B.C. mass shooting shakes Newfoundland community killer's mother once called home
The deadly mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., is reverberating on the other side of the country in the small Newfoundland fishing community where the killer’s mother spent her early childhood and many of their family members still call home.
Police have identified Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, as the shooter. Van Rootselaar’s mother, Jennifer Jacobs, 39, and 11-year-old half-brother, Emmett Jacobs, were also found dead Tuesday at the family home in Tumbler Ridge. Van Rootselaar, who identified as a trans woman, then killed six people at the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School before dying from a self-inflicted wound, police say.
Jennifer Jacobs, who used the last name Strang on social media, spent her early years in Lawn, N.L., on the southern tip of the Burin Peninsula.
“She lived next door to me, right next to our store,” Barry Tarrant, who owns the local general store in the community of about 670 people, said Friday.
“She was just a regular, happy-go-lucky little child.”
Her family moved west when she was young, Tarrant said. “They went away many years ago.”
He learned the mass shooting in B.C. had connections to the small Newfoundland community on the day after the killings.
“It’s a sad situation — sad, sad, sad,” Tarrant said. “You never know what you’re going to hear when you wake up in the morning…. It breaks your heart.”
He questions why authorities didn’t do more to address Van Rootselaar’s mental health problems, and why guns that were seized from the family’s Tumbler Ridge home at one point were eventually returned.
“They’ve got to (kill somebody) before the cops do something; that’s the stupidest thing,” Tarrant said.
Police found a long gun and a modified handgun Tuesday at the scene of the school shooting in Tumbler Ridge.
Lawn is no stranger to hunting rifles.
“A lot of people go moose hunting here and duck hunting and partridge hunting,” Tarrant said. “That’s a part of their life.”
Jacobs’ father, Russell Strang, was a fisherman who moved west with his wife for work after the collapse of the cod fishery, Tarrant said.
“People who had young kids, I guess they had no choice,” he said. “They had to get a job.”
Jacobs’ father “has six or seven siblings still in the community,” Tarrant said.
“He fished with his father for years. They had a big family. They all had their own boats,” he said. “That was the life for everybody back then.”
He remembers Jacobs as a child, riding bicycles with her brothers and sisters, and playing a lot of soccer.
“She was a nice, friendly little girl,” Tarrant said.
“She used to come up to my store (for) ice cream or a treat…. She always had a smile on her face.”
He doesn’t believe Jacobs visited Lawn much in recent years.
“I don’t think she was ever home with her kids, to be honest with you,” Tarrant said. “I’ve never seen them anyway.”
The Tumbler Ridge tragedy has touched Lawn in another way. Shannda Aviugana-Durand, the 39-year-old educational assistant killed at Tumbler Ridge Secondary on Tuesday, was married to Mark Stacey, who is also from the small Newfoundland community, said Tarrant.
“They were home for a few years then they went back again,” he said.
“It’s a shock really. You watch the news and it makes you cry.”
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