Teachers, students file new wave of lawsuits against OpenAI over Tumbler Ridge shooting

Teachers, students file new wave of lawsuits against OpenAI over Tumbler Ridge shooting

30 new complaints to be filed alleging tech giant behind ChatGPT could have prevented tragedy

Lawyers representing victims and survivors of the Tumbler Ridge school shooting say they are filing 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI in U.S. federal court in California.

Edelson PC, a U.S. firm that specializes in class actions, says the new plaintiffs include educators, a principal and students, including siblings who were separated during the Feb. 10 attack in northern B.C.

The tragedy left eight victims dead, including six children, along with the 18-year-old shooter.

The lawsuits describe the horror they experienced that day and include new details of OpenAI's alleged negligence in preventing the shooting.

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

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The new claims have been filed in California, where OpenAI is headquartered, and where seven other cases against the company have been filed by families of the shooting victims.

Edelson PC says OpenAI's safety team repeatedly asked to notify authorities about Jesse Van Rootselaar's activity on ChatGPT eight months before the tragedy, which allegedly included planning violent scenarios.

But the lawsuits allege those appeals were overruled by Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s head of global affairs.

They claim OpenAI's leadership "ignored its own safety staff and refused to alert police," yet acted to safeguard its own offices after learning of threats to employees three months before the Tumbler Ridge shooting.

The lawsuits accuse OpenAI of "choosing profit over the lives of the children of Tumbler Ridge" as it prepares to become a publicly-traded company.

Jason Kwon, chief strategy officer at OpenAI, said in a response posted on X that he thinks of the tragedy at Tumbler Ridge daily.

He said 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."

"They work continuously to identify potential warning signals 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."

Kwon said it was frustrating to see what he said were false claims made in the suits about his teams and individuals not involved in the process. Kwon said it is "absolutely false to say Chris Lehane was involved with our original referral decision, or that our investigators report to him in any way."

"It's also completely untrue to say that the people at the center of these challenging decisions do not prioritize safety, or that there are 'political' or 'public relations' factors at play."

The company previously acknowledged that it banned Van Rootselaar's account in June 2025, but said the activity did not meet the "higher threshold required" to refer it to police at the time.

CEO Sam Altman has apologized to the Tumbler Ridge community and says the company has updated its protocols.

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The B.C. government is also planning legal action against OpenAI, and has since demolished the site of Tumbler Ridge Secondary School.

The first set of lawsuits filed against the tech giant included the family of Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old student who was shot in the head and survived the shooting.

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In a Facebook post Monday, Cia Edmonds shared a video of her daughter that showed her relearning to speak, saying "mom" into the camera before cracking a smile.

"Tears of awe as I watch her crawl out of the rubble that her mind lives in," Edmonds wrote. "One step at a time. She shows me, more and more what miracles look like."

Jay Edelson, CEO of Edelson PC, told CBC's Daybreak South one hope of the lawsuits is to have Van Rootselaar's chat-logs with ChatGPT released.

He said OpenAI has so far refused calls to make the logs public, a choice he believes indicates their contents may not work in the tech company's favour.

"If, in anyway, it helped them they would do that," he said.

The complainants also want to view internal OpenAI documents showing why Canadian authorities weren't alerted about Van Rootselaar's plans, according to John Rice of Rice Parsons Leoni & Elliott, Canadian co-counsel for the suits.

He said the families are seeking historic compensatory and punitive damages to penalize OpenAI, if the allegations are proven true, and "to express society's condemnation and outrage over such egregious corporate malfeasance."

Rice said they hope to prevent another AI-facilitated mass shooting by reforming major platform safety, including with mandatory law enforcement reporting for "all foreseeable and imminent acts of violence."

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Matt Preprost is a reporter with CBC British Columbia based in Fort St. John. He has covered the B.C Peace region and Northern Rockies since 2013. Email him at fsj@cbc.ca