TUMBLER RIDGE — Police behind street blockades strung yellow tape around buildings in the tiny British Columbia community of Tumbler Ridge on Wednesday morning as families grieved and officials worked to understand a mass shooting at a school and home that left 10 dead, including the shooter.
The previous afternoon, Tumbler Ridge Secondary School was a scene of chaos and fear as the town went on lockdown, with video showing students walking out of the building with their hands up.
The next morning, residents were slip-sliding around banks of snow and sheets of ice on otherwise quiet streets of one-story homes in this former coal boom town in the northeast B.C. wilderness where lowlands of white spruce and lodgepole pine slam into the hard rock of the Hart range of the Rockies.
Pastor Gerald Krauss of the New Life Assembly church in Tumbler Ridge says he sheltered at the town’s community centre during the lockdown and afterwards, as desperate parents searched for their children among survivors.
He says he stayed until the last parent had been told of the fate of their children, finally getting home at 4 a.m. Wednesday.
“All of the parents came to the community centre looking for their children and some found their children, and some did not,” he said.
“And so it’s a tragedy, you know. No one ever wants to experience losing one of their children.”
Condolences for Tumbler Ridge poured in from across the province and country, and from as far away as Europe, Asia, the Olympic Games in Italy and war-torn Ukraine.
In Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney ordered flags lowered to half-mast on government buildings and the Peace Tower for seven days. “Parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, are waking up this morning, without one of their loved ones. It is a difficult time. Canada is grieving, grieving with you,” the prime minister told reporters.
In Great Britain, King Charles said in a statement that he and his wife express their deepest possible sympathy.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “no one should remain indifferent” when children are killed. “Such tragedies should never happen anywhere, in any country in the world,” he wrote.
Expressions of sympathy also came from French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Tumbler Ridge is a so-called “instant town,” created to mine coal for a boom in the 1980s that eventually turned bust, forcing the town to reinvent itself by diversifying into tourism, oil and gas exploration, and forestry. The community, it is said, is named as nod to the boulders that occasionally clatter and plunge off nearby cliffs.
Jon Cooper, the coach of Canada’s Olympic men’s hockey team, grew up in Prince George, B.C., the closest major city to Tumbler Ridge. Speaking to reporters at the Olympics in Italy, Cooper said he remembers the boom times.
“You think about tragedies that happen … usually they happen somewhere else, so you never really feel the effect of it touching close to home. But this one’s close to home, and my heart goes out to all the families,” Cooper said.
The investigation continues. RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald, was set to hold a news conference later Wednesday in Surrey.
Police have yet to comment on what they have learned about the circumstances or possible motivations of the shooter. It’s believed the shooter killed two people at a home before going to the school and committing one of Canada’s worst mass shootings.
Police said the shooter died by suicide.
RCMP Supt. Ken Floyd said Tuesday that about 25 people were hurt at the school, including two with life-threatening injuries.
Police were called about an active shooter at the school at 1:20 p.m. Tuesday, and arrived within minutes while triggering a lockdown that lasted several hours. Residents sheltered in place in homes and community spaces as police searched for a suspect described as a “female in a dress with brown hair.”
Floyd said that police encountered a “very dramatic scene,” at the school, finding six victims dead, as well as the body of the shooter, while another person died on the way to hospital.
B.C. Emergency Health Services says it received an initial call at 1:22 p.m., and took two patients by air to hospital — one in serious condition, the other critical.
Tumbler Ridge Mayor Darryl Krakowka said that when he first heard the toll of the shootings that have devastated the community, he “broke down.”
“I have lived here for 18 years,” he said of the community that he called a “big family.”
“I probably know every one of the victims.”
Police have not released the ages of the victims.
Carney said Tuesday that he had connected with B.C. Premier David Eby to express his condolences.
Eby said he wanted British Columbians and all Canadians “to wrap the people of Tumbler Ridge, wrap these families, with love.”
Krauss said “everyone knows everyone” in the town.
“There’s children that are church children. There are children that are hockey children. Children that are basketball children. People from everywhere in our town, but they all belong to our community and everyone knows everyone, so it affects everybody.”
He said the effects reverberated through the town’s first responders, too.
“It doesn’t happen in our country. And when it happens in your town … It affects every single person.”
— Ashley Joannou and Nono Shen in Vancouver and Wolfgang Depner in Victoria
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 11, 2026.
The Canadian Press
