Tumbler Ridge Shooting Survivors File 30 Lawsuits Against OpenAI

Survivors of a mass shooting in British Columbia filed 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI this week, claiming the company should have notified police when it shut down the shooter’s disturbing ChatGPT account eight months before the attack.

The lawsuits significantly expand a legal battle against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman that began in April, when victims’ families filed seven lawsuits alleging the company could have prevented the Feb. 10 shooting at Tumbler Ridge High School.

That day, Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, took two guns from her home in Tumbler Ridge, a remote town roughly 415 miles northeast of Vancouver, and killed her mother and 11-year-old brother, authorities said. She then went to the school and killed five students and a teaching assistant and shot two other students.

Ms. Van Rootselaar died at the school from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said.

OpenAI acknowledged that it had closed Ms Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT account in June 2025, eight months before the attack, after an automated system detected “violations of our usage policies”. However, the company representatives did not contact the authorities.

“Based on what we saw at the time the account was banned in June 2025, we did not identify credible and imminent planning that met our threshold for referring the matter to law enforcement,” wrote OpenAI vice president of global policy Ann M. O’Leary. letter to Canada’s Minister for Artificial Intelligence in February.

Lawsuits citing report v The Wall Street Journalclaims that some OpenAI employees urged the company to contact the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. But the lawsuits say OpenAI leaders overrode members of the company’s internal security team.

“Sam Altman and his leadership team knew what silence meant to the citizens of Tumbler Ridge, but were more concerned with what disclosure meant to themselves,” one of the lawsuits states. “Warning the RCMP would set a precedent that the company would find unacceptable, as OpenAI would be forced to notify the authorities every time its security team identifies a user planning actual violence.”

It is unclear what content on the attacker’s ChatGPT account prompted OpenAI to delete it. But The New York Times reported in February that Ms Van Rootselaar had publicized her mental health issues, drug use and fascination with guns and extreme violence on other platforms.

In April, Mr. Altman wrote open letter I apologize to the Tumbler Ridge community.

“I deeply regret that we did not alert the police about the account that was banned in June,” he wrote. “While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to acknowledge the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered.”

The new lawsuits were filed by educators, the principal and students at Tumbler Ridge Middle School, including siblings who were separated during the attack and a teacher and her nephew who shared the same classroom that day. One of the plaintiffs, who was 13 at the time of the shooting, played dead while his classmates were killed in the library.

British Columbia Premier David Eby said the lawsuits were filed after OpenAI left the mediation process.

“It highlights why these companies cannot be trusted,” Mr Eby said on Tuesday CityNewsVancouver. “They can’t be trusted to regulate themselves; they can’t be trusted in what they say.”

In response to a request for comment on the lawsuits, OpenAI pointed to contribution to X by its Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. Mr. Kwon wrote that the company “approaches this litigation with respect for both the legal process and the families and victims of this tragedy, and we will continue to engage in this process in good faith.”

Mr. Kwon added that OpenAI’s intelligence and investigation team and its legal department are “working hard to define standards and processes for when to report cases to law enforcement and apply those standards to really difficult and complex situations.”

“They are constantly working to identify potential warning signs of serious violence while protecting the privacy and security of the vast majority of the more than one billion users who use our tools responsibly,” Mr. Kwon wrote.

(The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing them of copyright infringement for news content related to AI systems. Both companies denied the claims. This week, the Justice Department sided with OpenAI.)

Deidre Rushlow, who taught English and humanities at Tumbler Ridge High School, is one of the plaintiffs in 30 lawsuits filed in federal district court in San Francisco, where OpenAI is based, following the shooting.

Before the attack, Ms. Rushlow sent her students to the library with her teaching assistant and never imagined they were “living their final moments,” she said in a statement released by her law firm, Edelson PC.

“What happened cannot be undone,” she added. “We won’t forgive, we won’t forget, and we certainly won’t rest until every last individual at OpenAI involved in the Tumbler Ridge shooting is brought to justice.”