At least nine people were killed at a high school and a residential property in the Canadian province of British Columbia, police said Tuesday, in the country’s deadliest school shooting in decades.
Police found six people dead and dozens injured when they responded to reports of an active shooter at the school in Tumbler Ridge, a small rural town in the province’s northeast, around 1:20 p.m. Tuesday local time.
Another person died while being transported to hospital, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said.
Two more people were found dead at a residence believed to be connected to the incident, police said in a statement.
The suspected shooter was found deceased at the school with “what appears to be a self-inflicted injury,” said police.
The suspect was described as a brown-haired woman wearing a dress, in an emergency alert which went out to residents’ phones, according to CNN affiliate CBC News.
Two victims were airlifted from the school to hospital with serious or life-threatening injuries. About 25 other people with non-life-threatening injuries are being treated at a local medical centre, police said.
Tumbler Ridge Secondary School has 175 students from Grades 7 to 12, according to the province’s website. Police have not yet determined a motive for the shooting, Superintendent Ken Floyd, North District commander, said in a press conference Tuesday.
“We are not in a place now to be able to understand why or what may have motivated this tragedy,” Floyd said.
“I think we will struggle to determine the ‘why,’ but we will try our best to determine what transpired,” he added.
It is not yet clear how many of the dead were children, or what, if any, their connections were to the shooter, Floyd said.
Police have identified the shooter but will not be releasing details for privacy reasons, Floyd said. He declined to say whether the shooter was a child.
Tumbler Ridge is a town of about 2,400 people at the base of the Rocky Mountains in western Canada, about 680 kilometers (422 miles) from the US border.
Police do not believe there is any ongoing threat to the public. The earlier alert asking the public to shelter in place was lifted at 5:45 p.m. local time.
Mass shootings are extraordinarily rare in Canada, which has much stricter gun laws than the US. According to the Small Arms Research project, there are 121 firearms for every 100 residents in the US, compared with an estimated 35 guns per 100 residents for its northern neighbor.
School shootings of this scale are almost unheard of. In 1989, a gunman murdered 14 women at École Polytechnique in Montréal, in a massacre that prompted a national reckoning about violence against women and led to tighter gun laws.
It is illegal to purchase an assault-style rifle in Canada – the class of weapons used in several of the deadliest school shootings in the US.
Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and Tumbler Ridge Elementary School will be closed for the rest of the week, a notice on the local school district website said.
British Columbia Premier David Eby said the government “will ensure every possible support for community members in the coming days, “as we all try to come to terms with this unimaginable tragedy.”
“Our hearts are in Tumbler Ridge tonight with the families of those who have lost loved ones,” he said in a post to X.
Larry Neufeld, the provincial member of parliament for Peace River South, which encompasses Tumbler Ridge, called the shooting “tragic and deeply disturbing” in a statement posted to social media.
“This is a small, close-knit town, and the impact of an event like this is felt by everyone,” Neufeld said.
By CNN
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