As you may know, on February 10th, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar shot and killed her mother, Jennifer Strang, and her 11-year-old stepbrother, Emmett, inside their home in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. From there, she drove roughly a mile to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and murdered an education assistant along with five students, none of whom had made it past the age of thirteen.
27 more people were wounded, one of them a twelve-year-old girl named Maya Gebala, who was shot three times and is still fighting to recover from a traumatic brain injury. Van Rootselaar died at the school from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, which spared her the trial, because they almost always take the coward’s way out.
A Canadian media consortium fought in court to unseal the investigative documents behind this case, and earlier this month they finally won. Hundreds of pages came out, still bleeding black ink from every redaction the RCMP could justify, but enough survived to fill in gaps.
We now know the first call to police wasn’t about a shooting at all. It was an erratic-driving complaint, someone reporting a green Hyundai Palisade backing into a snowbank outside the family home. The same caller told dispatch there were two bodies inside and shotgun shells on the floor and that “the eldest son was armed and had left.” Officers told them to shut the door, leave the scene untouched, and wait. Within minutes, the actual shots-fired calls started coming in from the school.
What follows in the documents is a minute-by-minute account of confusion that plagued the police response. Responding officers cycled through three different names for the same person, because Van Rootselaar apparently went by Strain, Jacobs, and Van Rootselaar depending on who you asked and when. One inspector radioed that the shooter was “the eldest child in the STRAIN/JACOBS family,” while another, working off different information, reported a possible second shooter named Jesse Van Rootselaar. It took officers reviewing the school’s own security footage to confirm there was only ever one gunman, not two, and that both names belonged to the same eighteen-year-old bleeding out in the library.
This is also how multiple shooter conspiracies get started even though school shootings in North America with more than one shooter are rare.
Anyway, none of that confusion changes the parts of this story I already told you, though it does clarify them. The documents confirm Van Rootselaar was “obsessed with guns,” which is the RCMP’s phrase, not mine, and that she’d been carded into the PRIME police database twelve separate times going back to April of 2018, when she was roughly ten years old. That’s not a troubled teenager who snapped; that’s a decade-long paper trail of a kid the system kept touching and kept failing to hold onto.
Add to that the archived footage of her firing a Desert Eagle and a semi-automatic carbine at a range. Then there were her mother’s own Facebook posts showing off a cabinet of rifles with the caption about “target practice,” and a household where guns weren’t hidden but were the family hobby. Then you start to see a kid raised inside a culture that treated firearms as identity long before she ever treated violence as an answer.
Layer in the drug use she wrote about online, the mushrooms and DMT, and one particular post describing a trip that nearly burned the house down, and you’ve got a mind that was chemically and culturally primed for exactly the kind of dissociation that makes violence feel abstract.
Then there’s the online life. A Roblox account building a mall-shooting simulator. A profile on a gore forum popular with the so-called True Crime Community, the online subculture that treats mass shooters like celebrities and body counts like high scores. That’s not a girl radicalized by her gender identity. That’s a girl radicalized by guns, drugs, and a digital cesspit that’s been grooming isolated kids since Columbine.
Turn on any right-wing outlet or scroll any conservative feed, and you’ll see the same lazy conclusion dressed up as thought. “It was the trans thing.” Never mind the twelve-year paper trail, never mind the rifle cabinet on Facebook, and never mind the mushroom trip or the shooting simulator or the gore forum. None of that fits neatly onto a bumper sticker, so it gets ignored in favor of the one detail that lets certain people feel vindicated in hating a group they already hated.
I’ll ask this plainly, because somebody has to. Which is actually more dangerous here, a person whose gender doesn’t match the one they were assigned at birth, or a household that treated assault rifles as a bonding activity for a child with a documented decade of mental health red flags? If you didn’t pick the guns, you didn’t actually read the documents. You read a headline, and you let it do your thinking for you.
I’ve said it before, and the new records only bolster my argument this was never a mystery. It was a pileup, years in the making, of untreated crises, glorified violence, easy access to firearms, and a family culture that mistook a rifle cabinet for a toy box.
The coroner’s inquest is now underway, looking at exactly that: mental health, weapons access, and the role artificial intelligence played in the months before the shooting.
The people demanding answers about gender identity were never actually looking for answers. They already had the one they wanted, and no amount of unsealed paperwork was ever going to change their mind.
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