A mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, on February 10, 2026, killed eight people and injured more than two dozen others. An 18-year-old former student killed her mother and stepbrother at a home, then killed five students and an educator at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School before taking her own life, police said.
What happened on February 10
The RCMP received a report of an active shooter at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School at about 1:20 p.m. local time on Tuesday, February 10, and issued an emergency alert describing a suspect. Officers who entered the school found six people dead and the suspected shooter dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. About 25 people were assessed at the local medical centre, and two students were airlifted to hospital with serious injuries.
Investigators then found two more bodies at a home on Fellers Avenue. Police said the attack had begun there: the shooter killed her mother, Jennifer Jacobs, 39, and her 11-year-old stepbrother, Emmett Jacobs, before going to the school. A family member who discovered the scene raised the alarm through a neighbour.
Tumbler Ridge is a municipality of roughly 2,400 people in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in northeastern B.C., more than 1,000 kilometres north of Vancouver. In a town that size, there was scarcely a family untouched.
The victims, and a corrected toll
Police initially reported nine victims dead. On February 11, B.C. RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald corrected the toll to eight, explaining that a victim airlifted to hospital had mistakenly been reported as deceased. The next day, with families’ consent, the RCMP released the names of those killed at the school: students Zoey Benoit, Kylie Smith, Abel Mwansa and Ticaria Lampert, all 12, and Ezekiel Schofield, 13, and educator Shannda Aviugana-Durand, 39.
McDonald identified the shooter as Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, a former student who had left the school four years earlier. He said police had attended the family home multiple times in response to mental-health calls, including an apprehension under mental-health legislation the previous spring, and that firearms once seized from the home had later been returned. The shooter’s own firearms licence had lapsed. Two firearms, a long gun and a modified handgun, were recovered. Police said the motive remained unknown.
A country in mourning
Prime Minister Mark Carney said he was “devastated” by the “horrific acts of violence,” suspended a planned trip to the Munich Security Conference, and addressed a grieving House of Commons, where he noted some of the wounded were still in hospital “fighting for their lives.” Flags were lowered across the country, and Carney later travelled to Tumbler Ridge for a community vigil held on February 13.
B.C. Premier David Eby, who went to the town with provincial ministers, captured the disbelief shared across Canada: “It’s hard to know what to say on a night like tonight. It’s the kind of thing that feels like it happens in other places and not close to home.”
Why this attack shook Canada so deeply
Mass shootings of this scale are rare in Canada, and attacks on schools rarer still. With eight victims, Tumbler Ridge ranks among the deadliest mass killings in Canadian history and the deadliest school shooting in the country in decades. The investigation, led by the RCMP’s major crimes unit, turned quickly to questions that will occupy legislators long after the funerals: how firearms returned to a home flagged for mental-health crises were handled, what warning signs existed, and what support a remote community needs to recover. The province mobilized victim services and mental-health teams from across B.C., and the RCMP asked that the focus stay where the families asked it to stay — on the victims, and on a town’s privacy as it grieves.
