A 30-year-old man has been arrested in Western Washington and charged with conspiracy to murder in a foreign country in connection with the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Tuesday morning.
Acting U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd shared further details at a press conference in Seattle Tuesday afternoon. Law enforcement leaders from the U.S. and Canada joined in on the announcement.
Officials say the suspect’s name is James Cody Bryant, and that Bryant had met Jesse Van Rootselaar via Omegle in 2023. They had been communicating via Discord for six months prior to the attack.
According to the criminal complaint, during their conversations, they talked about Van Rootselaar’s plan to kill multiple people. Bryant offered to help test out live-streaming equipment, gave tactical advice on how to maximize bloodshed, and advised what firearms to use.
It’s also alleged that Bryant sent money to Van Rootselaar to purchase things like a lighter that was used to build an explosive device and even gave instructions on how to start the family car to drive to the school.
The FBI says Bryant had the information and the ability to alert police, but instead encouraged the murders.
Bryant is scheduled to appear at the U.S. District Courthouse at 2 p.m.
On Feb. 10, 2026, the small B.C. community of Tumbler Ridge was struck by tragedy after 18-year-old Rootselaar killed her mother and brother at their home before killing five students and an educator at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School.
Van Rootselaar then shot herself dead.
Details revealed since the shooting say the killer was coached and given tactical advice about how to conduct a mass killing by an artificial intelligence chatbot.
OpenAI said shortly after the murders that it shut down the killer’s first ChatGPT account but she opened a second account that wasn’t discovered until after the killings.
An article published by U.S. magazine Mother Jones in September said ChatGPT gave Van Rootselaar advice about how to circumvent its own safeguards by describing mass shooting scenarios in prompts as fictional or hypothetical.
— With files from The Canadian Press and Cecilia Hua
