Second Suspect Arrested in Tumbler Ridge School Shooting

Here’s a twist on the story I wasn’t expecting. A second suspect has been arrested in connection with the February school shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School. And while I didn’t predict a second suspect, I’m not what you could call surprised.

If you’ll recall, on February 10th, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar shot and killed her mother, Jennifer Strang, 39, and her 11-year-old stepbrother, Emmett, at their home in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. From there she drove to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where she murdered education assistant Shannda Aviugana-Durand, 39, along with five students between the ages of 12 and 13: Abel Mwansa, Ezekiel Schofield, Kylie Smith, Zoey Benoit, and Ticaria Lampert.

More than two dozen others were wounded, including Maya Gebala, who was shot three times, suffered a traumatic brain injury, and recently celebrated her 13th birthday while still recovering. Van Rootselaar then took her own life inside the school, which, I’d like to remind you, is the coward’s way out.

Yesterday, federal authorities in Seattle announced the arrest of 30-year-old James Cody Bryant of Bellingham, Washington, who is charged with conspiracy to murder persons in a foreign country.

Before I go any further, a quick word about names. Bryant identifies as a trans woman, and I don’t mean to deadname anyone, but I’m going to use the name the press has been using so there’s no confusion about who I’m talking about.

As for the charge, the logic seems simple enough. The attack happened in Canada, but the alleged conspiracy involved someone sitting in Washington state, and prosecutors reached for a statute that covers exactly that kind of thing. The acting U.S. attorney called it a novel charge for what is essentially a school shooting.

Here’s how the arrest came about. Discord passed chat information to the RCMP shortly after the shooting, the RCMP passed it to the FBI, and agents interviewed Bryant just two days after the attack. Then came months of waiting, which prosecutors blame on the mountain of communications they had to sift through and the need to get a novel case right. Bryant faces up to life in prison if convicted.

According to the complaint, Bryant and Van Rootselaar met roughly three years ago on Omegle. For those who never touched it, Omegle was a free site that paired complete strangers at random for text or video chats with no account required. That anonymity was the entire appeal. It was also, for years, notorious as a favorite hangout of sexual predators, with lawsuit after lawsuit and an endless stream of horror stories about kids getting matched with adults, until the site finally shut down in late 2023.

Do the math on the timeline, and Van Rootselaar would have been about 15 when they first connected, while Bryant would have been in their late twenties. Nobody has alleged anything sexual between the two, and I want to be crystal clear about that. Still, an adult striking up a friendship with a teenager on a site like that is the kind of age gap that, in any other context, would have everyone’s alarm bells ringing.

Their contact was sporadic at first, Bryant told the FBI, because Van Rootselaar was institutionalized more than once. Per the complaint, she was first committed after being deemed a danger to herself, and then locked up again after setting her room on fire.

Bryant said Van Rootselaar got significantly worse after the second stay, angrier and increasingly suicidal, and began talking about shooting her family members. That fits the picture we already had from the RCMP documents of years of police visits to that house, and it makes the question of who was paying attention all the more uncomfortable.

By August 2025, according to the complaint, the two were already discussing Van Rootselaar’s plan to kill multiple people. Over the last six months before the attack, they allegedly talked just about every day.

Prosecutors say Bryant agreed to record and broadcast the attack, helped test the livestream equipment more than once, coached Van Rootselaar on deleting their messages and using a VPN to keep the plot secret, and offered advice on which firearms to use. Bryant also allegedly sent money for a lighter that was meant to be used in building an explosive device, which was then detonated during the attack, with authorities reportedly putting the price tag at about fifteen bucks.

Bryant was also said to have given ‘tactical’ advice to Van Rootselaar. According to the complaint, Bryant told Van Rootselaar that hallways give people plenty of ways to escape, with corners to turn, while “wide open spaces means numbers.” This supposed adult allegedly walked an 18-year-old through how to kill more kids. The FBI’s Seattle chief said the complaint was especially challenging to read because of how casual the tone was.

The livestream was supposed to be the centerpiece of the whole thing. On the day of the attack, Van Rootselaar started a stream on Twitch from her vehicle, and it ran for about 20 seconds before the platform cut it off.

Exactly one person watched, and that person was Bryant, who told investigators as much. Van Rootselaar reportedly feared that without a broadcast her attack would be just another headline, which is a bleak irony, since that’s precisely what it became. I can’t help wondering whether those 20 seconds are already making the rounds in the TCC, which I’ll explain in a moment, because it’s exactly the kind of grisly souvenir those people trade.

Bryant was in touch with her right up to the end, including after she had already killed her mother and stepbrother. According to the Justice Department, the family car wouldn’t start when she tried to leave, and Bryant allegedly talked her through getting the engine going, which let her carry on with the rest of her plan. Minutes before the shooting, Bryant confirmed that the livestream was coming through. Two people were already dead in that house; there was still time to pick up a phone, which Bryant never did.

Bryant claims to have tried talking Van Rootselaar out of it, and the complaint does include messages urging her to reconsider and wishing there were another path. Bryant also told the FBI that a school seemed like a bad idea because there would be too many young victims and suggested a church or a grocery store instead, which isn’t talking someone out of mass murder so much as haggling over the venue.

I have a hard time believing the effort was all that sincere, considering Bryant agreed to handle the broadcast, tested the equipment, and offered advice on which firearms to use. Bryant even wrote, “I know I can like, save lives I guess but idk.” That one line says more than I ever could.

So why did it happen? The complaint points to two things: notoriety and a grievance. Van Rootselaar reportedly talked about killing her family and others because she felt mistreated. The two discussed whether she would have “fans” afterward, and the FBI says she had few followers of her own and was counting on Bryant to amplify the stream.

Those are the same two ingredients that drove the Columbine cowards, who also craved notoriety and convinced themselves the world had wronged them. So at its heart this is still a copycat shooting. What these miscreants never seem to grasp is that school shootings have become so common that infamy isn’t even on the table anymore. Instead of becoming legends, they become one more entry on a long list of losers that most people couldn’t recite if you paid them.

No one in authority has come right out and said so, but to me it’s obvious this is a TCC-related shooting. For anyone new here, the TCC, short for True Crime Community, is a loose web of forums, Discord servers, social media accounts, and content creators that orbit mass shooters the way sports fans orbit their favorite teams.

Some of it passes for analysis, but at the dark edges killers become heroes, body counts become high scores, and manifestos get passed around like scripture, and the whole thing grew out of the Columbiners, who rebranded to something more inclusive so they could worship every shooter and not just two.

Bryant told the FBI that Van Rootselaar was already fixated on mass shootings and watched videos of past attacks to learn from them, which is about as TCC as it gets. To my eye, Bryant looks like someone who groomed Van Rootselaar into carrying it out, though that’s my read and not something investigators have said. Granted, the complaint paints Van Rootselaar as already fixated and already planning, so this wasn’t a kid led astray from nowhere, but an adult who feeds that fire instead of stomping it out is no innocent bystander.

As I alluded to previously, Bryant identifies as a trans woman, and the FBI says the shooter did as well, so I’m sure the right-wing media will have a field day with this. Authorities, for their part, say they have no indication of why the two stayed in touch. A handful of trans people have been school shooters in recent years, and I won’t pretend otherwise, but the list of right-wing school shooters is far longer, and if anybody wants that list, just say the word.

Some of you may also remember my “pipeline” post from February, and I’ll say now what I said afterward. I never meant that being trans leads to violence. The pipeline I worry about runs through isolation, untreated crises, and online spaces that turn killers into heroes, and a troubled teenager chatting with a much older stranger on Omegle fits that far better than any identity politics do.

Where this case ends up is anyone’s guess. The shooting happened in Canada, Bryant lives in Washington, and the evidence traveled from Discord to the RCMP to the FBI, so for now the prosecution is playing out in federal court in Seattle.

It began with a criminal complaint rather than an indictment, which means a grand jury still has to weigh in, and a detention hearing is set for next week with a preliminary hearing on October 20th.

Canada’s public safety minister said it’s too soon to say whether Bryant could face charges there as well, though a Canadian prosecution would be possible if investigators conclude Canadian laws were broken. Meanwhile, the acting U.S. attorney said more charges could be filed on both sides of the border, so who ends up prosecuting what, remains very much up in the air.

Then there’s the possibility of a third suspect. According to Bryant’s account to the FBI, Van Rootselaar said back in August 2025 that she had stolen guns and ammunition from her family and had also convinced someone else to buy ammunition for her. Nobody has been named or charged, and all of that rests on Bryant’s word, but the RCMP has said it may want to speak with other people who might have helped her get weapons.

Which, of course, brings me to the gun question, because we still don’t have a clean answer. Van Rootselaar apparently told Bryant she took guns from her family’s gun safe, yet the RCMP has slapped a publication ban on details about how she got her weapons, and that apparently covers questions about a chat message hinting that police confiscated one of her guns months before the attack. Add the fact that firearms were seized from that house once before and later returned, and how she ended up armed is a question the public deserves to have answered.

I keep saying these shootings are a perfect storm of failures, and now we know one more element of that storm, who allegedly had a username, an internet connection, and a front-row seat and chose to participate. That’s the ledger now. Twenty seconds of video, one viewer, and eight lives gone.