Police visited home of Canada school shooting suspect multiple times over mental health concerns

Police have said they were called on multiple occasions to the home of the teenage suspect behind one of Canada’s deadliest school shootings after concerns were raised regarding mental health problems and weapons.Six people, including a teacher and five children, were killed in a school shooting on Tuesday in the western Canadian town of Tumbler Ridge. About 25 other people were injured and two of them remain in critical but stable condition.The suspect’s mother and step-brother were also found dead at the family home, while the suspected shooter was found at the school with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the authorities said. Police later identified the suspect as Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18.The office of the country’s prime minister, Mark Carney, said he would visit the small town of Tumbler Ridge, home to about 2,400 people, on Friday.The people of Tumbler Ridge have been left in shock by the violent attack. Photograph: Paige Taylor White/AFP/Getty ImagesPolice said the motive for the attack remained unclear and that the investigation was still in its infancy. The family was known to authorities, Dwayne McDonald, a deputy commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), told reporters on Wednesday.“Police had attended that residence on multiple occasions over the past several years dealing with concerns of mental health with respect to our suspect,” McDonald said. On different occasions the suspect had been apprehended under the country’s mental health act for assessment and follow-up, he added.McDonald also said that at least one of the interactions with police related to weapons. “Police have attended that residence in the past, approximately a couple of years ago, where firearms were seized under the criminal code,” he said. “At a later point in time, the lawful owner of those firearms petitioned for those firearms to be returned and they were.”The suspect had a firearms licence that had expired in 2024 and did not have any firearms registered in her name, he said.Investigators attend Ridge secondary school, where the shooting took place, on Wednesday. Photograph: Eagle Vision Agency/AFP/Getty ImagesWith people across Canada horrified by the attack, questions were raised as to why firearms had been returned to a home where police had been called to attend to mental health concerns.“I have a lot of questions,” the premier of British Columbia, David Eby, told reporters on Wednesday. “I know the people of Tumbler Ridge have a lot of questions.”The former RCMP officer Sherry Benson-Podolchuk told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation(CBC) that for police to have proceeded differently, Canada would need to change its laws to allow officers to seize firearms if they spot them while carrying out a mental health check.While Canada has relatively high levels of gun ownership, it has much stricter laws than the US, including a ban on assault-style firearms and a freeze on the sale of handguns.The victims included Abel Mwansa Jr, according to local media reports. “I can’t handle this pain,” his mother, Bwalya Chisanga, wrote on Facebook. “In the morning my son went to school around 8:20am. The last word he said to me was, ‘Tell dad to come and pick (me up) at church when he comes back from work’.”His father, Abel Mwansa, described him as a child with a scientific mind and bright future, who loved carrying out experiments. “If I had power to give life, I would have brought you back to life together with others that were killed alongside you,” he wrote on Facebook. “But, son, my power is limited, and seeing your child murdered at this age is heartbreaking.”The family of Kylie Smith, 12, also said she had been killed in Tuesday’s shooting. She was the “light of her family,” her dad, Lance Younge, told CTV News. “She was just a beautiful soul. She loved art and anime. She wanted to go to school in Toronto and we just loved her so much. She was thriving in high school. She never hurt a soul.”He urged people to keep the focus on the victims, many of whom had lost their lives before they were teenagers. “You want to put someone’s picture up on the news?” he said. “Put my daughter’s picture up.”British Columbia school shooting 'one of the worst' in Canada's history, officials say – videoThose killed on Tuesday included two people in a home residence that police said was linked to the suspect. Police later identified the two people as Van Rootselaar’s mother, 39, and 11-year-old step-brother. The CBC identified Van Rootselaar’s mother as Jennifer Strang.Social media posts suggested a close-knit family where birthdays were celebrated and the children’s interests were championed. In 2021, Van Rootselaar’s mother linked to the suspect’s now-deleted YouTube channel, saying the posts were about “hunting, self reliance, guns and stuff”.Court documents from 2015 obtained by the CBC said Strang and her children had “led an almost nomadic life”, moving across Canada multiple times in the last five years.Speaking on Wednesday, police said they had “identified the suspect as they chose to be identified” in public and on social media. “I can say that Jesse was born as a biological male who, approximately six years ago, began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly,” said McDonald.After an independent provincial legislator in British Columbia claimed, without evidence, that the shooting rampage was related to the suspect’s gender identity, campaigners and gun violence experts warned against generalising an entire demographic based on the actions of one person.In the US, the Gun Violence Archive has said less than 0.1% of mass shootings between 2013 and 2025 were carried out by transgender people.Instead, research suggests that transgender people are more than four times more likely to be the victims of crimes, including sexual and aggravated assault, than cisgender people.