Jarbas Noronha was teaching his 12th grade auto mechanic shop class at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School to change oil on Tuesday afternoon. Students with good attendance are sometimes allowed to work on their own vehicles, and one student went to fetch his car.
He instead came back saying he heard gunshots outside, Noronha said.
About two minutes later, the school’s principal, Stacie Gruntman, came to the door of the shop, shouting “Lockdown!”
The shop is far from the school’s main entrance and the principal’s office. Noronha said he and 15 students locked the hallway door and the two garage doors that opened into the school yard. Two metal benches were used as barricades.
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“We were in the safest part of the school,” he said in a phone interview. “If someone tried to break in through the hallway door, we would run to the yard through the garage doors.”
Noronha said he kept his eye on a large wall clock in the shop. His class stayed in the garage for more than two hours until police officers knocked on the garage door and escorted them to the school’s recreational centre.
It was not until Noronha reached his home at about 7pm that he learned of the extent of the violence.
It was the third deadliest shooting in Canada’s history. Seven people were found dead in the school, including the suspected shooter, according to authorities. Two other people were found dead in a local residence and another person died while being transported to a hospital, police said.
The shooting has shaken the residents of Tumbler Ridge, a remote town of 2,400 people in northeastern British Columbia.
The mayor of Tumbler Ridge, vowed that residents of the close-knit town would support each other following one of the deadliest such attacks in Canadian history.
“I will know every victim,” mayor Darryl Krakowka told CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster after sheltering in the town hall.
“We’re a small community,” he told the broadcaster. “I don’t call them residents. I call them family.”
Chris Norbury, a town councillor, said that he worried that he had lost a relative as news of the shooting in the town of 2,400 broke.
“Like many in our community, I felt the fear, the kind that sits in your heart and soul that doesn’t let go. The fear that I lost a loved one,” he said on social media. “It is something none of us should ever have to experience.”
Jarbas Noronha said he has taught auto mechanic and wood shop at the secondary school for two years, after moving there from his native Brazil in 2022 to be with his wife, a Tumbler Ridge resident.
“This is a hunting town. Everyone has guns here,” he said.
Police have not provided the identities of the suspected shooter and the victims, and they have also not commented on the shooter’s motive. Officers were still notifying the victims’ families, British Columbia premier David Eby said in a news briefing on Tuesday night.
Students and staff were held in the recreational centre as authorities conducted a headcount, Noronha said. A shelter-in-place order for the town was lifted at 6.47pm and parents were allowed to pick up their children.
The school district has closed both Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and Tumbler Ridge Elementary School for the rest of the week. Provincial authorities said trauma counsellors would be sent to the town to support the community.
“I’m quite calm, but I still don’t know how many students were hurt,” Noronha said. He added that Gruntman told teachers they would be notified by email when the school would reopen.
“I don’t think many students are in a condition to go back now,” he said. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
