On Tuesday afternoon, Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, grabbed two firearms from her home and, the authorities in British Columbia said, killed her mother and 11-year-old brother. Then she traveled a mile to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killed five students and one educator before turning her weapon on herself.
The mass shooting, which also left two children injured with gunshot wounds, has sent shock waves across Canada, where such violence is rare, and has devastated the small rural community of 2,400 people.
An investigation of Ms. Van Rootselaar’s online life offers a chronicle of a young person’s gradual descent into mental health crises and radicalization into extreme violence.
Her online presence seems to show a teenager who went from being fascinated by, and frequently using, firearms, to using an array of prescription and illegal narcotics, and, eventually, frequenting some of the internet’s darkest corners, where she avidly consumed and commented on violent, nihilistic content.
Ms. Van Rootselaar’s mental-health struggles were no secret to the local authorities or the community, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and interviews with Tumbler Ridge residents. The police said officers had been to her family home, which she shared with four siblings and her mother, including to intervene after she started a fire while under the influence of illegal drugs and to confiscate weapons that were later returned.
Ms. Van Rootselaar was raised a boy and began transitioning at least five years ago to female, according to the police, which identified her as female.
A 2021 post by her mother, Jessica Jacobs, who appeared to use her maiden name, Strang, for herself and her child, focused on the teenager’s love of firearms.
“Check out my oldest son Jesse Strang YouTube Channel,” the mother said. “He posts about hunting, self reliance, guns and stuff he likes to do,” she added. The police said that Ms. Van Rootselaar had a minor’s firearms license that had expired in 2024.
Ms. Van Rootselaar used her mother’s maiden name for much of her online activity, which stretches back to at least 2019, when she created a Reddit account.
In 2023, she posted on the site about dealing with suicidal thoughts, exploring drugs, playing video games and undergoing a gender transition. The Reddit account name matches the same username posted on the Facebook account of Ms. Van Rootselaar’s mother when she described her child’s YouTube videos.
In February 2023, Ms. Van Rootselaar posted that she had burned down her house while high on psychedelic mushrooms.
In the same post she said that she had been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, and that she suffered from a number of mental-health conditions, including depression, as well as being diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Elsewhere she listed several different kinds of prescription anti-depressants and anti-psychotic drugs she claimed to be using alongside smoking cannabis and ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms, which are illegal in Canada.
That same month, Ms. Van Rootselaar, who had begun socially identifying as female and was beginning to buy girls’ clothes, said she was on a six-month waiting list for hormonal treatment to medically transition at a hospital in British Columbia. There is no indication that she ever actually received gender-affirming care.
Eryn Collins, a spokeswoman at Northern Health, a regional health care authority in northern British Columbia, said Ms. Van Rootselaar was not in any inpatient care nor was she on a leave from inpatient care at the time of the shooting.
Posts on the Reddit account also show Ms. Van Rootselaar’s continued fascination with weapons. She posted a photo of a semiautomatic rifle matching a Chinese Norinco SKS, the same model that was posted on the mother’s Facebook account.
The same gun was posted, by an account with a username similar to Ms. Van Rootselaar’s Reddit name, on a site where users can post uncensored videos of violence and extreme gore, including deaths, beheadings and suicides. The site, a particularly horrific corner of the internet, started as a community on Reddit, but was ultimately banned from the platform in 2019.
On the site, the account associated with Ms. Van Rootselaar celebrated videos of shootings, and discussed how she found videos of violent content “addictive.”
An account on Roblox, an online game popular with young people, which The New York Times matched to Ms. Van Rootselaar’s online footprint, hosted a game that allowed users to simulate carrying out a mass shooting at a mall. In a statement, a Roblox spokesperson said the company had “removed the user account connected to this horrifying incident as well as any content associated with the suspect.”
The company added that the game was only visited seven times.
Video games like Minecraft and Roblox have been criticized for contributing to child radicalization, with researchers documenting digital worlds where players can simulate terrorist violence and mass shootings, like the 2019 attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 51 people were killed.
The Times verified that other accounts belonged to Ms. Van Rootselaar by matching biographical details, common user names and images from family members’ social media accounts. For example, what appears to be the same cat is visible in both a photograph on her mother’s Instagram account and a photograph from Ms. Van Rootselaar’s account on the extremely violent website that started as a Reddit forum.
Ms. Van Rootselaar’s online life fits a pattern of online descent into extreme violence, experts said, identifying “nihilism” as a rising threat among children in Europe and North America.
“We are seeing a trend proliferating globally of children being attracted to this concept of nihilistic violence,” said Steven Rai, who tracks extremism in Canada at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank. “These are individuals who gain a sense of excitement and entertainment from consuming violent content online, attack footage and extremist content in some cases.”
In December, the Canadian government listed two new terrorist groups that it described as “nihilistic,” a form of extremism rooted in a hatred of humans.
In the aftermath of the shooting, there has also been a focus on Ms. Van Rootselaar’s gender identity, at a time when transgender issues have become a socially polarizing force.
In a handful of high-profile shootings in the United States in recent years, the perpetrator has been wrongly identified as transgender on message boards and social media, including in the assassination last year of Charlie Kirk.
Fewer than 1 in 1,000 mass shooters over the past decade have been identified as transgender, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks gun violence in the United States using police reports. The group defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims were shot or killed.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff is the Canada bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the country.
The post Before Mass Killing, Mental Breakdowns and Online Violent Extremism appeared first on New York Times.
