The weapon used by a gender-confused shooter to massacre young children at a rural Canadian school had a transgender-themed attachment, disturbing new photos show.
Court filings unsealed this week shed more light on the deadly rampage carried out in British Columbia on February 10, 2026, by transgender-identifying Jesse van Rootselaar. Van Rootselaar, a man who identified as a woman, gunned down his mother and stepbrother at his home before murdering six people at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School.
A photo from the day of the deadly rampage shows Van Rootselaar posing in a black skirt and fishnet tights while gripping a rifle with an attachment emblazoned with the blue, pink, and white colors of the transgender flag. Van Rootselaar killed himself during the attack.
Van Rootselaar: criminal complaint.
Police first identified the school’s attacker as a “gunperson” wearing a dress, and Canadian authorities repeatedly referred to him in press conferences on the attack as female despite the fact he was male.
Another photo taken by Van Rootselaar in the months leading up to the attack shows a pump-action shotgun leaning against a transgender flag. The shotgun features a sticker of the planet Saturn shaded with the transgender colors.
Van Rootselaar shotgun: criminal complaint.
The photos were sent to a 30-year-old American man named James Cody Bryant, who was arrested Tuesday for conspiracy to murder a person in a foreign country. Both photos were included in the criminal complaint filed against Bryant, who also identifies as transgender. Bryant is accused of helping Van Rootselaar carry out the attack by providing financial support and agreeing to livestream the shooting.
The criminal complaint against Bryant, filed on October 2, referred to Van Rootselaar as a female. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington plans to file an amended complaint with the correct pronouns, The Daily Wire has learned.
The arrest of another transgender suspect comes after some federal officials last year considered blocking trans-identifying people from buying firearms and ensuring that mentally ill individuals suffering from gender dysphoria are unable to obtain firearms while they are unstable. Those discussions stalled out in the months following the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project urged the FBI in September 2025 to create a new terror designation for attacks motivated by transgender ideology. That came after multiple attacks by transgender shooters targeting Christian schools.
“The United States has seen a recurring pattern of extreme violence committed by perpetrators that appear to have been acting in furtherance of a radical transgender ideology,” the Oversight Project argued in a memo. The group wanted the FBI to introduce a Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism (TIVE) category to apply to those who believe that violent action is justified against those who oppose transgender ideology.
The Oversight Project noted that violence is often encouraged in far-Left online communities.
“This digital infrastructure provides anonymous networks for grooming and coordinating, turning isolated resentment into organized threats, exemplified by the radicalization of figures like Tyler Robinson, who allegedly assassinated Charlie Kirk over views on transgender issues after immersion in leftist online forums,” they wrote.
Both Van Rootselaar and Bryant apparently got to know each other online and regularly communicated over Discord, according to investigators. Van Rootselaar would have been about 15-years-old when he started communication with Bryant who was in his late 20s.
Van Rootselaar had a YouTube account featuring an anime figure and a rifle with colors associated with the transgender flag in the background.
Van Rootselaar YouTube: Juno News.
Messages included in the complaint reveal that Van Rootselaar wanted to commit the largest mass shooting in Canadian history and wondered if he would gain fans from carrying out an attack. “Wut do you think. Would I have fans,” Van Rootselaar asked.
“I think you definitely would,” Bryant replied, according to messages included in the criminal complaint.
Other disturbing messages showed Van Rootselaar voicing his violent thoughts and discussing how he felt driven to “break or burn or hurt something” and “a lot of things suck like how violent i feel today.”
“I wish I was closer to the people who deserved to be punished. Not just randos in my town in the middle of nowhere. There are so many people who are. They’re close to the valuable targets yet they sit there doing nothing. If you’re gonna kill yourself why die like a loser and meaninglessly? At least do something,” he wrote in one message less than two weeks before the attack.
Other messages show the pair nonchalantly discussing the plan to murder innocent school children. Bryant agreed to livestream the shooting and offered tactical and material support for Van Rootselaar to carry out the massacre, according to prosecutors.
“The Tumbler Ridge Secondary School shooting was a horrific tragedy for that small community and for all of Canada. Indeed, here in the Pacific Northwest we felt the pain of those families devastated by this violence,” said acting U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd. “It is even more profoundly disturbing to learn that a resident of Western Washington had a role in the attack and took steps – providing counsel, technical advice, and money to the shooter planning such a tragedy.”
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