Jarbas Noronha, a teacher at Tumbler Ridge secondary.Supplied
Around 2:20 p.m. on Tuesday, a student returning to Jarbas Noronha’s class said he’d heard what sounded like gunfire.
Two minutes later, another student approached Mr. Noronha, a mechanical shop and applied science teacher at the only secondary school in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., a remote town 13 hours north of Vancouver.
The principal had just come to the door, the student said as the alarm sounded. The school was in lockdown.
Mr. Noronha sprang into fight-or-flight mode and took a quick head count: 15 students, all in Grades 11 or 12. Using the mechanical shop’s heavy metal benches, Mr. Noronha barricaded the classroom door. “The idea was just to buy us an extra three or four minutes if eventually somebody tried to break in,” he said in an interview.
Emotional Carney says nation mourns with Tumbler Ridge, B.C., after deadly school shooting
“I gathered all the students together and got all their names, and then we built an escape plan,” he said.
“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,” he 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,” he said.
“That was it,” he recalled. “My goal was to try and keep all 15 students calm. I did not want them to panic, because I wanted them to act if I needed them to.”
For the next two hours, Mr. Noronha and his students waited in a corner of the mechanical shop, tucked away at the end of the school’s hallway, far from the main entrance. “We were in one of the safest spots in the school,” he recalled. Eventually, the police knocked on the classroom door and led the group outside.
RCMP have identified the Tumbler Ridge, B.C., shooter.
Reuters
The Tumbler Ridge shooting, one of Canada’s deadliest, claimed the lives of nine people, according to a statement from the RCMP on Wednesday afternoon.
A school staffer and five children – all 12 or 13 years old – were killed. The shooter, an 18-year-old local, was also found dead at the school. The shooter’s mother and 11-year-old stepbrother were found deceased at their family home.
“I never thought I was going to face that in my life as a teacher,” Mr. Noronha said. “We always see that on the news, and it’s always somewhere else, distant, right?”
In the shooting’s aftermath, Mr. Noronha realized some of the victims were Grade 7 students from one of his classes. “I had them just one class prior,” he said. “Forty-five minutes earlier, they were with me.”
“They were just the sweetest little kids.”
Speaking with The Globe and Mail on Wednesday, Mr. Noronha said he was “doing okay.”
“I’m Brazilian,” he said. “We’ve been through rough situations before.”
Mr. Noronha found his way to Tumbler Ridge in 2022 after a fateful Alaska-to-Brazil motorcycle tour in 2019. During the trip, he made a stop in Dawson Creek, B.C., and met up with a woman he’d known online for nearly two decades.
Teenager identified as Tumbler Ridge school shooter had recent psychiatric care
“I met her for the first time for 10 minutes on her lunch break, and she invited me to come over to Tumbler because she was moving there,” he recalled. “And now, she’s my wife.”
The community’s response since Tuesday afternoon has been incredible, Mr. Noronha said. After being evacuated, the staff, the students and some parents gathered at the town’s rec centre. As hunger started to set in, the food began to arrive.
“We started helping, giving food to everybody, getting drinking water to everybody, organizing to avoid any kind of chaos,” he said.