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

Grief at this magnitude is crushing anywhere, but especially in a place so little

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........

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