According to CNN, at least nine students are dead, and another 25 are wounded at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in Northeast British Columbia. The shooter was only described in the law enforcement alert as a "female in a dress with brown hair."
The small-town school had just 170 students, grades 7-12. The town's population of 2,400 is reeling from the attack.
"I will know every victim … we're a small community," Tumbler Ridge Mayor Darryl Krakowka told CBC News. "I don't call them residents. I call them family."
No description of the weapon was released. In fact, national and local authorities are being extremely tight-lipped about all aspects of the case. The names of the victims have not been released, nor have any details about the shooter or her (or his) motives.
We've seen this kind of secrecy before. It reminds me of the Covenant School shooting in Tennessee in 2023 when Aiden Hale (birthname Audrey) killed six people — three children and three adults — before police fatally shot her. More than 1,000 pages of writings, mistakenly referred to as a "manifesto," have been the subject of legal disputes, as the parents of the shooter fought to keep the writings private based on U.S. copyright law.
The same sort of lockdown secrecy we are seeing today in British Columbia surrounded the Covenant School shooting. Despite the police's focus on procedural grounds as the reason for the lack of information being released, some critics argued that the delay was a deliberate attempt to downplay a potentially controversial motive related to the shooter's gender identity or resentment toward the Christian school.
Early in the investigation, Chief John Drake stated that authorities believed the shooter's "transgender identity" might have played a role in targeting the school, but the final investigative report released in April 2025 concluded the primary driver was a desire for notoriety.
The leak of three pages of a journal in November 2023, which contained hate language toward "white privilege" at the school and referred to the "meek" nature of the Christians, further fueled public debate over whether authorities were being transparent about the shooter's mindset.
As of this writing, there is no official information suggesting the shooter at Tumbler Ridge was transgender. I was just pointing out similarities between the Covenant shooting and this shooting as a possible reason why, almost 24 hours after the shooting, so little information has been released.
The alleged shooter, who was found dead at the school with a self-inflicted injury, is believed to have killed two more people, whose bodies were discovered at a home in the township
Two victims were airlifted from the school to hospital with serious or life-threatening injuries. And about 25 other people were also being treated at a local medical center, police said.
In an emergency alert which went out to residents’ phones, authorities described the suspect as a brown-haired woman wearing a dress, according to CNN affiliate CBC News.
Police know the identity of the suspect but did not give further details, and declined to say if they were a child.
“I really appreciate the outpouring of support that we’ve received from a national level, international level,” Chris Norbury told CNN affiliate CBC News. “Please continue to send any support you can because as much as I believe in Tumbler Ridge – I know we will get through this – we will definitely need all the support we can get."
Some people in Canada, including liberal politicians, are fond of moralizing about U.S. school shootings, as if mental illness and obsession with guns are peculiarly American afflictions. If anything, in Canada, a nation with fanatically strict gun control laws, the incident only proves the point that guns don't kill people. People kill people.
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