CONFIRMED: Tumbler Ridge Shooter Was Entrenched in TCC Lifestyle

To recap, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar shot and killed her 39-year-old mother and 11-year-old stepbrother at home, then drove a mile to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and murdered a teacher and five students between the ages of 12 and 13 before killing herself. Twenty-seven others were injured.

Police say they had been to the house before for mental health calls, weapons seizures, and apprehensions under the Mental Health Act. Guns were confiscated but were later returned after the owner petitioned for them. A long gun and a modified handgun were recovered at the scene. Another shotgun was found at the house.

Now let’s talk about the home environment.

Jesse’s mother loved guns. She posted photos of a cabinet holding multiple rifles on Facebook with captions about taking them out for target practice. She publicly promoted her child’s YouTube channel, encouraging friends to subscribe to videos about hunting, self-reliance, and firearms. Archived footage shows Jesse firing a Desert Eagle, a 12-gauge shotgun, and a semi-automatic carbine at a range.

The gun culture in that house was not hidden. It was curated, displayed, and celebrated.

When guns are elevated to hobby, identity, and bonding inside a family, they can slowly become something else. They can become the default solution to stress, anger, and alienation. When the tool you revere most is a weapon, it does not take a massive psychological leap for that weapon to become the answer to every problem.

The YouTube channel was not just about clean country air and target practice. There were posts about drugs like psychedelic mushrooms and DMT. A 2023 Reddit entry describing taking three grams of “Blue Meanie” mushrooms, breaking from reality, and nearly burning down the family home. There were admissions of psychiatric hospitalization. Mentions of antidepressants and antipsychotics. References to autism spectrum diagnosis. Public pleas about depression, transition, identity, and confusion.

The warning signs were not subtle. They were written down.

There was also family fracture.

Jesse’s biological father released a statement saying they were estranged and had not been allowed to be part of his child’s life. Court documents indicate the mother had to be ordered by a judge to allow the children telephone access to him. Jesse did not use the Van Rootselaar family name in regular life.

Add to that what has been described as a nomadic lifestyle, with the family reportedly moving between Newfoundland and Powell River, British Columbia. I’m not aware of how the family travelled, but that’s a 4500-mile trek.

The mother described herself as a Libertarian. You know, the party of guns, weed, and child brides. She celebrated firearms, but at the same time, she appeared to support Jesse’s gender transition. She even posted a trans-inclusive pride flag message about not harassing marginalized communities.

But this was not just a troubled teen in a rural town with access to guns.

Jesse created a mall shooting simulator on Roblox. The platform confirmed the account and removed it. The game had only been visited seven times, but the intent matters more than the traffic. Building a mass shooting simulator is not random teenage edginess. It is a hallmark of what is commonly called the true crime community, or TCC.

She also frequented an extremely violent website known for hosting uncensored gore videos. A place that started as a Reddit community before being banned. A place where shootings, beheadings, and suicides are consumed as content. Accounts associated with Jesse discussed violent footage as “addictive.” If it’s the same site I’m thinking of, it attracts many adherents of the TCC philosophy, and two other school shooters who took their own lives were known to frequent there.

The TCC is not a formal club. It is a loose collective of forums, Discord servers, social feeds, and content creators who orbit mass shootings like sports fans orbit teams. Some claim to analyze, some memorialize, and some glorify. In the far edges of that world, death tolls turn into tallies, manifestos are treated like sacred texts, and killers are recast as symbols for anyone nursing a grudge.

The TCC stretches all the way to the day of Columbine. Since that day 27 years ago, there have been those who gather to celebrate death and emulate their cowardly heroes. And with each new generation, it seems to pick up steam without any sign of slowing down. For years they called themselves Columbiners before changing to the ‘all-inclusive’ True Crime Community. This way they didn’t have to limit their admiration to just the Columbine shooters.

If anyone is looking for a motive here, the simplest and most historically consistent answer is copycat. Another young person marinating in shooter mythology, immersed in digital nihilism, with easy access to firearms at home.

That brings me to something I wrote the other day in my post about a “Trans to School Shooting Pipeline.”

I stand by the statistical observation that trans-identified school shooters and school shooting plotters appear overrepresented in the small sample of recent school shootings relative to their share of the population. That is an uncomfortable data point. It should not be buried. It should be studied.

But I failed to clarify something critical.

The pipeline I was referring to was not “being trans leads to violence.” It was the pipeline of TCC radicalization. Online spaces that romanticize mass killers disproportionately attract isolated, ostracized youth. LGBTQ kids, especially in unsupportive homes or communities, are statistically more likely to experience rejection, bullying, and alienation. That alienation makes online subcultures offering identity and belonging far more seductive.

The overwhelming majority of school shooters are white males who often espouse radical right ideologies. That is not controversial. It is documented. From Columbine forward, the list is long and depressingly consistent. If you want names, I can provide them.

Trans people are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Suggesting that being trans inherently increases someone’s likelihood of committing a mass shooting is false and irresponsible. That was never my argument.

Meanwhile, anti-trans vitriol has already flooded social media. Politicians and influencers rushed to weaponize this tragedy before the bodies were even buried. That reflex is as predictable as “thoughts and prayers.”

It is easier to scapegoat a marginalized identity than to examine the intersection of gun access, untreated mental health crises, online radicalization, and copycat mythology.

Jesse Van Rootselaar murdered children.

That fact stands on its own. Nothing about identity politics softens it. Nothing about prior suffering excuses it.

But if we want to understand why this keeps happening, the answer is not culture war sloganeering. It is not pretending patterns do not exist. It is not pretending guns in the home are neutral objects when they are fetishized and celebrated. It is not pretending that TCC spaces are harmless curiosity.

It is looking at the full ecosystem.

And admitting that we have seen this story before.

(Sources)