A grieving father whose son was killed in the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting said his 12-year-old son loved school so much he cried when his father once suggested home schooling.
“Our son went to school this morning and it happened that someone came to school with a GUN went to my kids classroom shot some kids and my son was killed too just like that,” Abel Mwansa said in an emotional
to his son, Abel, that by mid-day Wednesday had garnered more than 200,000 views and 1,000 comments.
Mwansa wrote that he raised his son “to respect elders, answer to one call, be strong, work hard,” focus on his studies and “never miss school.”
“One day I came up with an idea that he should do home school but he cried that I love being at school,” he said.
Mwansa said that before his son picked up his backpack and left for school Tuesday morning, he asked his mother to ask his father pick him up after class at church, where he would be attending a youth meeting, “for he loved the Lord.”
He got a call at work while he was having lunch to pick Abel up at church at 6 p.m. only later to learn that his son had been shot “like a stray dog murdered in cold blood.”
He said he treasures the “12 years and 11 months we spent with you” and said God didn’t take his son, “but death did.”
Abel’s mother, Bwalya Chisanga, shared her heartbreak in another emotional Facebook post. “I can’t handle this pain (it) is too much,” she said.
“Am I dreaming,” she said in imagining that a friend was still coming to pick her son up for school.
In one of the worst mass school shootings in the nation’s history, eight people were killed and at least 27 more injured, two critically, in the community of Tumbler Ridge in northeastern B.C. Tuesday.
One adult female educator and five students — three girls and two boys — were found dead inside Tumbler Ridge Secondary School. One victim was found in a stairwell and the others in the school’s library, RCMP said Wednesday.
Kylie May Smith, 12, was identified as one of the victims.
Two more victims — the suspect’s mother and a brother — were found dead in a home nearby. Police said the only suspect, identified by police Wednesday as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar,
was found dead inside the school from a self-inflicted injury. Two firearms, a long gun and a modified handgun, were recovered by officers at the school.
Police had attended the family’s home on multiple occasions over the past several years related to Van Rootselaar’s mental health, BC RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald told reporters Wednesday.
McDonald said Van Rootselaar was born a biological male who began to transition to female about six years ago. Van Rootselaar dropped out of school about four years ago and wasn’t attending the Tumbler Ridge high school.
National Post
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