Days after a deadly mass shooting devastated a rural town in British Columbia, Canada, police are still searching for clues as to why the suspect, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, would have turned violent, and how she could have carried out her attack.
In Tumbler Ridge, a mining town of roughly 2,700 people, a picture of the teen’s unsettled life was emerging from police and court records and a family statement. Van Rootselaar went mostly by Jesse Strang, the maiden name of her mother, Jennifer Strang. Van Rootselaar was the name of her biological father, a man she barely knew after a difficult split between her parents. Even though her father lived in the same town, they never had much contact.
Van Rootselaar dropped out of school around four years ago, authorities said.
During her teen years, Van Rootselaar became well-known to the local police. They interacted with her through numerous visits to handle mental-health concerns at the residence where she lived with her mother and younger siblings. More than once, police said, Van Rootselaar was apprehended for assessment under the province’s mental-health law. But she always returned home. At one point, guns being kept in the residence were taken by police and later given back when someone living there petitioned for them.
Van Rootselaar is suspected of using four weapons in Tuesday’s deadly assault that killed eight people before she died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said. The two weapons believed to have been the main weapons used were never previously seized by police and are unregistered, police said. Finding out where and how Van Rootselaar obtained the weapons is a top priority, according to authorities.
A specialized team of investigators has also been combing through her online activity and digital footprint for clues about the why and how of the mass shooting—as well as reviewing her past interactions with police and mental-health professionals, according to Royal Canadian Mounted Police Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald.
Some of Van Rootselaar’s digital footprint has already surfaced online. She had created a videogame that simulated a mass shooting inside a shopping mall on online gaming platform Roblox, the company has confirmed. The simulation allowed a Roblox character to pick up various weapons and shoot other Roblox characters in a mall. The simulation was only seen by seven people because it had to be accessed through a separate app that developers use to design games, called Roblox Studio, and was never approved for distribution to casual gamers. The company didn’t say when Van Rootselaar created it.
“We have removed the user account connected to this horrifying incident as well as any content associated with the suspect,” a Roblox spokeswoman said. “We are committed to fully supporting law enforcement in their investigation.”
Archived social-media posts show Van Rootselaar posted pictures of herself shooting at a gun range, claimed to have created a bullet cartridge using a 3-D printer and engaged in online discussion about YouTube videos made by gun enthusiasts.
The trans woman also shared her concerns about the process of transitioning and her interests in anime cartoons and illicit drugs, using “jesseboy347” as a social-media handle, according to a post on her mother’s Facebook page.
In archived Reddit posts from 2023, when Van Rootselaar was 15, she posted to a “r/trans” forum that she found transitioning “super intimidating,” but that she intended to see a gender transition specialist.
The teen shared a mirror selfie of her first time trying makeup and expressed concern about the proportions of her 6-foot frame.
“Why can’t I be petit an smol?” she wrote in a Reddit post.
Later that year, Van Rootselaar posted that she “went crazy and burnt my house down” after her second time trying psychedelic mushrooms, adding that the dosage “made me go straight into dangerous psychosis.”
Van Rootselaar posted that she hoped to find the right amount that would allow her to “experience something positive in my life,” adding that electroconvulsive therapy and prescribed medications hadn’t resolved her mental illness.
Her biological father, Justin Van Rootselaar, hinted at a turbulent early life for the teen in a statement confirming their estrangement, which he blamed on Van Rootselaar’s mother.
“While that distance is the reality of our relationship, it does not lessen the heartbreak I feel for the pain that has been caused to innocent people and to the town we call home,” he told Canadian press on Friday.
As a young child Van Rootselaar’s life was uprooted several times, court documents show, as her mother made repeated cross-country moves between Newfoundland on Canada’s far eastern Atlantic coast; Grand Cache, a small mountain town in western Alberta; and Powell River, a coastal community in southwestern British Columbia.
When Van Rootselaar was around 7 or 8 years old, a then-pregnant Strang took her across the country from British Columbia to Chamberlain, Newfoundland, against the father’s wishes, in what a judge described in court documents as “reprehensible conduct.”
At that point, Van Rootselaar and her father hadn’t had a relationship for “many years,” but the two were beginning to speak over the phone, court records show. The father, who hadn’t initially pursued all his parental rights, sought joint guardianship and requested he be consulted on parental decisions. The barely existing relationship between father and child was a consequence of the mother’s “nomadic lifestyle,” British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Anthony Saunders said.
Before Strang left with the child, she sent her ex-partner a text message that read: “We are moving to Newfoundland,” and “We told your lawyer that last week.” But she didn’t tell the father exactly where or when she intended to relocate with their child, according to court documents.
It’s unclear when the mother moved the children back.
It was in the following decade that Van Rootselaar began to have contact with local police over mental-health concerns, and those interactions are now part of the investigation into what motivated Van Rootselaar on Tuesday, when police said she fatally shot her 39-year-old mother and 11-year-old half-brother in the family home. She then went to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and fatally shot six people there—a teacher and five students—and critically wounded two others, police said. She took her own life as police entered the school. Asked if she had been bullied at the school, police said they didn’t know but that she currently wasn’t a student there.
Amid the tangle of forensic evidence left at both scenes, one clear fact has emerged, said Deputy Commissioner McDonald. Van Rootselaar didn’t appear to have a specific target in mind at the school and shot randomly, he said.
“This suspect was, for lack of a better term, hunting. They were prepared and engaging anybody and everybody they could come in contact with,” McDonald said.
Write to Jack Morphet at jack.morphet@wsj.com