‘Nomadic lifestyle’ of Tumbler Ridge shooter, who created shopping mall massacre game

Police have said they made multiple visits for mental health concerns to the split-level home in Tumbler Ridge that Van Rootselaar shared with her mother, Jennifer Jacobs, and 11-year-old stepbrother, Emmett Jacobs.

RCMP say Van Rootselaar, 18, killed them both in the family home before continuing her killing spree at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where she shot dead a teacher’s aide and five children.

The shooter had been apprehended multiple times under B.C.’s Mental Health Act, and had dropped out of school four years ago, police say.

A 2015 B.C. Supreme Court decision in a dispute between the shooter’s parents describes Jennifer Jacobs, moving with her children between Newfoundland and Labrador, Grand Cache in Alberta and Powell River, B.C., in the previous five years.

Jacobs, also known as Jennifer Strang, was found to have engaged in “reprehensible conduct” by failing to give her children’s father enough notice that she was moving back to Newfoundland in August 2015.

She was ordered to return their children to B.C.

Police investigators in white protective suits were working Thursday at the Tumbler Ridge home where the killings began.

Outside the home, there were signs of the lives erased, blue bins and a pickup truck in the driveway.

In the snowy front yard lay a bicycle, tangled in yellow police tape.

In the court ruling, Justice Anthony Saunders blames Jennifer Jacobs’ “nomadic lifestyle” for Justin Jan Vanrootselaar not having vigorously pursued his parental rights. The court spells the father’s surname without the space.

“Ms. Strang acknowledges in her affidavit that there have been at least months at a time when Mr. Vanrootselaar has had no idea where the children have been,” Saunders notes.

Jacobs is described in the court documents as being pregnant with a child due in January 2016. Her existing children, Saunders’ ruling says, had had “no personal contact” with their father at the time of the ruling, although they were beginning to have phone contact.

Jennifer Jacobs’ Facebook account lists her hometown as Lawn, N.L.

In that small community of about 600 near the coast of the French islands of St. Pierre-Miquelon and about a 400-kilometre drive west of St. John’s, she is remembered as an occasional visitor.

Resident Doris Strang is unrelated but says Jacobs used to visit from B.C. when her grandmother was still alive, never staying for very long.

“It’s a tragedy,” Strang said in an interview Thursday. “It’s affected a lot of people in this little town … (people) are just outraged about it, that this could happen, and it could have been worse.”

According to a 2018 post on her social media, Jacobs had five children. She was featured in a 2023 article from the northeast B.C. news site Energeticcity.ca, urging parents to push for better health care.

The article was published after a nurse said Jacobs’ then-seven-year-old son had a stomach bug that turned out to be appendicitis.

Jacobs’ Facebook profile says she worked for Tumbler Ridge coal mining company Conuma Resources. Her friend list includes numerous residents of both Lawn and Tumbler Ridge.

They include Cia Edmonds, the mother of 12-year-old Maya Gebala who was shot by Van Rootselaar and is gravely injured in BC Children’s Hospital.

Police have said Van Rootselaar chose her victims at the school at random.

— Jack Farrell in Edmonton, Brenna Owen in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., and Devin Stevens in Halifax

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 12, 2026.

The Canadian Press

by The Canadian Press

‘Nomadic lifestyle’ of Tumbler Ridge shooter, who created shopping mall massacre game

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