VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The families of victims of a shooting in a remote Canadian Rockies town grappled with unrelenting grief Thursday as details emerged about those killed in the country’s deadliest mass shooting in years.
Authorities said the 18-year-old alleged shooter, identified as Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed her 39-year-old mother, Jennifer Jacobs, and 11-year-old stepbrother, Emmett Jacobs, in their northern British Columbia home on Tuesday before heading to the nearby Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and opening fire, killing five children and an educator before killing herself.
Twenty-five people were also injured in the attack. The motive remains unclear.
Among the dead was 12-year-old Kylie Smith, whose family remembered her as “the light in our family.”
“She loved her family, friends, and going to school,” Kylie’s family said in a statement. “She was a talented artist and had dreams of going to art school in the big city of Toronto. Rest in paradise, sweet girl, our family will never be the same without you.”
Kylie’s father tearfully recounted the desperate hours spent trying to learn what happened to his daughter, only to find out from an older girl, not the authorities.
Lance Younge told CTV News that his son, Ethan, texted “I love you” shortly after 3 p.m. Tuesday and then called a short time later to say he was hiding in a utility room at his school in the small mountain community of Tumbler Ridge, but that he didn’t know where his sister Kylie was.
The family would find out hours later that Kylie was among the dead.
While looking for Kylie, Younge said he walked around the local recreation center where students were reuniting with their families for about six hours, but that police wouldn’t tell him anything.
“I went home not knowing where my daughter was until a high school kid … came here and told us her story about trying to save my daughter’s life,” he said. “The police didn’t tell us anything. We had to find out through the community and through kids and rumors.”
Authorities on Thursday identified the other victims as Abel Mwansa, Zoey Benoit and Ticaria Lampert, all age 12, as well as 13-year-old Ezekiel Schofield and assistant teacher Shannda Aviugana-Durand, 39.
In a statement, Zoey’s family described her as “resilient, vibrant, smart, caring and the strongest little girl you could meet.”
Peter Schofield, whose grandson, Ezekiel, was killed, shared his grief in a Facebook post, saying: “Everything feels so surreal. The tears just keep flowing.”
A need for mental health services
Trent Ernst, publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines, the town’s biweekly newspaper, said he has been “randomly breaking down and weeping at inopportune times, usually when talking to people about what is happening.”
He said he knows Maya Gebala, 12, who was wounded in the head and neck, and Paige Hoekstra, 19, who also suffered bullet wounds. Both were hospitalized in Vancouver.
He said he spoke with Maya at a recent town winter carnival, describing her as “funky and vivacious” and “full of life.”
Ernst said one of the biggest frustrations in the community is the lack of medical support and in particular mental health services. Rootselaar had a history of police visits to her home to check on her mental health, authorities said.
“The majority of people that I’ve talked to are sad more at the fact that Tumbler Ridge doesn’t have the level of support for mental health and health services in general,” he said.
“If this had happened three hours later, our clinic would have been closed and there would be no emergency room there,” he said, adding that it would likely have reopened under such exceptional circumstances.
In particular, Ernst said there’s a severe lack of mental health services in the Canadian Rockies town, which has roughly 2,700 residents and is more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) northeast of Vancouver, near the provincial border with Alberta.
“Right now, there are five mental health nurses in town. But this is the exception, and it’s an exceptional situation. There are times where we’ll go months, if not years, without having anybody in mental health services in town,” he said.
Alleged shooter led a nomadic life
Rootselaar and her family led a “nomadic lifestyle” marked by multiple moves between at least three Canadian provinces, according to a 2015 British Columbia court ruling.
The court’s decision in a dispute between the alleged shooter’s parents described her mother, Jennifer Jacobs, moving with her children between Newfoundland, Grand Cache in Alberta and Powell River, British Columbia, in the previous five years.
Her mother, also known as Jennifer Strang, was found to have engaged in “reprehensible conduct” by failing to give her children’s father enough notice that she was moving back to Newfoundland in August 2015.
Jacobs was ordered in the court ruling to return their children to British Columbia.
A community grieves
Mourners braved frigid cold Wednesday night to honor the victims, with Mayor Darryl Krakowka telling them, “It’s OK to cry.”
Krakowka described the town as “one big family,” and encouraged people to reach out and support each other, especially the families of those who died in the attack. The community must support victims’ families “forever,” not only in the days and weeks to come, he said.
Police recovered a long gun and a modified handgun at the school that they said Rootselaar used in the attack.
Dwayne McDonald, deputy commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in British Columbia, said Wednesday there was no information that anyone at the school was targeted. He said officers arrived at the school two minutes after the initial call and that shots were fired in their direction when they showed up.
“Parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers in Tumbler Ridge will wake up without someone they love. The nation mourns with you, and Canada stands by you,” an emotional Prime Minister Mark Carney said Wednesday as he arrived in Parliament.
Carney, who said flags at government buildings will be flown at half-staff for seven days, planned to visit Tumbler Ridge on Friday.
Deadliest rampage since 2020
The attack was Canada’s deadliest since 2020, when a gunman in Nova Scotia killed 13 people and set fires that left another nine dead.
School shootings are rare in Canada, which has strict gun-control laws. The government has responded to previous mass shootings with gun-control measures, including a recently broadened ban on all guns it considers assault weapons.
Gillies reported from Toronto. Associated Press reporter R.J. Rico in Atlanta contributed.
