Canadian school shooter’s online activity shows penchant for extreme violence and violent content, expert says
Internet activity for an 18-year-old after fatal shooting inside a Canadian high school last week revealed an interest in guns, extreme violence and a history of consuming “violent” content, according to expert analysis.
The gunman, identified as Jesse Van Rootselaar, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, spent time in the dark corners of the internet, writing about his problems with substance abuse and mental health. Van Rootselaar referred to the horror content as “addictive” in a post shared with CBS News by analysts at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit, non-profit organization that works on solutions to counter extremism.
He was working on the website WatchPeopleDie, which hosts material showing graphic violence against people and animals. The site has become a common thread among the purveyors of extreme violence, as CBS News did before reportand a few other school shooters who frequent the area. Cody Zoschak, a senior manager at the agency, told CBS News that Van Rootselaar’s digital footprint revealed a visit to the 15-year-old’s WatchPeopleDie page. Natalie Rupnowwho shot and killed a student and a teacher at a Wisconsin school in 2024.
Zoschak said these online communities can exacerbate common teenage emotions such as loneliness and hopelessness. In the digital age, young people who feel isolated can turn to online spaces where they can find validation from strangers, instead of seeking help from their communities. But these spaces can be a dangerous echo chamber with strangers with bad intentions, he said.
“The worst influence you can have is the meanest kid in your school. Now, the worst influence you can have is the meanest person on the Internet,” Zoschak said. “There’s a big difference in scale between those two.”
By comparing social media profile features with usernames and images with reference to content posted online, ISD analysts were able to identify accounts associated with Van Rootselaar and pinpoint when the cyber shooter’s career began to take a turn for the worse.
Zoschak said ISD was able to track Van Rootselaar’s activity across various online accounts as of 2019, when the shooter would have been about 12 years old. The posts started with discussions about video games, and then, in 2021, there was a post about a photo of a gun that Van Rootselaar claimed to be holding. Around 2023, Van Rootselaar started posting about substance abuse and mental health issues. Zoschak said Van Rootselaar had an inactive year in 2024, with no traceable vacancies. Then five months ago, Van Rootselaar created an account on WatchPeopleDie, which featured comments made on a number of amazing posts.
In addition, independent media company 404 Media recently reported on a shooting simulation game created on Roblox that online sleuths linked to Van Rootselaar. It was not immediately clear when the simulation was created.
“We have removed the user account linked to this shocking incident and any content related to the suspect,” Roblox said in a statement sent to CBS News. “We are committed to fully support law enforcement in their investigation.”
The game was in a separate app called Roblox Studio, which could only be accessed by coders and developers, so the game only had seven visits. But these kinds of games and others painful content they have entered the big arena before with the recreational school shootings at Columbine, Uvalde and Parkland, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
As Van Rootselaar fell victim to violent content online, mental health concerns also arose at home, when police responded to mental health calls at Van Rootselaar’s family home a few years ago.
During a press conference last week, police said Van Rootselaar had been arrested several times under the British Columbia Mental Health Act, which allows police to arrest a person with a mental disorder who may need treatment.
Six people died at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School – most of them under the age of 13. Van Rootselaar’s 11-year-old brother was also found dead in the residence. The shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School was Canada’s worst since 1989, when Marc Lepine, 25, shot and killed 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique before killing himself.
