Police tape is seen outside a home where two people were found dead in Tumbler Ridge, B.C. Police said the two victims were the shooter's mother and stepbrother.JESSE WINTER/The Globe and Mail
Less than three years before Jesse Van Rootselaar took deadly aim at students and relatives in northeastern British Columbia, the teenager set fire to a bed inside the family’s home after ingesting psychedelic mushrooms.
That event, described by people who know the family, came in the midst of turbulent years in which the shooter was taken away for psychiatric treatment before being returned to a Tumbler Ridge home. In that home were guns, which had earlier been seized by police but then returned.
Police have not described a motive for the 18-year-old shooter, who was born a biological male but began a gender transition roughly a half-decade ago.
But accounts from people who knew the family, alongside police statements, court documents and social media posts, describe a family that had for years been buffeted by romantic failure, workplace injury and mental illness.
On Tuesday afternoon, the shooter gunned down eight people before killing herself, in one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern Canadian history. The dead included the shooter’s own mother, Jennifer Strang, and a younger sibling.
RCMP have identified the Tumbler Ridge, B.C., shooter.
Reuters
“It just doesn’t seem real,” said Bernie Lehmann, a carpenter who has previously worked at the Tumbler Ridge high school, where most of the deaths occurred.
“The big question, obviously, is why? It’s just – I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to believe.”
On Wednesday, RCMP said police had visited the family home multiple times over the past several years because of the shooter’s mental health issues, apprehending her more than once under the provincial Mental Health Act for psychiatric assessments.
RCMP said the shooter once had a firearms licence but that expired in 2024. No guns were registered to her name and the Mounties said they do not yet know who owned the guns used Tuesday, nor how they were procured.
Police had seized firearms from the home a couple years ago, RCMP said, but someone in the family successfully petitioned for their return.
The guns were given back roughly a month ago, a family member said.
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By then, the shooter had experienced recurrent difficulties with mental health and substance use, including a late 2023 episode in which she set a fire in a bed, friends of the family and a relative said in interviews.
The shooter at the time, “was hallucinating real bad,” a family friend said in an interview, recalling details recounted by Ms. Strang.
In a post to Reddit, an account named JesseBoy347 describes going “crazy” saying she “burnt my house down my second time trying shrooms.”
The account username closely matches another verified social media account belonging to the shooter. The family friend said a picture posted to the account resembles the shooter.
The Globe and Mail is not identifying that friend or relatives who agreed to speak on Tuesday, because they fear reprisal for being associated with the shooter.
The shooter’s mother, Ms. Strang, was raised in Newfoundland, where she maintained lifelong ties with the small coastal town of Lawn. She left the island as a child, before moving west. The shooter was the oldest of five children.
In the summer of 2015, Ms. Strang, who also went by the name Jennifer Jacobs, decided to move with her children back to Newfoundland from Powell River, B.C., so that her family could help her with a child she was due to give birth to early the next year, according to a B.C. Supreme Court judgment from that era.
The father of the shooter, who had separated from Ms. Strang in 2009, fought that move in court because he wasn’t given the legal amount of notice.
The judge described Ms. Strang’s itinerant past as “an almost nomadic life.”
He noted the shooter’s father had difficulty rebuilding his relationship with the children when they were untethered from a stable life. In a December 2015 ruling, Justice Anthony Saunders ordered Ms. Strang to return to B.C., even though the children were already enrolled in school on the other side of the country.
The family later arrived in Tumbler Ridge, where Ms. Strang got a job working as a haul truck driver and part time drill trainee at the Brule Mine, one of several Conuma Resources coal operations. She was injured three years ago in a haul truck cab and placed on short-term disability, one friend said in an interview.
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Conuma then laid her off, the friend said. Conuma, in a statement, did not answer detailed questions about Ms. Strang, who lost her job at a time of mounting trouble at home.
It was about four years ago that “things started taking a turn for the worst” with the shooter, the friend said.
The shooter stopped going to school several years ago, a relative added.
She was “very, very mixed-up,” the relative said. “A lot of mental health issues.”
On Reddit, JesseBoy347 described mental health problems, drug use and difficulties in accessing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to transition from male to female.
Details posted to the account – including places and dates – conform with information provided to The Globe by people who were close to the family.
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One family friend said the shooter was prescribed “numerous amounts of different drugs to help with illness that didn’t help. So the mother tried alternative methods,” telling her friend that she was looking into micro-dosing psychedelic substances.
The Reddit user deleted the account but copies of posts were archived by the Arctic Shift Project, which preserves Reddit posts.
In one April 20, 2023, post, JesseBoy347 said she was 15, living in “a very rural area” in B.C. and anguishing about delays in receiving HRT because she feared puberty was accentuating her male character. The post said she was on a six-month waiting list to see a specialist in Prince George.
“I am noticing heavy changes in my appearance every month, by the time I’m actually able to visit I may have severe damage from Testosterone changing my body. This is extremely stressful, the wait alone makes me want to die,” the user wrote.
“It really hurts, I am genuinely considering taking my own life. Is there any way, literally any way possible I can speed up this process?”
That October, JesseBoy347 described igniting a fire in the house. The post said that, after taking the mushrooms ground up and mixed with peanut butter, she “had a complete break from reality and did a lot of irrational things.”
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She added that she had left a psychiatric ward the previous month and had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, autism spectrum disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The shooter spent weeks receiving treatment in Prince George, a 400-kilometre drive from Tumbler Ridge, several people confirmed. The provincial health ministry later confirmed to The Globe that the shooter was not under an enhanced form of mental health supervision known as “extended leave” during Tuesday’s incident.
A month later, the Reddit user asked whether it was safe to use the psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT and mentioned she was on anti-depressants and had previously been prescribed an anti-psychotic.
While the account’s username was JesseBoy347, the Reddit user noted on occasions that she was misgendered by other commenters. She asked whether she should change the username to JessieGal.
Ms. Strang, on her Facebook page, called the shooter by the name “Jessie.” (The shooter was known locally as Jesse Strang.)
On Facebook and Instagram, her mother posted pictures of firearms and made reference to hunting. In 2022, she made numerous comments about the trucker convoy in Ottawa, lashing out at then-prime minister Justin Trudeau and criticizing what she described as violations of civil liberties.
More recently, she posted an image of the transgender flag with the text: “Good people don’t spend their time harassing marginalized communities.”
“Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate,” she wrote. “Please STOP.”
With reports from Stephanie Chambers and Mariya Postelnyak