By Ismail Shakil and Ryan Patrick Jones
Feb 10 (Reuters) – Ten people are dead including the shooter after a woman opened fire at a high school in western Canada on Tuesday before turning the gun on herself, police said.
The blast, one of the country’s deadliest mass casualty events in recent history, brought to Canada the most common type of mass shooting in the neighboring United States.
Six people were found dead inside a high school in the town of Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia, two more people were found dead in a residence believed to be connected to the incident, and another person died on the way to the hospital, said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
At least two other people were hospitalized with serious or life-threatening injuries, and as many as 25 people were being treated for non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
A shooting suspect was also found dead from what appears to be a self-inflicted injury , police said, adding that they did not believe there were any more suspects or an ongoing threat to the public.
Police described the shooter as a woman – an unusual development since mass shootings in North America are almost always carried out by men.
A police active shooter alert said the suspect was described “as a woman in a dress with brown hair.” Police Superintendent Ken Floyd later confirmed in a press conference that the suspect described in the alert was the same person who was found dead at the school. Police did not say how many of the victims may have been minors.
ONE OF CANADA’S WORST MASS CAUSE INCIDENTS
Tumbler Ridge is a remote municipality with a population of about 2,400 people in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in northern British Columbia, about 1,155 km (717 miles) northeast of Vancouver. Pictures of the city show a snow-covered landscape full of pine trees.
“Floyd told reporters that several injuries and several dead were inside the school as officers passed the scene.
“We are still trying other victims, and I have no updates on whether that number may increase. The scene was very dramatic, and there are multiple victims who are still being treated,” said Floyd.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a statement on X: “I am devastated by today’s horrific shootings in Tumbler Ridge, BC. My prayers and deepest condolences are with the families and friends who lost loved ones to these horrific acts of violence.”
In April 2020, a 51-year-old man disguised in a police uniform and driving a fake police car shot and killed 22 people in a 13-hour rampage in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia, before police killed him at a gas station about 90 km (60 miles) from the site of his first killing.
In Canada’s worst school shooting, in December 1989, a gunman killed 14 students and wounded 13 at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, before committing suicide.
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil in Ottawa and Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto; Writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Christopher Cushing, Michael Perry and Don Durfee)