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Terry Newman: We need an inquest into the Tumbler Ridge shooting

This tragedy appears to have been entirely preventable

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The community of Tumbler Ridge, B.C., has suffered the tragic loss of eight victims — all but two under 14 years of age. A picture is quickly emerging of a community that was failed on multiple levels by mental-health services and law enforcement. Now that the dust has settled, it’s time for an independent investigation into how this tragedy happened in the first place, in the hope that changes can be made so that something like this never happens again.

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On Feb. 10, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar shot their mother and half-brother at home before venturing to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killing an educational assistant and five children. Dozens of others were injured, including one child who remains in critical condition.

Terry Newman: We need an inquest into the Tumbler Ridge shooting Back to video

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Van Rootselaar’s rampage appears to be, in part, a failure of British Columbia’s mental-health system. Van Rootselaar’s mental-health conditions were well-documented and included trying to set the family home on fire, substance abuse and multiple visits by police due to mental-health concerns.

Van Rootselaar was apprehended more than once for involuntary psychiatric assessments, most recently last spring. For some reason, when Van Rootselaar was released, they were not placed on “extended leave,” meaning they would have been required to undergo continued treatment and receive supervised support from community care providers. Continual monitoring may have allowed a care provider to intervene before it was too late.

As for the shooter’s motive, there does not appear to be any clear answer as of yet. RCMP Assistant Commissioner Dwayne McDonald told Global News that he didn’t believe that Van Rootselaar had any specific targets and was “engaging anybody and everybody they could come in contact with.” No suicide note was found.

Van Rootselaar was born a biological male, but identified as a female. It’s unclear whether Van Rootselaar was taking hormone replacement therapy at the time, but had posted questions about it online. It’s also unclear whether the shooter was on any medication or any other drugs, and if such substances may have played a role in Van Rootselaar’s erratic behaviour prior to and including the shooting.

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And the failures continue to mount, specifically in respect to law enforcement and gun-control measures. A long gun and a modified rifle were found at the scene. Neither were registered to the shooter, whose license expired in 2024.

Shockingly, police actually seized firearms from the shooter’s residence a couple years ago, but later returned them. The RCMP told reporters that neither of the weapons had ever been seized by police and that one of the firearms was unregistered. Still, it is unclear why any weapons would be permitted in a home where an individual was experiencing consistent and severe mental-health issues.

As if these flags weren’t glaringly red enough, we recently found out that there were even more signs this tragedy could have been prevented.

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After the shooting, OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company that owns the popular large language model ChatGPT, reached out to the RCMP, revealing that it had banned Van Rootselaar’s account eight months prior to the shooting and, according to the Wall Street Journal, “about a dozen staffers debated whether to take action on Van Rootselaar’s posts.”

Ultimately, the company decided that Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT activity did not warrant notifying police because it did not constitute a credible, imminent risk of serious harm. Yet if a user’s activity is serious enough to ban that person from using the service, shouldn’t OpenAI at least be required to give a heads-up to local law enforcement?

On Saturday, B.C. Premier David Eby issued a statement saying, “Reports that allege OpenAI had related intelligence before the shootings in Tumbler Ridge took place are profoundly disturbing.” But it’s unclear if a call from OpenAI to the RCMP, which already had plenty of warnings about Van Rootselaar, would have helped.

What is clear is that the Tumbler Ridge tragedy requires a thorough, independent inquest into the failures of multiple systems and processes, which will hopefully lead to reforms around mental-health services, gun control and, maybe, a better-safe-than-sorry policy that artificial intelligence companies can adopt to balance privacy concerns with the pressing need to notify police about potentially violent behaviour.

National Post tnewman@postmedia.comTwitter.com/TLNewmanMTL

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