A police investigator enters the home where two bodies were found in Tumbler Ridge.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
She was a mother from coastal Newfoundland who found a life in Western Canada operating heavy equipment at mining operations.
As she moved from place to place – Alberta, the British Columbia coast and northeastern B.C., with a brief stop back in Newfoundland – Jennifer Strang built a home with five children and two fathers.
Throughout that time, she struggled to care for her eldest child, consulting parenting forums for help and, more recently, turning to the psychiatric care system for interventions.
On Tuesday, that child – Jesse Van Rootselaar – used several firearms to kill eight people, including Ms. Strang and another of her children, before turning a gun on herself.
RCMP investigating use of four guns in Tumbler Ridge mass shooting
Police have not described a motive for the killings, leaving searching questions but few answers for those left to grieve, not only those who live in Tumbler Ridge, but those who have known the family and its children.
“I have been racking my brain trying to understand how this happened – why it happened,” a family member who was close to Ms. Strang said in an interview Friday, choking back tears.
She was texting Ms. Strang on Tuesday, before her death and Ms. Strang gave no indication of anything unusual. They were planning to work out later that night, she said.
The Globe and Mail is not naming the family member, who fears retribution for association with the shooter.
Ms. Strang’s parents, Adell and Russell Strang, said in a statement Friday that the family had for years tried to get help for the shooter, who they said had high-functioning autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, deep depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
“There were cancelled appointments, gaps in care, and treatments that were difficult and traumatic, including forced interventions such as ECT,” they said, referring to electroconvulsive therapy.
“We trusted that the system in place would provide the sustainable support Jesse needed,” they added. “From our perspective, the system failed us and Jesse.”
The family described the specifics of treatment delivered to the shooter.
Jesse Van Rootselaar in an undated handout photo.HO/The Canadian Press
Antidepressants, they said, produced little evident result, seemingly rejected by the shooter’s body while raising concerns about liver damage.
Other treatment attempts also came with serious side effects, including ECT, which involves passing electrical currents through the brain. The shooter received six such treatments, each inducing a seizure, the family told The Globe. The final treatment produced a seizure so severe it required a medically induced coma to recover.
They said the shooter was also taking medication for ADHD.
Ms. Strang, her parents said, “poured everything she had into her children and worked tirelessly each day to provide the best life she could with the resources she had.”
For Ms. Strang, who was 39 when she was killed, the intense efforts to seek care for the shooter capped a life in which she sought to balance the provision of life’s necessities with the demands of a rapidly expanding family.
She was born in Newfoundland, where she grew up in the coastal community of Lawn before moving with her parents to Tumbler Ridge, a coal-mining town, while still in elementary school. Ms. Strang followed family and professional opportunity back and forth across Canada.
She gave birth to her first child, Jesse, in August of 2007. A second, a daughter, arrived in 2010. By then, Ms. Strang had separated from the father of those children, Justin Van Rootselaar. In a statement sent to media this week, Mr. Van Rootselaar said he carries “a sorrow that is difficult to put into words.”
In late 2010, Ms. Strang moved to Grande Cache, Alta., where she worked as a heavy equipment operator at a coal mine. She met JP Jacobs, and the two were married. They had three children together.
Among the dead this week is Mr. Jacobs’ son, Emmett Jacobs, who was 11.
“I lost my little boy, a man’s pride and joy. Jennifer and I had our differences, but she did not deserve this, none of them did. I couldn’t even begin to comprehend the news,” he said in an interview.
He remains legally married to Ms. Strang, who also goes by Jennifer Jacobs. The couple separated in 2018 and Mr. Jacobs had been in the process of filing for divorce.
Both fathers were estranged from the family and had not been part of their children’s lives. Emmett was four the last time he saw his father.
After leaving Grande Cache, Mr. Jacobs and Ms. Strang lived in Powell River, B.C., and briefly in Chamberlains, Nfld., where Mr. Jacobs worked at a nickel-processing plant. In December of 2015, a judge ordered them back to B.C., after their move east was challenged by Mr. Van Rootselaar. The couple arrived in Tumbler Ridge in 2017, where Ms. Strang found work as a haul truck driver.
Mr. Jacobs, who knew the shooter from the time she was a toddler until she was nearing the end of elementary school, has no answers for what happened.
As a child, the shooter “was a happy boy,” Mr. Jacobs said. The shooter was born male, before beginning a gender transition roughly a half-decade ago.
But, Mr. Jacobs said, as the shooter advanced through primary school, “there was a lot of acting out.”
Remembering the Tumbler Ridge shooting victims: Eight lives lost
The family also showed signs of difficulty, said Rev. Patrick Tepoorten, who served at Church of the Assumption in Powell River, which Ms. Strang attended. The church provided tuition assistance to allow her children to attend the local Catholic school.
Ms. Strang “was a very good mother,” said Father Tepoorten, who recalled baptizing some of her children. But “this was a family that was extremely unstable. They were living hand to mouth.”
On Facebook, Ms. Strang offered glimpses of the struggles she experienced. In early 2015, around the time she described losing a job, she posted to Facebook seeking help with a seven-year-old – an age that matches that of the shooter at that time. She described a child who was academically gifted, but “very slow.”
“Just needs to be asked a million times to do anything at home and at school. … Then when it’s play time, he loves to run, scream, squak & sometimes he hurts his siblings … has a devious grin when he hurts his siblings,” she wrote.
Ms. Strang sought help with her son Emmett, too.
“He wasn’t formally diagnosed, but he was being treated for autism,” the family member said, calling him “just a sweet little boy.”
But, the family member said, she struggles to reconcile how the shooter could have become someone who opened fire, killing community members and her own family.
The shooter was “very, very intelligent,” the family member said. But she was also a troubled teenager who needed help.
“It wasn’t for lack of effort by his mother,” the family member said.
With reports from Tu Thanh Ha