Canadian police named 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, a transgender female, as the killer of nine people at a secondary school in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. In addition to the five students and one teacher he murdered at the school, Van Rootselaar murdered his mother and stepbrother before turning the gun on himself.
While many on the right are trying to make this massacre an issue of violent transgender ideology, this was clearly a failure of the mental health system to remove a very disturbed young person from an environment that included a stressful family life and access to several firearms.
Van Rootselaar was obsessed with school shootings, including the Coventry School murders in 2023, where three young children and three adults were killed by transgender male Audrey "Aiden" Hale. His social media presence has been mostly scrubbed, but like many young people, he had a fascination with guns. He liked target practice and hunting and kept several guns at home, although it's reported that he lost his Canadian permit in 2024.
According to a British Columbia 2015 custody suit filed by his father, the mother, Jennifer Strang, lived a "nomadic life," dragging the children all over Canada from Newfoundland to B.C. The court refused Strang's request to move.
“These children have led an almost nomadic life, from what I have been told, with multiple moves over the last five years between Newfoundland, Grand Cache and Powell River,” Justice Anthony Saunder wrote in a ruling ordering Strang to provide her children telephone access to their father. “It can hardly be the case that the children are tied in any meaningful sense to that one location.”
At the point of the family court dispute, Strang wanted to relocate her children to Newfoundland so they could enter the school system in that province.
She was pregnant at the time and claimed “she made the move to Newfoundland so that she could receive support from her family.”
Over the following years, Facebook accounts of family members show a tight-knit family who celebrated Van Rootselaar's achievements and birthdays.
A post from Strang’s Facebook account from 2021 also suggests that Van Rootselaar had developed an interest in weapons.
“Check out my oldest son Jesse Strang's YouTube channel. He posts about hunting, self reliance, guns and stuff he likes to do,” read the post, which links to a now-deleted YouTube channel. “He doesn’t go on much other social media so this is his way of sharing his life.”
That nomadic life almost certainly contributed to Van Rootselaar's mental health crises later in his teens. Without stability at home, the young man suffered from several mental conditions, including depression and suicidal ideation. This was borne out by numerous police visits to the home. Mental health experts say that the usual reason for calling the police to a home involves violent outbreaks by a family member threatening harm to another family member.
During one such visit by the police, they confiscated some firearms. The guns were returned after the owner of the firearms petitioned the court. On another occasion, the police removed the young person from the home under the Mental Health Act and checked them into a hospital for assessment.
The last visit to the home by police for mental health reasons was last spring, when authorities were called over “concerns regarding mental health, self-harm,” according to a report in The Independent.
This young person should have been taken from his home and placed in a facility that could have tried to help him. Van Rootselaar's transgenderism was a symptom of his illness, not the primary driver of his delusions. As with many self-identifying transgender people, there were other causes of mental distress, including depression, paranoia, and schizophrenia. His frequent breaks with reality made him incredibly dangerous.
To claim that his transgenderism drove him to kill is simple-minded and ignores the mountain of evidence that proves otherwise. Van Rootselaar was allowed to stay in his home with access to firearms, and that's on the local authorities and Canada's overly permissive mental health standards.
