Tumbler Ridge shooting — eight victims

The B.C. Notice of Civil Claim (S-261734) alleges that no later than late spring/early summer 2025, when the shooter was 17, she described gun-violence scenarios to ChatGPT over several days; that OpenAI's monitoring system flagged the posts and routed them to human moderators; that roughly twelve OpenAI employees identified them as indicating an imminent risk of serious harm to others and recommended informing Canadian law enforcement; that leadership rebuffed that request and only banned the account; and that she then opened a second account, never detected, which she used to keep planning and to receive 'pseudo-therapy' from ChatGPT. The claim pleads a duty to warn arising from ChatGPT's assumed role as mental-health counsellor, plus defective design of GPT-4o. The seven U.S. suits filed 2026-04-29 in N.D. Cal. add aiding and abetting and name Sam Altman personally; counsel Jay Edelson has said they will likely seek more than US$1 billion.

The deaths are officially established by the RCMP: on 2026-02-10, Jesse Van Rootselaar (also known as Jesse Strang, b. 2007-08-04), 18, killed her mother Jennifer Strang and her 11-year-old half-brother at the family home, then killed five students aged 12-13 and education assistant Shannda Aviugana-Durand, 39, at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School at about 2:20 p.m., wounding others including 12-year-old Maya Gebala, before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Nine deaths in total; eight victims. RCMP recovered four firearms (two at the residence, two at the school) and Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald said there was no specific targeting of individuals at the school. Court documents containing the RCMP's investigative material were unsealed in August 2026 but remain heavily redacted, including the response timestamps.

The AI-specific facts are unusually well corroborated by the company itself, not merely alleged. OpenAI has publicly acknowledged that it banned the shooter's ChatGPT account in June 2025 after an internal review of gun-violence content, that it considered referring the account to the RCMP and decided the activity did not meet its threshold for referral, and that she later evaded the ban with a second account. Sam Altman's letter of 2026-04-23 to the Tumbler Ridge community states: 'I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June.' Premier David Eby called the apology 'necessary, and yet grossly insufficient.'

What is not established: the content of any prompt or output. The B.C. claim quotes no chat text and attaches no logs, and neither the RCMP nor OpenAI has released any. The BC Coroners Service inquest ordered on 2026-03-03 will examine mental health services, firearm acquisition, and the role of artificial intelligence, including how information is shared between online platforms and law enforcement — but it has not been held, so there is no inquest finding, no verdict, and no official causal determination on the AI question. A coroner's inquest in B.C. is also non-adversarial and cannot assign legal fault. No civil case has reached a ruling on the merits.

Official findings: Cause of death: gunshot wounds (per RCMP; individual BC Coroners Service determinations not public). Manner: homicide for the eight victims; suicide for the shooter. Investigating agencies: RCMP (BC RCMP Major Crime); BC Coroners Service. Findings: RCMP has stated there was no specific targeting of individuals at the school and recovered four firearms, with the main weapon's origin unknown; unsealed but redacted court documents were reported in August 2026. A coroner's inquest into all nine deaths was ordered 2026-03-03 with AI explicitly in scope — not yet held, no findings or recommendations exist. No official body has attributed causal responsibility to ChatGPT. No criminal charges (perpetrator deceased); no charges against OpenAI.

Model: GPT-4o is pleaded explicitly and repeatedly in the B.C. Notice of Civil Claim, which alleges OpenAI 'designed, developed, deployed, and profited from GPT-4o', that GPT-4o's memory, sycophancy and anthropomorphic features were 'intentionally designed to foster psychological dependency', that it was released months ahead of schedule without adequate safety testing, and that it became available to the public in Canada on 2025-05-13. As with the FSU case, no authenticated log ties a specific model version to the shooter's sessions.

Research notes (2026-08-24): Downloaded the Courthouse News copy of the Notice of Civil Claim via curl (WebFetch was blocked with 403), found it was a 25-page scanned document with no text layer, and OCR'd it with pdftoppm + tesseract to read it in full. That is how the S-261734 mismatch surfaced: the claim's own caption and paras. 1-4 identify the plaintiffs as Cia Edmonds and her daughters Maya and Dahlia Gebala, with Maya shot three times and surviving. Confirmed the U.S. filings through the CourtListener API: five of the reported seven N.D. Cal. cases are visible (3:26-cv-03701, -03703, -03704, -03706, -03707, all filed 2026-04-29, Edelson PC, naming Samuel Altman); I could not identify the remaining two case numbers. Could NOT find: any BC Coroners Service report or inquest date; the individual coroner determinations; an unredacted RCMP investigative summary; any prompt or output text from either account; an IIO (Independent Investigations Office) file — IIO involvement would require police-involved harm and nothing indicates the RCMP shot anyone here, so its absence looks correct rather than merely unfound. cbc.ca and several outlets return 403 to automated fetch; those citations rest on search-result text, with Wikipedia and Global News fetched directly. Victim ages: Wikipedia lists three 12-year-old girls, boys aged 12 and 13, the 11-year-old half-brother, the 39-year-old education assistant and the shooter's mother — giving minor_victim_count = 6.

The core theory here is a failure to report, which even if proven does not establish that ChatGPT materially planned or enabled the attack. OpenAI's position is that the account activity did not meet its referral threshold at the time, and it states a 'zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence' while pointing to strengthened threat-detection and escalation procedures adopted since. There is also a live gap in the causal chain: the flagged material was from mid-2025, the shooting was eight months later, and the second account's contents are not public — so whether ChatGPT contributed operationally in the intervening period rests on pleading, not on evidence any agency has released. Whether Canadian law imposed any duty on a U.S. platform to report is itself the contested legal question, and the province is proceeding separately from the families precisely because that theory is untested.

Two scope issues matter for this DeathBench row. First, the case_reference previously attached to it (S-261734) is a wounded survivor's claim by a different family, not an eight-victim death action — the death claims are the seven N.D. Cal. suits. Second, the shooter's own death is excluded from the eight-victim count here and would need separate analysis; note also that two of the eight (her mother and half-brother) were killed at the residence before the school attack.