What We’re Getting Wrong about the Tumbler Ridge Shootings

Reactions to mass shootings follow a grimly familiar script: stunned disbelief, public mourning, and a rush of conjecture and speculation. In Tumbler Ridge, a remote town of roughly 2,500 in northeastern British Columbia, that cycle began on February 10, 2026, after an attack in which police identified Jesse Van Rootselaar as the shooter. Authorities say the eighteen-year-old local resident killed her mother, Jennifer Jacobs, and her eleven-year-old half-brother at home before going to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where six people—students aged twelve and thirteen, as well as a thirty-nine-year-old educator—were fatally shot and two others critically injured. Another twenty-five were reportedly taken to a local medical centre to be assessed. Van Rootselaar was found dead at the scene.

Investigators say Van Rootselaar acted alone. She reportedly dropped out of school four years ago. Police say they have no information about whether she was bullied but confirmed they had attended the family home in relation to mental health concerns on more than one occasion. Firearms had previously been removed from her residence. The motive for the shooting remains unknown, and police say the weapons used were not registered to Van Rootselaar.

To move beyond instant conclusions, I spoke, by Zoom, with Tracy Vaillancourt, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Youth Mental Health and Violence Prevention. A leading researcher on the neuroscience behind aggression, Vaillancourt argues for clearer thinking in our risk assessments of violence and a refusal of easy explanations that substitute stigma for understanding.

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

There’s always a general confusion that descends on these kinds of mass shootings. From your perspective, what are the things that frustrate you when these events are first being reported?

It makes sense that we often get it wrong at the beginning. Reporters are racing to get the story out and to inform the public, especially when there are safety concerns. But that same push means people can get hurt. In this case, the wrong person was initially outed as being involved in the shooting. That mistake won’t simply disappear—it’s now part of the internet forever. That’s deeply frustrating. At the same time, I understand the pressure journalists are under. Their reporting is only as good as what police are willing to provide, and law enforcement is frequently tight-lipped. As a result, gaps get filled with suboptimal information.

This might be a good segue into my next question. At this moment, we know this person dropped out of high school a few years earlier, and there seems to have been no bullying history. There was, however, a recurring mental health crisis that prompted police to step in. How do we understand that? What would you say is the most persistent myth about the link between mental health and violent behaviour?

That they go hand in hand. A lot of people assume someone with a mental illness is inherently unsafe. But that’s not true. Most violent crimes, including mass shootings, are committed by people who are not mentally ill. I study aggression across the lifespan, and under the right conditions, most people have the capacity to treat others poorly. We need to start thinking about that. We tend to focus on how humans are innately pro-social, but we should also acknowledge that, in certain contexts, we can also become hostile and antisocial. Mental health is such an easy boogeyman, it’s become such a convenient explanation, that it allows us to avoid harder questions. It allows us to not look really closely at ourselves, or our values, if we can attribute violence to something that falls outside of how we normally behave as humans.

What is it about how we behave as humans that leads to these events?

Violence and aggression are born from a lot of different factors. There is a genetic component. The more far out on the spectrum of extreme violence you get, the higher the heritability rate. Socialization practices also factor in. There are early environmental risk factors too. A lot of times, kids live in families that value violence, that promote violence, and that then influences the way they see the world. There are also neurobiological differences. Some people are psychopaths. They’re rare. About 2 percent of the population are psychopaths, and they’re high on callous and unemotional traits. Their brains look quite different from non-psychopathic individuals. You also have people who are impulsive or reactively aggressive. They also have different prefrontal cortices. They tend to be dysregulated and unable to cool their jets and assess things. They’re really quick to anger. They see hostility in ambiguous situations.

This is what you have to sort out when you’re assessing risk?

All of this comes together, and it makes it difficult to then say who’s going to commit a heinous act and who’s not. But there are things that we can put in place that would mitigate risk, and one of the things that Canada’s done a really good job at is access to guns. We don’t see mass shootings every other day, like they do in the United States, because we don’t have easy access to guns. We’re doing right on that.

Is there a straightforward, psychological framing we can use to understand the Tumbler Ridge shooting? A place for us to start?

There have been enough school shootings that we have a bit of a profile. We don’t know yet, but I would be surprised if this individual did not put out hints signalling they were unhappy and disenfranchised. Many people who commit these crimes tell people about what they’re going to do. The problem is a lot of people also do that and don’t go on to shoot up schools and murder kids in their community. So, it’s a difficult thing for police services and mental health professionals to figure out: Are you going to be the next serial killer or not?

Van Rootselaar was transgender. How do you factor that fact into this case?

That’s what makes having a conversation about this incident so difficult. The perpetrator was a trans individual, and that community is already so vilified. How do we have an earnest discussion without causing further harm to a group that is already deeply harmed?

So, like mental illness, it becomes a phony shorthand for explaining what happened.

Again, it’s about conflation. The fact that we’re mixing mental illness with violence is also going to happen with trans identity. Entire communities end up bearing the weight of actions not representative of them.

So many of these mass shootings happen at schools. Is there something about school social hierarchies that triggers aggression?

Adolescents are incredibly socially motivated, and belonging is a fundamental human motivator. So, when individuals don’t belong, they get hurt; they get mad or get sad. That’s why, in about a third of school shootings, you see a link to bullying and victimization. There’s also a revenge component. School violence can also be perpetrated by kids who were suspended or expelled, or who dropped out. It’s not like everybody who commits a mass shooting in schools is a current student. They can be former students. With Tumbler Ridge, we have an individual who wasn’t in school, so likely wasn’t bullied at the time this was happening.

So why pick the school?

I think that the selection of the school is not symbolic. I think it’s about convenience. I think that’s what will come to fruition on this. It’s where you can find a large gathering and cause a lot of harm. Tumbler Ridge is not a big town where you can go to a movie theatre or a mall. A school becomes the most predictable place to find a concentrated group of people at a given time.

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Maybe we can circle back to the question of assessing risk. How early can these patterns be identified?

It’s developmentally normal to be high on physical aggression until you enter school. If you’re still on a trajectory of physical aggression past grade one, that’s a big red flag. Because it’s just not the norm. And I know you’re going to say, “Well, kids get into fights in high school. How do you reconcile that?” Well, those are one-offs. I’m talking about a lifelong persistence of aggression. There’s a small minority of individuals in our communities who are aggressive across their lifespan. The way we manage this group is so fundamentally different than the kid who gets into a scrap here or there. I mean, you’re a man. I bet you, in your life, probably had a little fight once or twice, right?

Yup, that’s happened.

In many cases, a firm talk with someone in authority is all it takes to scare you straight. But there’s a smaller group that’s largely impervious to those interventions. These individuals come into contact with youth justice early—at twelve, again at sixteen—and then continue offending. As teenagers, they may already be committing intimate partner violence; as adults, they may go on to maltreat their own children. They are jerks in everything they do. These life-course-persistent aggressors cause a disproportionate amount of harm—probably around 85 percent of the violence we’re talking about—and they consume enormous social resources. Importantly, many of them drop out of school around grade nine or ten. That means they disappear from school-based violence statistics and show up instead in community-violence data. Because those data sets aren’t well integrated, it becomes harder to track them across different contexts.

But I imagine there are violent incidents where persistent aggressors aren’t involved—where someone just snaps.

Absolutely. And here we have yet another group. They don’t have prefrontal dysfunction; they’re not callous and unemotional. They just react badly to the environment and any frustrations that occur in that environment.

One thing that interests me is the issue of contagion, or the contagion effect. What’s your thinking on that? Is it an actual worry for someone in your position, for these kinds of shootings?

It worries me a bit, particularly in the context of the erosion of civil norms. But I’m more interested in asking that question about that other group, not the life-course-persistent offenders. Because that is where you’re going to get more of an effect.

Explain a bit more about that group.

These are people who’ve had a couple fights, dabble in aggression. But they can also be quite susceptible to online radicalization, sometimes drifting into anti-government fringe groups. That’s how the contagion effect actually operates—not across the entire population but within a narrow, vulnerable slice of it. School shooters, in particular, have this unique thing where they’re very interested in violence and very interested in copycat behaviour. They become experts—true-crime experts of school shootings. They know all about those who came before them. They’re in online communities where they all replay past attacks and trade details. It’s not just interest but an obsession with imitation.

Tell me about situations where you’ve been asked to make a threat assessment for a young person.

I was in clinical training after the Columbine shooting happened. During residency, you rotate through different services. You have six weeks in an eating-disorder clinic, then mood disorders, and so on. During my rotation in conduct disorder, we did a lot of threat assessments. I wasn’t leading them—I was still a student—but it was striking work. Psychologists and psychiatrists had to put their names on decisions allowing students to return to school after they had said they intended to commit mass violence. The question was always the same. How do you determine whether a threat is real? How do you assess if someone poses an imminent risk to themselves or their community?

Is it really that hard?

I can’t tell you how much noise to signal there is. There are so many kids who say these things, and so many mental health professionals assessing them, and nothing comes of it. Meaning they don’t go on to hurt anyone, which is great. However, a lot more would come of it if we had more guns, and they were easier to access. If you were to look at a data bank, right now, comparing knife attacks in Canada and the United States, you’re not going to see the massive difference that you will for gun violence, because anybody can grab a knife. And so, yes, it’s not always obvious. Because if everybody’s screaming fire in a theatre, how do we know which theatre is really on fire?

Do you end up second-guessing yourself?

I don’t do clinical work anymore, but whenever I reported on kids I was worried about, I sometimes felt like an idiot. That’s a problem. Because if those of us trained in threat assessment and child psychopathology are calling in something we think is credible, and we’re being treated like we’re a nosy neighbour, you’re probably going to get anybody else calling in these threats. I want us to be a little bit more mindful about the public trying to help. Are they being rewarded for their efforts, or are they being humiliated? And if we keep humiliating the public, a lot of things are going to slip through the cracks.

How do you know that signal when you see it?

For me, the signal is always triaged to the top when there’s access to weapons. There’s no debate there. No negotiation. I was consulting with an American school once where they were talking about this kid who had tons of guns and was unwell. I just so happened to be there giving a talk about violence. And so, they asked me: What are your thoughts about this teenage boy at our school? He’s threatening violence all the time, and the family has a gun room. What? Why are you even asking me this? This should have already been flagged! That is the flag; they have a means to do it. Even when you think about suicide assessment; a lot of people say they want to die by suicide, but do they have the means to do it? If they’re telling you, I’m going to do it, and they have credible means to do it, then it elevates the risk. If I say I’m going to shoot up the school, and there’s five guns in the house, we better be looking into this.

Guns certainly seem to be a factor in Tumbler Ridge.

It’s interesting that the cops seized the guns away and then returned them. That’s the part of the story I want to understand next. If the weapons were returned, who signed off on that person not being a threat anymore? No system is perfect, and we will learn from this. It’s deeply unfortunate that so many people were harmed in the process, but answering those questions will be essential.