IF YOUR LOVED ONE WAS A VICTIM, CONTACT US

On February 10, 2026, eight people were killed in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. Five of them were children between the ages of 12 and 13. A teacher's aide. A mother and her 11-year-old son. It was the deadliest school shooting in Canada in more than three decades, in a town of fewer than 2,500 people where, as the mayor put it, he probably knew every victim by name.

What Canadian families didn't know until this week is that OpenAI potentially knew about the shooting before it happened. According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, confirmed in part by OpenAI itself, the suspect's ChatGPT account was flagged by the company's own review system last June, a full eight months before the shooting. Roughly a dozen OpenAI employees reviewed the activity internally. Some of them wanted to contact Canadian law enforcement. Company leadership decided against it. The account was banned for a terms-of-service violation. The RCMP was not contacted until after eight people were dead.

OpenAI has said publicly that the activity did not meet its threshold for a law enforcement referral. The internal policy requires, in the company's own words, "an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others." In a statement to the Globe and Mail, the company also noted that referring users to police too frequently could cause "distress" to a young person if officers showed up unannounced.

We’re calling on OpenAI to come clean about what it knew in June, and any other situations like this that it is keeping under wraps. 

Edelson PC filed the first major wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI in August 2025, on behalf of the family of 16-year-old Adam Raine, a California teenager who died by suicide after months of conversations with ChatGPT. The complaint alleged that OpenAI's own monitoring system had flagged Adam's messages repeatedly. No meaningful intervention followed. We later filed the first case against OpenAI for causing a homicide, on behalf of the estate of a Connecticut woman whose son allegedly killed her and then himself after months of conversations in which ChatGPT validated and amplified his paranoid delusions.

We have pushed OpenAI for answers about what the company knew, and when. We’ve asked how many other situations like this they’ve known about and decided to bury. That question is now being asked about the shooting in Tumbler Ridge.

Many families don't realize they can access their loved one's AI chat logs. These conversations may show whether the AI provided appropriate crisis intervention or instead encouraged them to harm themselves or deepened a delusional or psychotic state.

We are not promising outcomes. Every situation is different, and investigations like this take time. But the questions we believe deserve answers include:

We think those questions are worth asking. We think the families of Tumbler Ridge deserve to be part of that conversation.

Edelson PC has spent years taking on technology companies when their decisions cause serious harm to real people. Jay Edelson and the team have been at the center of AI liability litigation since it began, and have also represented families in the aftermath of mass shootings, including Highland Park. We know what it looks like when corporate decisions have devastating impacts on real people. 

If you’d like to speak to us, your consultation is completely confidential, and reaching out does not commit you to anything.

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