Following the deadly shootings at a school in western Canada, police publicly identified the suspected attacker. The suspect was identified as an 18-year-old transgender woman, the police in the western province of British Columbia said. It is now also certain that she was a resident of the rural town of Tumbler Ridge. Yet the motive continues to be a mystery.
The police were called on Tuesday (local time) to the high school in the town, which lies roughly 435 miles (about 700 kilometers) northeast of Vancouver. The alleged shooter killed six people at the school and later took her own life, according to police. Two more bodies were found in a residence.
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An apparent link between the acts is suggested, as the other two victims are the suspect’s 39-year-old mother and her 11-year-old stepbrother, according to police. The 18-year-old allegedly first killed family members and then headed toward the high school. There, police later found the other victims — three female students, two male students, and a teacher — among other places in the school’s stairwell and library.
Two injured in critical condition
The police initially spoke of ten fatalities in total, but later revised that figure to nine. The ages of the killed students were first listed as 13 to 17 years old, then corrected to 12 to 13. Police also spoke of roughly two dozen injuries. At least two of the injured remained in critical condition, investigators said. Some victims were injured while trying to flee to safety in a panic inside the school.
A student told CBC: “We grabbed desks and barricaded the doors.” The scene at the crime site felt “almost surreal.” “It felt like I was in a place I had only seen on television before.”
>The small community and the country as a whole have been shaken by the events. When releasing further investigative results, authorities stressed that it was important to handle with sensitivity those who had lost loved ones, the police said.
Motive remains a mystery
Nothing is known yet about the motive behind the attack. The relationship between the alleged teenage shooter and the victims is part of the inquiry, the police said. A spokesperson noted that emergency crews had, in previous years, repeatedly visited the suspect’s home and found weapons. The officer also referenced “mental health issues” of the alleged shooter, without providing further details.
Regarding the suspect’s identity, the officer said: “We identify the person as she identifies herself publicly and on social media.” He added that the shooter was registered at birth as male. At present, police have no information about whether the suspect faced bullying or other discrimination at school. She had left the school four years earlier.
Dark memories of a 37-year-old crime
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney appeared visibly moved at a press conference and announced that the next seven days would be observed as a period of national mourning. He described Tumbler Ridge, the site of the incident, as “a town of miners, teachers, construction workers, families who built lives there—people who always stood by one another.”
According to Canadian media, this is the deadliest incident of its kind at a school or college in the country since 1989, when a 25-year-old man opened fire at a technical college in Montreal, killing 14 female students before taking his own life.
In Canada, gun violence is far rarer than in the neighboring United States, where the problem is much larger and school shootings occur more frequently. Experts attribute this to Canada’s markedly stricter gun laws.
Trans shooter in the United States
In the United States, there was already in August 2025 a mass shooting by a transgender woman: at a Catholic school in Minnesota, a 23-year-old killed two children and then turned the guns on herself. The act was used by Republican lawmakers and conservative media in the United States to fuel hostility toward transgender people (TheColu.mn reported). In Canada, such reactions have been rare in this case so far. Right-wing forces in the United States—and also in Germany—have been trying to cast the transgender community as a scapegoat. Beatrix von Storch, a deputy leader of the AfD, tied her criticism of trans people to the widespread contempt for public broadcasters in her circles: “Dear Tagesschau, the tenfold murderer of the British Columbia school massacre is said to be a man. Or in your language: a trans woman. Why are you concealing that in the 8 p.m. edition today?” What she omits is that the shooter’s identity was only revealed shortly before the broadcast at a press conference.
The claim from right-wing voices that trans people are primarily responsible for such violence was rejected by experts: following the Minnesota incident, The Violence Project reported that only 0.11 percent of mass shooting suspects are transgender — while about one percent of the population identifies as transgender, and the share is higher among younger people. In total, there have been around 4,400 mass shootings in the United States with more than four injuries or deaths since 2013. (dpa)
