During a press conference on Wednesday, the BC RCMP took questions about 18-year-old Tumbler Ridge mass shooting suspect Jesse Van Rootselaar.When the Western Standard submitted a question about his gender identity via the virtual chat system, the moderator omitted the word "transgender" to only ask about his identity."They're just wanting to know why we're waiting until now to confirm the identity of the suspect," the moderator told Deputy Commissioner Dwayne MacDonald. He left out "transgender.""It's a good question and I know it's one of concern, specifically with the speed of social media," Urano replied. "I think it's important to recognize that yesterday when we first provided a media availability, it was approximately five hours after the active shooter event — at that point in time we were still trying to lock down locations, we had victims we were evacuating."He said that "it's important for us, when we do release information, to get it accurate," citing an earlier correction of the death toll from ten to nine."We want to get information out as quick as possible, but we also appreciate that that information needs to be accurate, particularly when we're dealing with victims or the identity of a suspect," he said. "In this case our suspect was deceased. We had to locate next-of-kin ... I would hate for someone to find out that their loved one was deceased coming from our podium or coming from the news media in advance of being told in person."Earlier, the RCMP revealed that Van Rootselaar identified as transgender, and used his preferred pronouns, 12 hours after it was first confirmed by other outlets, including the Western Standard.Van Rootselaar was first described in an alert as a female wearing a dress."We're not hiding it," MacDonald said when asked why so little had been said about Van Rootselaar's gender identity. "We identified the suspect as they chose to be identified in public and on social media."Van Rootselaar was born male, but "approximately six years ago began to transition to female."MacDonald said that while it was unknown whether Van Rootselaar had difficulty at school due to his gender identity, he "dropped out of school approximately four years ago and was not currently attending the school."He added that it was too early in the investigation to determine whether Van Rootselaar's gender identity was correlated to the shooting.The RCMP were reached for comment, but did not respond in time for publishing.
