Canadian school shooter: Online radicalization, nihilism, gun culture, and gender identity

From playing mass shooting simulations on Roblox to sharing gore videos from WatchPeopleDie, the 18-year-old who shot +30 people in British Columbia was the stereotypical assailant.

After starting the K-12 School Shooting Database on February 15, 2018, the most frequent question I would get is “why does somebody commit a school shooting?” I never had a simple answer to this question because there are a dozen common different factors that lead up to the attacks. About 4 years ago, I made this gumball machine to try to explain the randomness in the motivations of school shooters. If you have a gumball machine full of the different elements from the manifestos, videos, and social media posts from prior assailants, when you turn the dial a random collection of them will roll out.

But the shooting this week in British Columbia, Canada at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School (grades 6-12) was like smashing the glass machine and causing every ball to fly across the room. The last time I shared this graphic was after a 12-year-old student opened fire inside his classroom in Finland on April 2, 2024 (read more: Finnish pre-teen has the same profile as US school shooters).

On February 10, 2026 at 1:20 pm, an emergency alert was sent to the 2,399 residents of Tumbler Ridge for reports of an active shooter in the community. The five police officers who work in this remote mountain town responded to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School where they found 7 were killed, ~25 wounded or injured while fleeing, and a teenage girl who was dead from a self-inflicted wound. Just like Sandy Hook, Red Lake, and Uvalde, police found the mother and sibling of the assailant dead in their home.

18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar (note: there are dozens of AI generated photos being shared online that are not the perpetrator)

Unsurprisingly, the perpetrator (18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar) left behind an extensive online presence documenting struggles with depression and suicidal ideation combined with an obsession with guns and online gore content in forums that glorify mass shootings including:

• Account on WatchPeopleDie (popular in the True Crime Community (TCC))

• Played mass shooting maps on Roblox

• Posted nihilistic content on social media groups where users share and celebrate images of death including “I appreciate this post” on a thread that compiled footage of prior mass shootings and “I love these first person perspective type videos, when the shooter records his or her own actions it’s always heat”

• Reddit account where she discussed suicidal thoughts, video games, and gender transition (in the process of social gender transition without medical/hormone treatment)

• Hospitalized for psychiatric care and was taking antidepressants and antipsychotic

• Had access through her mother to at least six guns including a Norinco SKS (Cold War-era Chinese military semi-auto rifle)

• Firearms-related activities were a primary hobby of her family (98% of school shooters come from homes with easy access to firearms)

The Tumbler Ridge school shooter was basically a real-life version of this TCC meme: