Tumbler Ridge: What Happens When a Small Town Is Synonymous with Tragedy?

Until mid-afternoon on February 10, Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, was a place known for mining and bears, for its geopark and dinosaur fossils and mountain vistas.

But most Canadians had likely never even heard of this town, with its approximately 2,700 residents. Set in the foothills of the Hart Ranges, a subrange of the Rocky Mountains, Tumbler Ridge is close enough to the famed mountain parks of Alberta and BC to share a bit of their epic scenery but far enough to go mostly unnoticed by the outside world.

Everything is different now, and in the worst way. Eighteen-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar shot and killed her mother, Jennifer Jacobs (also known as Jennifer Strang), and her eleven-year-old half-brother, Emmett Jacobs, in their home at 112 Fellers Avenue. She then moved on to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where she killed five students and an education assistant, Shannda Aviugana-Durand.

Five kids who went to school that day will never come home: Zoey Benoit, Ticaria Lampert, Abel Mwansa, Ezekiel Schofield, and Kylie Smith, all age twelve but for Ezekiel, who was thirteen. Another two students, Maya Gebala and Paige Hoekstra, ages twelve and nineteen, were seriously wounded and taken to hospital in Vancouver.

Over the next twelve hours, world leaders reached out to Prime Minister Mark Carney to share condolences over Tumbler Ridge. This town that, in the before times, rarely appeared in news stories outside of BC is suddenly everywhere. For years to come, its name will serve as a stand-in for the horrible thing that happened there. Carney said as much in the House of Commons the day after the shooting. He listed Canadian places and towns marked by tragedies, without naming the tragedies. He didn’t have to. We all knew what he meant when he said: École Polytechnique in Montreal; the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City; La Loche, Saskatchewan; Humboldt; Portapique.

When a tragedy so wickedly out of proportion to the size of a town happens, that is what the place will become known for. Devastation in the extreme puts a town on the world map. The atrocity will be the invisible banner that hangs below the welcome sign at the town boundaries.

In January 2016, Sara Dungavell had just finished her medical residency and was getting ready to start her first ever job as a psychiatrist, covering small communities in northern Saskatchewan, when she heard about a shooting in La Loche. A seventeen-year-old had killed two of his cousins in their home and then driven over to the La Loche Community School, where he killed a teacher and teacher’s assistant and wounded seven others. Dungavell arrived to a population reeling in shock. Every home was in mourning.

“Everyone knows everyone, so that means that everyone is grieving,” she said. “People will grieve because they knew the shooter. They grieve because they knew the family of the shooter and the folks who were involved.” Some will “grieve because they’ve lost children or they know someone who’s lost children.”

Grief at this magnitude is crushing anywhere, but especially in a place so little. The numbers of dead leave a different-sized hole in the social architecture of a place where everyone knows where everyone lives. The people of Tumbler Ridge will see their streets differently now—which road has a house that is home to someone who has died or was injured or at school that day. “I will know every victim,” Mayor Darryl Krakowka told the CBC in those early hours when Tumbler Ridge waited to find out the names of the casualties.

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This first chapter in the after times will be one of utter shock, of people just trying to survive the unsurvivable. How much pain are humans really capable of enduring? A lot, it turns out. The evidence is in places like La Loche and Portapique and Humboldt. People can and do and will survive the unsurvivable, but it is hard and takes years.

There will be a slow reckoning with the enormity of the loss, said Dungavell. The human body doesn’t get over sadness and anguish on a schedule that matches with funerals and back-to-school dates.

But the way that a community responds to tragedy is a key part of their story. In La Loche, the lasting effect of the 2016 massacre is not stigma but something greater. It’s a complicated legacy: layers of sadness and anger but also love and resilience. People have “a lot of pride in their community and in the strength that it did have, even in the face of these incredibly hard things,” said Dungavell.

That’s why it matters that the mayors and residents of places like La Loche and Portapique send words of support to Tumbler Ridge. And that’s why it matters that the outpouring of support from Canadians persists long after the cameras have left. New schools will need building, and stable health care supports will be needed for years, Dungavell said.

“Right now, we’re talking about survival, but the hard work of figuring out ‘how this fits into our life story’ is going to happen in the next months and years,” she said.

Love and beauty exist after horror. That’s part of the story here, and in La Loche, Portapique, and Humboldt. In the years to come, there will still be mining and bears, a geopark, dinosaur fossils, and mountain vistas in Tumbler Ridge. But they will always look a little different.