Listen: Mother of Tumbler Ridge shooter interviewed about struggle to get care for another child two years before tragedy

TUMBLER RIDGE, B.C. — The mother of the Tumbler Ridge shooter spoke out about healthcare shortages in northeast B.C. just over two years before she was one of the first victims of a mass shooting perpetrated by her child. 

Energeticcity.ca is releasing audio from an interview conducted in November 2023, when Jennifer Jacobs – then named as Jennifer Strang – spoke about her struggles to access care in Tumbler Ridge after one of her other children developed appendicitis. 

Speaking of access to care more broadly at the time, she told Energeticcity.ca: “Some [patients had] appendix-related [illnesses], and some of them were diabetes.

“Some of them were other things. Some others went to the emergency [room and said,] ‘I think it’s this,’ and then they got a prescription thrown at them without any testing or anything.”

At the time, she described it as “an assembly line.”

She added: “It’s just sad that just because we are short-staffed, and we’re in the north and all this stuff – people could and have died from things that are completely preventable, and that is insane.

“It doesn’t even seem like real life.”

Then, some 27 months later, her 18-year-old daughter Jesse Van Rootselaar committed a deadly mass shooting in the small community where she lived. 

She killed Jacobs and her stepbrother, then went to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killed six more, including an educator and five children aged between 12 and 13, before inflicting fatal wounds on herself.

In a press conference on February 11th, the BC RCMP confirmed Rootselaar was known to police, with a history of attendance at the family home and some of which were related to mental health issues. 

In the wake of the tragedy in Tumbler Ridge, Peace River North MLA Jordan Kealy called for better mental health support in the region, also citing the deaths of two young people in Fort St. John over the 2025-26 Christmas break. 

Late last year, Tumbler Ridge had been embroiled in an ongoing controversy over cuts to the on-call ER hours at the local health centre, amid chronic problems with short-staffing across the northeast.

Energeticcity.ca reached out to Northern Health for a response but did not hear back before publication.