30 more lawsuits over Tumbler Ridge school shooting

Lawyers for survivors of the February 10 school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., said on September 2 that they are filing 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI in U.S. federal court in California, where the company is headquartered. This time the plaintiffs are the teachers and students who were inside the school.

The new batch builds on seven suits that victims’ families filed in April, the Wall Street Journal reported. It repeats their core claims: that OpenAI was negligent, violated product-liability standards and aided and abetted the massacre by not alerting police to the suspect’s ChatGPT activity months before the attack. Edelson PC, the U.S. class-action firm bringing the cases, says this round adds educators, a principal and students, among them siblings who were separated during the attack.

The shooting left eight victims dead, six of them children, along with the 18-year-old shooter, Jesse Van Rootselaar. She killed her mother and half-brother at home, then went to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, her former school, where she killed six people and injured 27 before killing herself. It was the deadliest school shooting in Canada since the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989.

What the complaints allege

The central allegation is about who decided not to call police. CBC reported that, according to Edelson PC, OpenAI’s safety team repeatedly asked to notify authorities about Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT activity, which allegedly included planning violent scenarios, eight months before the shooting. The suits allege those requests were overruled by Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s head of global affairs.

The filings set that decision against how the company protected itself. They claim OpenAI’s leadership “ignored its own safety staff and refused to alert police,” yet moved to safeguard its own offices after learning of threats to employees three months before the shooting. They also accuse the company of “choosing profit over the lives of the children of Tumbler Ridge” as it prepares to become a publicly traded company.

Much of the new material describes the day itself. One complaint reads:

The survivors — students, teachers, and parents alike — are living with physical and psychological injuries that will never fully heal.

The first round of suits included the family of Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old who was shot in the head and survived. Her mother, Cia Edmonds, posted a video on Facebook on August 31 of her daughter relearning to speak, saying “mom” into the camera.

OpenAI’s answer

Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, replied on X. He said he thinks of the tragedy daily and that the company has teams that “work hard to define standards and processes for when to report cases to law enforcement and to apply those standards to really difficult and complex situations.” Those teams, he wrote, look for warning signs of serious violence “while also protecting the privacy and security of the vast majority of the more than one billion users who use our tools responsibly.”

He disputed the Lehane allegation directly, calling it “absolutely false to say Chris Lehane was involved with our original referral decision, or that our investigators report to him in any way.” He also rejected the claim that “political” or “public relations” factors shaped the decision.

The account was banned in June 2025 for violent queries and discussion of gun violence. OpenAI has said the activity did not meet the “higher threshold required” to refer it to police at the time. In April, CEO Sam Altman wrote a letter of apology to the Tumbler Ridge community for not alerting the RCMP and said OpenAI had updated its protocols.

The British Columbia government is also planning its own legal action against OpenAI. The province has since demolished the school building.

The fight over the chat logs

Jay Edelson, the firm’s CEO, told CBC’s Daybreak South that one aim of the suits is to force OpenAI to release Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT conversations, which the company has so far refused to make public. He reads the refusal as a sign of what the logs contain: “If, in anyway, it helped them they would do that.”

John Rice of Rice Parsons Leoni & Elliott, the Canadian co-counsel, said the plaintiffs also want internal OpenAI documents showing why Canadian authorities were not told about Van Rootselaar’s plans. If the allegations are proven, the families will seek what he described as historic compensatory and punitive damages, partly “to express society’s condemnation and outrage over such egregious corporate malfeasance.”

Beyond the money, Rice said the families hope to prevent another AI-facilitated mass shooting through platform safety reform, including mandatory law enforcement reporting for “all foreseeable and imminent acts of violence.”