The mother of a 12-year-old girl critically injured in the mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., last month says her daughter’s breathing tube has been removed as doctors check to see whether she can breathe on her own.
A post on the Facebook account belonging to Cia Edmonds, mother of Maya Gebala, says the removal was a “terrifying experience” and she held her daughter’s hand as the girl winced.
But Edmonds writes in the post on Friday that her daughter was “doing great” and “looking more like her beautiful self.”
Edmonds and Gebala’s father, David Gebala, have said their daughter was struck in her neck and in the head, just above her left eye, when shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar opened fire at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School on Feb. 10.
Van Rootselaar had gone to the school after killing her mother, Jennifer Strang, and 11-year-old half-brother, Emmett Jacobs, at their family home in the northeastern British Columbia community.
A Facebook post by the Tumbler Ridge Chamber of Commerce says the Strang family has invited family, friends and residents of Tumbler Ridge to join them for a service celebrating the lives of Strang and Jacobs on Saturday.
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The chamber and its counterpart in Prince George, B.C., are meanwhile urging the B.C. and federal governments to ban children under 16 from using AI tools and social media.
Jerrilyn Kirk, executive director of the Tumbler Ridge chamber, said last month’s shootings underscore that everybody is “vulnerable to the impacts of online harms.”
She said a growing body of research shows that giving children unregulated access to powerful digital applications contributes to “social instability, mental health pressures and public safety risks.”
The chambers were building their case on research that Australia used to ban social media for children under 16 last year, Kirk added in an interview.
A 2023 peer-reviewed study led by researchers at the University of Ottawa found heavy social media use is associated with higher levels of psychological distress, with younger adolescents being the most vulnerable.
Van Rootselaar, who shot dead eight people before killing herself, had been banned by OpenAI last June after violating its policies on the use of its ChatGPT chatbot.
But the company only told police after her name became public following the shooting.
Neil Godbout, executive director of the Prince George Chamber of Commerce, said healthy communities are “foundational to economic stability and growth.”
The two chambers say in a statement that their joint resolution on the proposed ban now goes to the BC Chamber of Commerce for debate.
If adopted, it would become part of the policies that the provincial chamber will submit to the B.C. government for consideration, they say.
B.C. Attorney General Niki Sharma said she was aware of the resolution, adding that improving online safety is a top priority as online tools evolve.
“We should not be allowing social media and AI chatbot platforms to experiment, in an unregulated fashion, on the minds of young people,” she said.
Sharma said the federal government must create “meaningful regulations” that strengthen safeguards for youth online.
B.C.’s chief coroner, Dr. Jatinder Baidwan, announced this week that an inquest into the shootings is set to consider the role of artificial intelligence.
RCMP Staff Sgt. Kris Clark said the investigation into the shootings is ongoing and would only conclude once “all investigative avenues have been exhausted.”
“It’s impossible to provide a specific or detailed timeline, as it is subject to the gathering of all digital and physical evidence and any analysis,” he said in a statement.
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