I Saw the Best and Worst of Humanity in Tumbler Ridge

When I was in high school, a grown man with no association to the students or staff wandered in through the doors and started walking the halls. It must have been lunchtime, because I caught a glimpse of his back before the teachers shooed us to safety until they could remove him from the property. He seemed impossibly tall, like a giant in a dollhouse, towering beneath the building’s stubby ceilings. His clothes were baggy. He might have been bald. Those details are hazy to me now, but what I do remember clearly is the sense of violation that I felt.

Back then, in the early 2000s, safety protocols for school intruders were nowhere near what they are today, if not unheard of altogether. I recall frequent fire drills and earthquake drills, but the threat of a school shooting was not on my radar. How lucky we were. These days, most schools have practised procedures for trespassers and specific plans for mass shootings. Students as young as kindergarteners are trained on what to do if the protective bubble of their school is compromised. It is a horrific but necessary reality: CNN reported that in the United States alone, there were seventy-eight school shootings in 2025. In Canada, we like to think of ourselves as immune to these horrors.

Aside from a child’s home, the place that they are supposed to feel safest in the world is their school. That’s what has stuck with me the most in the days since I returned from reporting on the mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia: the more than 100 students who barricaded themselves in classrooms and closets for hours while their friends and peers were killed. The place that was supposed to hold them—their expanding minds, their hopes for their future selves, their first crushes and kisses and breakups—had become an epicentre of trauma. And now that it has made that transition, I don’t know how you reverse it.

• What We’re Getting Wrong about the Tumbler Ridge Shootings
• Tumbler Ridge: What Happens When a Small Town Is Synonymous with Tragedy?
• Journalists Parachuted into Tumbler Ridge. What Counts as Decent Reporting in a Crisis?

Maybe the answer is that you don’t try to. A few days after the shooting, Christy Fennell—superintendent for School District 59, which includes Tumbler Ridge Secondary—published a letter to parents stating that “the expectation is that we will not be returning to the current high school site.” That same day, BC premier David Eby confirmed that students would not have to return to classes there; a shipment of portables has already arrived at nearby Tumbler Ridge Elementary, where high school classes are taking place for the foreseeable future.

I arrived in Tumbler Ridge from Vancouver on Wednesday, February 11—one day after one of the worst mass shootings in Canadian history—on assignment for the New York Times. Together with a photographer, my job was to feed information back to the newspaper’s in-house team in real time, talking to people on the ground and helping to paint an accurate picture of what happened. Little was known about the shooter or the victims in those first twenty-four hours, and the community was understandably in disbelief that such an outsized tragedy had struck their remote, close-knit town.

What we know now: an eighteen-year-old trans woman fatally shot her half-brother and her mother at home before killing five students and an educational assistant, along with herself, inside the secondary school. Another victim, twelve-year-old Maya Gebala, was airlifted to BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver in critical condition after trying to protect her classmates by attempting to lock the school’s broken library door. Nineteen-year-old Paige Hoekstra was also shot and then flown to a Vancouver hospital; she was later cleared to return home to Tumbler Ridge to continue her recovery there.

To get to Tumbler Ridge, I took a two-hour flight to Fort St. John and then drove for another two hours along a winding, breeze-swept highway flanked by rolling snow-topped hills, waving giant wind turbines, and coal mine flares that, come sundown, glowed ominously against the inky sky. The town of approximately 2,400 residents is located at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and is home to a UNESCO-recognized geopark. I probably would have noticed the beauty of the landscape if I had been visiting for any other reason.

Downtown Tumbler Ridge, if you can call it that, is tiny. There’s a small health centre; a community centre that, in the aftermath, quickly became the headquarters for victims’ services; a grocery store; a dollar store that doubles as an Amazon package pick-up office; a bakery; a liquor store; a cafe; a Subway. There are three hotels, all of which were booked up by the time I got to them, so I stayed in the nearest city of Dawson Creek, located an hour and a half outside of town. The secondary school is just steps from it all, a modest-sized red-brick building overlooking a basketball court.

I’m sure some locals think that journalism asks too much in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy like this one. It certainly was a circus: television camera crews dotted the downtown streets, setting up shop near the secondary school for hours on end. On my second afternoon, I sat outside the community centre and observed two women embracing across the street. One of them had just finished an on-camera interview with a media outlet; the cameraman must have decided that he wanted some B-roll of her, because he started filming the two women talking. The woman who had not been on camera told him to stop. He acknowledged her request but then kept on filming anyway. Looking back on it, I wish I had intervened.

But as misinformation about the shooting—in particular, the harmful wave of anti-trans rhetoric—began to spread online, it became clear to me why we need trained journalists on the ground in the wake of an event like this. There is nuance that you gain only from seeing a place with your own eyes. There are stories that you’ll hear only by talking to people in person instead of messaging them on social media or phoning them out of the blue. There is value in the facts, laid bare for all to see: this is what happened, this is what didn’t.

Most of the time, a field reporter’s job is to relay that information back to the public—a public who understandably wants answers. Encouraged by my editor to lead with my values, I approached people gently and acknowledged their grief. I knew that, for my own sake as much as everyone else’s, I needed to keep compassion at the forefront of every move I made. If I asked someone to talk and they said no, I moved on. Most people had no interest in speaking to me, which I understand; a town that small and quiet and intimate is going to feel protective about its people and its trauma. Still, I was struck by how polite and kind the people I spoke with were, even as they declined my requests for comment. One person managed to tell me, between tears, “Welcome to Tumbler. Thank you for being here.”

Other times, though, the job was purely to listen. On the evening of my second and final night in town, local mother Sarah Lampert addressed gathered media with a prepared statement about her twelve-year-old daughter, Ticaria, who was killed in the school. “It’s really hard to breathe right now,” she said, with one of her other daughters, Niveya, sitting quietly next to her, both of them trying not to cry. “I’m not only here as a grieving mother. I’m here being the voice of a beautiful, strong voice that was silenced.”

I stood off to the side, listening, fighting back my own tears. I probably shouldn’t admit that. In journalism school, we are taught to be dispassionate, emotionless. While reporting on a story, we are supposed to observe; we are not supposed to feel. In that moment, though, it seemed like the most important thing was not to chase a story, to find a source, or to drum up a new angle, but to simply bear witness to a mother’s grief.