughlin, Carrie Tait, Kate Helmore, Zosia Bielski, Nathan VanderKlippe, and Tu Thanh Ha