At least nine people have been killed in a school shooting in a picturesque, isolated town in Western Canada.
Reports from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police say that the shooter, initially described as a brown-haired woman in a dress, has also been found dead after opening fire at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia on Tuesday afternoon.
The school has around 160 to 175 students, according to the district, and is considered the heart of the local community, which itself sits at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
A further 27 people were injured in the attack on the school, although two of the nine victims are believed to have been killed off-campus at a nearby residence.
Although police have not definitively confirmed that the two attacks are linked, the RCMP told reporters that this is currently one of their main lines of inquiry.
The shooter is the tenth death associated with the attack, with police giving the as-yet unnamed person’s cause of death as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
What happened during the shooting at Tumbler Ridge?
Canadian police first received a report about an active shooter at the school at around 1.20pm, with authorities responding in around 2 minutes according to David Eby, the premier of British Colombia.
“I was getting briefly off of my support block, which ends at one thirty our time,” Darian Quist, a Grade 12 student at the school told CBC. “I was heading down to the mechanics classroom, nothing seemed wrong.”
But, then, everything changed.
Quist said that one of his teachers began shouting in the corridor that the school was being plunged into a lockdown.
“For a while, I didn’t think anything was going on,” he said, until reports on his phone about the shooting began to come through. “We got tables and barricaded the doors and I believe we sat in there for two hours, two hours and thirty minutes, until members of the RCMP and I believe SWAT came through the door and escorted us at the high school.”
The Grade 12 student says that he did not hear the shooting unfolding at the school, since he believes that it was happening upstairs on the other side of the building.
While waiting, though, he began receiving disturbing pictures of “blood” from his classmates in other parts of the school.
During the attack, six students were killed on campus with a seventh dying on the way to hospital.
Who was the shooter that opened fire at Tumbler Ridge?
Police have not yet revealed the shooter’s identity, although an initial police alert described the suspect as “female in a dress with brown hair.”
Ken Floyd, the RCMP North District Chief Superintendent, has confirmed that the suspect described in the alert was the same as the person believed to have carried out the shooting.
That suspect was found dead by police, having died from a suspected self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The shooter’s motive remains unknown too, although investigations are underway to determine what led them to attack the school.
“We are not in a place now to be able to understand why or what may have motivated this tragedy,” Floyd told reporters.
