On Feb. 10, a shooting occurred at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, Canada. Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, killed 8 people, along with injuring 25 others and leaving a 12-year-old, Maya Gebala, in critical condition after she intervened to protect her classmates. Out of the eight killed, six of them were minors.
Shortly after the shooting occurred in the school, two more victims, Van Rootselaar’s mother, Jennifer Strang, and Van Rootselaar’s stepbrother Emmett Jacobs, were found dead at their family home. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, an unregistered shotgun was used to kill her mother and her stepbrother.
Once before, police seized guns from the home under the Criminal Code but returned them after a request from the owners. RCMP Assistant Commissioner Dwayne McDonald claimed that the shotgun was never seized, and a second weapon was found during the investigation. McDonald stated, “Police had attended Jacobs’s home on ‘multiple occasions’ over the past several years due to concerns about Van Rootselaar’s mental health.” She was apprehended at least twice under B.C.’s Mental Health Act and taken to hospital “in some circumstances,” according to globalnews.ca.
Investigators confirmed that Van Rootselaar brought two weapons to the school — a long gun and a modified rifle. She died by suicide following the attack. No note was left, and authorities have not released a confirmed motive.
As of now, the community is hoping for Gebala to heal and for all of the families of the victims to recover from the situation.
On Feb. 16, a shooting occurred during a high school hockey game at the Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket, RI, and left two people dead and three people in critical condition.
Those killed were the shooter’s ex-wife, Rhonda Dorgan, and the shooter’s adult son, Aiden Dorgan, 23. Rhonda Dorgan’s parents, Gerald and Linda Dorgan, and a family friend, Thomas Geruso, were critically injured.
According to Tina Goncalves, chief of the Pawtucket Police Department, the shooter’s birth name was identified as Robert Dorgan, but Robert’s preferred name was Roberta Esposito. After the fatalities occurred, Esposito died from a “self-inflicted gunshot wound,” as reported by usatoday.com.
Players on the bench were ducking for cover and people in the stands hid under their seats. Some players even ran out of the building in their hockey gear. In the ice rink, bystanders stepped in to overpower Esposito and eventually de-escalate the situation.
Prior to the shooting, Esposito had a complicated relationship with their family. In 2020, Rhonda Dorgan filed for divorce from Esposito. She originally wrote that “gender reassignment surgery” and “narcissistic personality disorder” were the grounds for divorce, but those reasons were later replaced with “irreconcilable differences,” according to nytimes.com.
The investigations of both of these shootings remain ongoing.