Mass Shooting In British Columbia Highlights Online Extremism
By Simon Desjardins & Ignacio Zamorano
Staff Writer & News Editor
Tuesday, February 11th, 2026, will always remain in the memory of the residents of Tumbler Ridge, BC, pop, 2,400. Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, a trans woman, killed 8 in the town before taking her own life. The shooter’s rampage started at her residence, claiming the life of her mother and one of her half-brothers. She proceeded to shoot up the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, murdering five students—all aged 12-13—and a teacher. Additionally, 27 were injured in Canada’s second-most lethal school shooting after École Polytechnique massacre. The shooter’s motive remains unclear although she had a history of psychiatric episodes sparked by mental illness and substance abuse.
The shooter’s erratic online presence shed a light on her tumultuous existence. A set of accounts linked to the shooter under the name of Jesse Strang, her mother’s maiden name which she used for much of her online activity, provide hints about what went wrong before that fateful Tuesday.
The first records of such, in the shooter’s vast online footprint uncovered by a New York Times investigation, come from a 2021 Facebook post from her mother, that spoke of the shooter pre-transition, it read: “Check out my oldest son Jesse Strang YouTube Channel. He posts about hunting, self reliance, guns and stuff he likes to do”.
In 2023, she posted on her Reddit account about her gender transition and struggling with suicidal ideation a few months before posting that she had set her house on fire under the effect of psychedelic drugs. She explained that following the incident she had been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, and that she suffered from a number of mental-health conditions, including depression, as well as being diagnosed on the autism spectrum.
More directly violent were Van Rootselaar’s posts under similar usernames in a popular gore website, where she posted one of the family guns spotlighted in her mother’s 2021 Facebook posts. In addition to that, her account celebrated videos of shootings, and discussed how she found videos of violent content “addictive”. In Roblox, her account created a game that allowed users to simulate carrying out a mass shooting at a mall. A recent report by the Wall Street Journal stated that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, considered alerting law enforcement about her interactions the chatbot. Her chats, flagged by an automated review system, alarmed employees at OpenAI. Internally, about a dozen staffers debated whether to take action on Van Rootselaar’s chat logs. Some employees interpreted Van Rootselaar’s writings as an indication of potential real-world violence, and urged leaders to alert Canadian law enforcement about her behavior; yet, OpenAI leaders ultimately decided not to contact authorities.
In a world where the expanding thoroughness of one’s online presence has made of it a more reliable indicator of one’s offline actions, careful monitoring of online activities that raise suspicion and spaces where people can be desensitized to violence are worth monitoring.