As details are still emerging about Canada’s deadliest school shooting in decades, one of the first people to arrive outside Tumbler Ridge Secondary School as the incident unfolded says the small northern British Columbia community is facing a reckoning.
“People are looking for people to blame,” says Trent Ernst, the publisher of the Tumbler RidgeLines website, who livestreamed the police response to the active shooter situation Tuesday. “And we’re seeing that happen already.”
Mounties have not indicated a motive for the mass shooting that left 10 people dead, including the shooter, and more than two dozen others injured.
CTV News has identified the suspected shooter as Jesse Strang. Authorities have not yet publicly confirmed the suspect’s name, even as rumours and accusations have run rampant online.
Ernst says he arrived at the school grounds and began streaming video after receiving a call from a school superintendent.
“I could see the RCMP moving into and out of the building freely,” he told CTV News Your Morning Vancouver on Wednesday. “They weren’t going in as if there was a tactical operation going on. So I knew that whatever happened had already happened.”
The journalist initially assumed that a student had “shown up with a wooden handgun as a joke,” he says. “This is beyond the pale of anything that I could have imagined would happen here.”
Within hours of the shooting, Tara Armstrong, the MLA for Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream, wrote on social media that the killings were part of a growing “epidemic of transgender violence” in Western countries.
Condolences have poured in from across Canada and around the world, with Prime Minister Mark Carney, King Charles, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi joining a chorus of those offering consolation to the victims of the attack.
Ernst says the 2,400 residents of Tumbler Ridge are “resilient,” but have many difficult days ahead.
“There are strong people here. There are people here who have deep connections to other people in the community,” he says. “But it’s going to be hard. I’m not gonna lie, it’s going to be very hard.”
Mounties are expected to provide more details about the incident during a news conference late Wednesday morning.