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An RCMP vehicle sits outside Tumbler Ridge
Secondary School in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., on Friday.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
In many parts of rural Canada, earning that first hunting licence is a rite of passage on par with a first kiss or a driver’s test. For Jennifer Strang, the mother of five young kids in small-town B.C., that proud day came in the summer of 2020.
Her parents marked the occasion on Aug. 30 by sending Facebook congratulations to Jennifer and her eldest child, then-13-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, for passing the province’s Conservation and Outdoor Recreation Education course and earning a firearms licence.
For Tumbler Ridge, the town of 2,400 people tucked among Rocky Mountain foothills loaded with moose, elk, mountain goat and other game, it was fairly ordinary.
But warning signs would soon emerge, and police – invoking laws designed to take guns away from public safety threats – seized the family’s firearms.
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That seizure was overturned. And now, the question of how Ms. Strang’s oldest child obtained four guns used to kill eight people, including Ms. Strang, despite Canada’s gun laws, remains unanswered.
Police say the shooter killed her mother and her 11-year-old half-brother at the family home on Tuesday. She then entered the town’s secondary school armed with two guns, killing six children aged 12 to 13 and a 39-year-old education assistant.
When police confronted the teen, she shot herself, police said during a Friday news conference.
Once the mother and teen earned their licences in 2020, shooting was no fleeting pandemic hobby. Subsequent social-media posts show the family hunting and shooting together – bagging a rabbit one day, heading for target practice another.
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By the summer of 2021, the shooter was posting on YouTube about “hunting, self reliance, guns and stuff” according to Ms. Strang’s Facebook page.
There would have been limits on that hobby. The shooter would have held a minor’s firearms licence, which permits the holder to borrow and use guns, but not to own them.
Ms. Strang, who the police identified as Jennifer Jacobs, held the adult version, a Possession and Acquisition Licence (PAL), that police said remained valid at the time of her death.
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Jennifer Strang, the mother of the shooter in the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, posted a photo on Facebook in August, 2024, of several long guns in a cabinet.HO/The Canadian Press
In the summer of 2024, she posted a photo of a gun locker filled with six long guns with the caption: “Think it’s time to take them out for some target practice.”
The shooter’s firearms licence lapsed in 2024.
But in the fall of 2023, her social media had veered into distressing territory. Posts expressed anguish about the delays in accessing hormone replacement therapy and explicitly spoke about being suicidal.
During that time, she set fire to her room while high on psychoactive mushrooms and, according to the RCMP, was detained for a psychiatric assessment by police. Some time later, she was held again for mental-health issues.
The RCMP said Thursday that “in the past couple years” local Mounties arrived at the home and seized guns because of a Criminal Code violation, but no charges were approved.
Under Canadian law, the Crown would need to make an application outlining a continuing safety threat in the home. Neither the RCMP nor the local court system has released any records that would have provided the Crown’s justification for seizing the firearms.
But the seizure timeline coincides with a period when the shooter was posting increasingly troubling imagery online.
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On Aug. 24, 2025, a new user calling themselves @jessssz opened an account on a website that bills itself as a place to post gore videos of people dying violently.
The user posted photos of guns – including an SKS rifle and a KRISS Vector gun – and a cat that matches photos on social-media accounts that The Globe and Mail has confirmed belonged to the shooter and her mother. The user wrote “I appreciate this post” in response to a long compilation of mass shooting videos.
RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald said Friday of the two firearms used at the school, police are unsure of the origins of the one that caused the most amount of damage. It had never been seized by police.
“We’re trying to determine how the suspect got that firearm. The investigation is continuing.”
Of the two firearms used in the killings at the shooter’s home, one was a shotgun, an unregistered weapon that had never been previously seized, he said.
‘The unimaginable’: Family of Tumbler Ridge shooter issues statement
It remains unclear how authorities missed a slew of online activity that should have raised red flags, according to Chris McBryan, a former RCMP member who served with the Canadian Firearms Program before retiring a decade ago.
“Looking at some of the online stuff, I would rate this person as a high risk right before this happens,” Mr. McBryan said.
If she obtained her licence in 2020, Ms. Strang would have had to renew five years later. But renewal forms don’t appear to take household mental health into consideration.
The closest the gun licensing process comes to examining any risk posed by other members of a gun user’s house appears to be a yes-or-no question on the application and renewal forms asking: “Do you know if you have ever been reported to the police or social services for violence, threatened or attempted violence, or other conflict in your home or elsewhere?”
