There is a small town called Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia, Canada. This mining town hidden in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains has only 2,400 residents. Town councilor Chris Norbury once proudly said that there is no need to worry about crime when living here. But on the afternoon of February 10, the alarm at Tumbler Ridge Middle School suddenly went off.
Students blocked the classroom door with tables and chairs. Physical education teacher Keith Bertrand rushed upstairs. When he came back, his face was white, and he told the children in the gym that this was not a drill, and then locked everyone in the equipment room. A 17-year-old student later told the media that he heard 12 gunshots fired one after another.
(Tumbler Ridge Township)
The RCMP Tumbler Ridge Division is only 600 meters from the school. Within two minutes of receiving the call, four police officers rushed into the school gate and immediately saw the victim lying on the ground. Someone leaned out of the window and shouted that the suspect was upstairs!
The surveillance video recorded the final scene: 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar stood in the corridor and pulled the trigger for the last time, not aiming at anyone, but turning the gun towards himself.
(murderer Jesse Van Rootselaar)
She took a total of 8 lives in less than an hour. Including his mother, his 11-year-old brother, and the group of 12-year-old children in the school library. This is Canada's deadliest school shooting since the 1989 Montreal Polytechnic massacre.
Just eight months before the tragedy, a debate took place in an office building in San Francisco.
[The controversy in San Francisco]
In June 2025, OpenAI's automatic monitoring system quietly marked a ChatGPT account with a red mark.
Account name: Jesse Van Rootselaar.
Trigger: This user repeatedly described scenes involving gun violence in conversations lasting several days.
The flagged account was moved into a dedicated review process, and more than a dozen OpenAI employees began discussing the matter.
According to information disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, after reading these conversation records, some employees felt that there was a very high potential risk and tried their best to persuade them to report it to Canadian law enforcement agencies.
But company executives rejected it.
The reason is that the company does not feel there is any imminent danger and has nothing to worry about. However, his account was banned for abusing the model to promote violence.
Then, tragedy happened.
【Instigator】
Jesse Van Rootselaar, born August 4, 2007, was male at birth and began living as a female around the age of 13. He was 18 years old at the time of the incident and had already dropped out of school for four years.
(Jesse posted online that he was wearing makeup for the first time, but he hadn’t started hormone treatment yet)
Piecing together the traces she left on the internet, the picture is chilling.
He has been active in online forums since he was 12 years old and has made some comments about wanting to commit suicide.
She has a video account online, and her avatar is an anime-style female character holding a rifle against a pink and white striped background. It includes videos of her shooting a Desert Eagle, a tactical shotgun and a semi-automatic carbine.
Her mother Jennifer even posted a post in 2021 hoping to increase her child's followers.
She forwarded multiple videos of the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, the shooter Audrey Hale, online.
A mall massacre simulation game has also been created. The player controls the character to pick up a gun and shoot passers-by in the mall. There were also comments on the collection of mass shooting videos. They all thought it was exciting to be a shooter and wanted to try shooting and other anti-social comments.
She has diagnoses of major depressive disorder, autism spectrum disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and once took hallucinogenic drugs, triggering a psychotic episode and setting her bedroom mattress on fire.
(Jesse Van Rootselaar)
Deputy Chief of Police Dwayne McDonald later confirmed that the police had often dealt with Jesse in the past few years to deal with issues related to her mental health, and she had been legally detained for mental evaluation more than once.
Police even confiscated guns from her home about two years ago. There are reports that the guns were returned about a month before the shooting...
[Children who never had time to grow up]
Six families were completely destroyed in this shooting.
Abel Mwansa Jr., 12 years old.An immigrant family from Zambia, the family moved to Tumbler Ridge because of their father's mining job.
Is an excellent football player. His father, Abel Mwansa Sr., plans to transport the body back to Zambia for burial. In a Vancouver hospital, he ran into another father who had lost a child, and the two embraced each other.
Kylie Smith, 12 years old.A painter who dreams of going to art school in Toronto and a figure skater. Her 15-year-old brother, Ethan, survived the shooting by hiding in a utility room. The father said he would never forget the last time he saw Kylie walking into the house with her brother Ethan.
Zoey Benoit, 12 years old.Her family describes her as resilient, energetic, smart, loving and the strongest little girl. She moved from Langley, BC, in 2023, and Langley's former classmates later held a special memorial service for her.
Ticaria Lampert, 12 years old.The glue among seven siblings, her mother calls her Tiki-torch, like a torch, full of energy, love and joy.
Ezekiel Schofield, 13 years old.A member of the local U13 ice hockey team, the Raptors. Grandfather Peter Schofield wrote on Facebook:
"It's all so unreal. The tears won't stop flowing. So many young lives ended so senselessly."
Shannda Aviugana-Durand, 39. teachingassistant.
and Jennifer Strang, 39, Jesse's mother, who was killed at home. 11-year-old Emmett Jacobs, Jesse’s half-brother.
(Photos of the victims, excluding the murderer’s mother, Jennifer Strang)
12-year-old Maya Gebala is a very brave and lucky survivor. As the gunman approached the library, she tried to lock the door, and two bullets struck her in the head and neck. A classmate noticed her fingers were still moving and immediately called emergency personnel.
She is still at the Children's Hospital in Vancouver, with her father by her side, slowly learning how to get her fingers to listen again.
[The call made after the gunfire rang out]
The day after the shooting, representatives from OpenAI appeared at a meeting of the B.C. provincial government. This meeting was a business meeting that had been arranged a few weeks ago.
OpenAI is considering setting up a satellite office in Canada. But at this meeting,OpenAI did not mention any information about the shooter or the shooting.
It took another day, February 12, before OpenAI asked its BC provincial government contact for the RCMP’s contact information. Then, Jesse’s ChatGPT usage information was provided.
The BC premier's office later confirmed that OpenAI had not notified any members of government that it had potential evidence related to the Tumbler Ridge shooting.
(murderer Jess)
In this regard, OpenAI’s explanation is:
ChatGPT is trained to direct conversations into specialized processes when it detects that a user may harm others. But triggering the threshold for reporting to the police,There must be an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm. The batch of conversations in June 2025 was not deemed to meet this standard.
The company also added that excessive reporting to the police can lead to distress for young people and their families, such as unannounced police visits, and can lead to privacy issues.
RCMP Sergeant Kris Clark also pointed out a key detail. The platformAccounts were flagged internally but authorities were not notified until after the shooting.
BC Premier David Eby had harsh words:
"Reports that OpenAI had intelligence leading up to the Tumbler Ridge shooting are of great concern to the victims' families and all British Columbians.Extremely disturbing! "
(Murderer Jess)
Canadian Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon also spoke out:
"Like many Canadians, I am deeply troubled by reports that the suspect's concerning online activity was not promptly reported to law enforcement."
OpenAI currently says it is reviewing the case to assess whether its reporting standards to police need to be improved.
[Tragedies happen frequently]
The Tumbler Ridge shooting is not the first time OpenAI has faced similar problems.
In 2025, an American lawyer sued OpenAI on behalf of two families because the content that users communicated with AI contained a lot of violence and self-harm. Although OpenAI detected it, it did nothing.
Over the past year, lawsuits against OpenAI have been flying in like snowflakes.
Raine v. OpenAI:Adam Raine, a 16-year-old boy from southern California, committed suicide in April 2025 after months of conversations with ChatGPT. His parents accused ChatGPT of encouraging him to explore suicide methods and helping him write a draft of his suicide note.
Chat records show that after he said I don’t want my parents to think they did something wrong, ChatGPT responded:
"It doesn't mean you owe them to live. You don't owe anyone that."Then he offered to help him draft his suicide note.
Soelberg v. OpenAI:Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, killed his 83-year-old mother in Connecticut in August 2025 before committing suicide after hundreds of hours of conversations with GPT-4o.
The lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT systematically reinforced his paranoid delusions, telling him he had a chip implanted in his brain and defining his mother as an enemy.
Shamblin v. OpenAI:Zane Shamblin, 23, spoke with ChatGPT for more than four hours.
In the chat history, he repeatedly told the AI that he had written a suicide note, loaded bullets in the gun, and was just waiting to finish the cider at hand. ChatGPT’s final response was four words:"Rest easy, king."(RIP, King.)
(Tumbler Ridge Township)
These cases have a common technical feature, which researchers call AI psychosis. ChatGPT is designed to be compliant, friendly, and constantly cater to user expectations. For normal people, this is innocuous; but for users experiencing mental health crises, this mechanism systematically amplifies their most dangerous thoughts while cutting them off from real-world support systems.
According to a report by Wired magazine in November 2025: About 1.2 million ChatGPT users expressed suicide intentions or plans every week, accounting for 0.15% of active users. Hundreds of thousands of other users show signs of delusion or mania, and their delusions are often confirmed and reinforced by ChatGPT.
[A bloody real problem]
Laura Huey, professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario, said something very precise:
"Technology has evolved far beyond the ability of law enforcement to monitor it, so we rely, to a large extent, on commercial companies to do what is in the best interest of individuals and the public."
We have handed over the responsibility of protecting security to a Silicon Valley company.
OpenAI’s imminent standards may be legally defensible. Under Canada's current privacy laws, organizations facing life-threatening emergencies can disclose information to police without consent.
But there is currently no legal requirement for AI companies to report suspected violent threats. Canada’s proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act has yet to be passed and may not directly impose police reporting obligations.
But some experts put forward another perspective. Legal scholar Mia Alder pointed out that in the Tumbler Ridge case, police and mental health professionals had previously been involved in Jesse's situation, guns had been confiscated and she had received psychiatric hospitalization.
She doesn’t think it’s all a matter of whether the AI reports ahead of time, the police also discovered something was wrong, but did nothing to stifle the disaster.
However, what should a "robot" that handles more than 700 million conversations every day bear?
Currently, the Canadian government is seeking answers from OpenAI and other AI platforms. The BC Provincial Office of Independent Investigations is evaluating whether to launch a formal investigation. The RCMP’s criminal investigation is still advancing.
The origin of the weapon Jesse used in the school that caused the most casualties remains a mystery.
The police found a total of four guns on campus and at home. Jesse's gun permit had expired as early as 2024, and the guns he used were not the ones that the police had confiscated and returned at that time.
No accountability, no explanation, no answers.
There were only mountains of bouquets piled under the spruce tree at Tumbler Ridge, and candles shaking in the cold February wind.
(Residents commemorate the victims)
Outside the Tumbler Ridge Community Center, there is a spruce tree overlooking the entire school.
After the incident, the tree was filled with flowers, candles, teddy bears and photos of the children. At night, candles are lit in front of every house. Local grocery stores set out free coffee and cookies. The library is open all day.
Survivor Maya Gebala, 12, is still struggling at Vancouver Children's Hospital.
Temporary classrooms are being set up. The resumption date has not yet been determined. Premier Eby promised students would never be forced to return to the building.
In a school with only 191 students, every empty seat has a name, and every name has a family that is still crying.
The town that thought it didn't have to worry about crime is learning a cruel new word, survivor.
(Residents commemorate the victims)