News & Analysis

The Tumbler Ridge Lawsuits: Survivors and Families Sue OpenAI Over a Flagged Shooter

By David Meldofsky

Published June 12, 2026 · Updated September 2, 2026

A second wave of complaints against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman began on September 2, 2026 in San Francisco federal court, brought by students, teachers, and a principal who were inside the school during the February 10 shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. They join the seven suits filed in April by families of the dead and wounded. Plaintiffs' counsel has said the second wave will reach thirty complaints in total, one per plaintiff. The September filings add a specific internal allegation: that OpenAI's own investigators wanted the shooter's account referred to Canadian police, and that the company's global affairs operation overruled them. OpenAI says that account of its decision-making is false.

What Happened

The shooting took place on February 10, 2026 at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in northeastern British Columbia. According to authorities as reported by NPR, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killed five students and a teacher at the school before dying by suicide, having killed a mother and 11-year-old half-brother at home earlier the same day. Eight people were killed in all. Around two dozen were injured.

Eight months before the attack, in June 2025, OpenAI's automated systems flagged Van Rootselaar's ChatGPT account for gun violence activity and planning. The account was deactivated. A second account was created and used, and OpenAI has said it did not learn of that second account until after the shooting.

Seven federal lawsuits followed on April 29, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The second wave began in the same court on September 2, 2026. An earlier civil claim proceeds in the British Columbia Supreme Court, and Global News has reported that the province is pursuing its own legal action against the company.

The Lawsuits at a Glance

• Court: U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division.
• First wave: seven complaints filed April 29, 2026 by families of those killed and injured.
• Second wave: began September 2, 2026, brought by people who were inside the building during the attack, including students, teachers, and a principal. Counsel has said it will reach thirty complaints.
• Defendants: Sam Altman personally, along with OpenAI Foundation, OpenAI OpCo, LLC, and OpenAI Group PBC as successor to the earlier for-profit entities.
• Claims: negligence, negligent entrustment, negligent undertaking, aiding and abetting a mass shooting, strict product liability, and negligent infliction of emotional distress. Rushlow pleads nine counts.
• Basis for federal jurisdiction: diversity under 28 U.S.C. section 1332(a)(2), because the plaintiffs are Canadian citizens and the defendants are Californian.
• Relief sought: damages, punitive damages, and injunctive relief to compel corporate changes at OpenAI. All request a jury trial.
• Counsel: Jay Edelson of Edelson PC is lead counsel. John Rice of Rice Parsons Leoni & Elliott LLP in Vancouver is Canadian co-counsel.
• Primary source: Rushlow v. Altman case guide on Lawsuit Center, with the complaint (PDF, 48 pages).
• Related proceedings: a civil claim in the British Columbia Supreme Court.

The September 2026 Wave: Survivors Sue

The second-wave complaints come from people who were in the building and survived it. Global News reports the group includes educators, a principal, and students, among them a 13-year-old identified as A.C., who survived by playing dead among classmates in the library, and a 16-year-old identified as D.I., who sheltered in a storage closet sharing a wall with that library. Deidre Rushlow, a seventh-grade teacher who locked her classroom door and pulled students under her desk, is a named plaintiff.

The plaintiff class is what makes this wave legally distinct. A wrongful death claim brought by a parent and an emotional distress claim brought by a surviving bystander travel different doctrinal routes to the same defendant. Negligent infliction of emotional distress carries its own requirements about presence at the scene, contemporaneous perception, and the nature of the resulting harm, and those requirements vary by jurisdiction. Filing them together puts that question before a single court on a single record, rather than letting it develop case by case over years.

Press accounts differ on one point worth flagging. TechCrunch reports that the September complaints accuse OpenAI of aiding and abetting the shooting for the first time, escalating from a theory of negligent failure to prevent. NPR's own account of the April filings describes those seven suits as already pleading aiding and abetting alongside the failure-to-notify claim. Until the April counts can be read against the September ones on the face of the filings, treat the escalation as reported rather than settled.

Inside one complaint: Rushlow v. Altman

Rushlow v. Altman, No. 3:26-cv-09344-PHK, was filed September 2, 2026 and is the first of the second-wave complaints available in full. Deidre Rushlow alleges she sent part of her grade 7 class to the library with an education assistant minutes before the shooter reached it, locked her room and hid the remaining students under her desk, and was inside when the shooter fired through the front and back classroom doors. She called the library and texted the assistant during the attack and got no answer. The complaint pleads that she texted her husband a goodbye.

The complaint makes nine separate legal claims. Most are versions of the same basic argument, that OpenAI was careless. It says the company was careless in not warning police, in not warning the public about how the product behaves, and in how it built the product in the first place. Other claims say the product was defective, that OpenAI gave a known-dangerous user access again, and that the company ran a safety review and did it badly. The last claim covers the emotional harm to someone who was in the building during the attack.

One thing repeats throughout the complaint. Over and over it says OpenAI owed these duties whether ChatGPT counts as a product or not. Courts have not settled that question yet, and it affects which legal rules apply, so the lawyers wrote the case to work either way. Our explainer on whether AI output is a product or content covers why it matters so much.

One claim is worth watching more than the others. Normally a company has to owe you something before it can be held responsible to you, and OpenAI will argue it owed nothing to people in a Canadian town it had never heard of. This claim gets around that. It says OpenAI chose to review the account, and once it chose to, it had to do it carefully. The complaint also argues that shutting the account down made things worse, because it showed the user what had set off the alarm.

The allegation about OpenAI's own employees

The strongest factual allegation in the second wave has nothing to do with what ChatGPT said to anyone. The complaints allege that threats to OpenAI's own personnel are handled by a separate corporate security function reporting to the chief operating officer, and that this team can notify police on its own authority. They point to November 21, 2025 as the example. On that day, the company locked down its offices, warned employees, circulated a suspect's name and photograph, and called the San Francisco Police Department. It did so while acknowledging there was no indication of active threat activity.

Set against the refusal to contact the RCMP over a flagged user, the comparison is meant to show that the imminence and privacy standards OpenAI invoked bend according to who is at risk. It is an allegation a court can evaluate against the company's own records without ever reading a chat log, which is what makes it useful to plaintiffs.

What the complaints say OpenAI knew

The complaints say OpenAI's own systems flagged the account in June 2025 over what he was writing about guns, and that a specialist team inside the company reviewed it. That team decided he was a credible threat to real people, and more than one reviewer recommended calling the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

They say that recommendation was overruled by the part of the company that handles public relations and politics, led by chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane, and that Sam Altman signed off. That link is pleaded on information and belief, which is the ordinary way of alleging something a plaintiff expects to prove once they see the company's records. It is also the part most exposed if the documents do not support it. Lehane is not a defendant.

OpenAI rejects this. Chief strategy officer Jason Kwon told NPR it is false to say Lehane was involved in the referral decision or that OpenAI's investigators report to him, and said the team reports to Kwon himself. He said the people making these decisions prioritize safety, and denied that politics or public relations played any part.

The company gave its own account in February 2026. It said it identified the account, banned it for breaking the usage policy, and considered a referral, but decided the activity did not meet its threshold because there was no imminent and credible risk of serious harm.

That is the heart of the dispute. The complaints say the company's own threat-assessment staff reached the opposite conclusion about the same conversations. If both accounts are true, the disagreement happened inside OpenAI, and the record of it is in the company's files. Canadian counsel John Rice has said the plaintiffs want the chat logs from the beginning through the day of the shooting, along with the internal documents showing who identified the threat, who recommended reporting it, and who decided not to.

Altman's April 24 letter settles one part of it. He said he was deeply sorry the company did not alert law enforcement to the account.

Deactivating an account is not the same as banning someone

The complaints also say that after the first account was shut down, a second one was created and the conversations carried on.

That matters more than it sounds. A general claim that a company should have watched its users more closely is vague and easy to get dismissed. A claim that the shut-off could be undone by signing up again with a different email is specific, and it points at how the system was built rather than at anything the product said.

The September complaints go further and say OpenAI has no way to ban a person at all, only to close one email address, and that its own help pages tell deactivated users how to come back.

The same point matters for anyone holding an account now. Our guide on what to do in the first days covers what stays, what goes, and how long a deleted conversation can still be recovered.

Why this theory is different from the other cases

Every case against OpenAI runs into the same first question: is what a chatbot says a product, or is it speech? That question decides which rules apply, and our guide to whether AI output is a product or content explains it in plain terms.

These cases are built to work either way. They are not really about what the product said to anyone. They are about whether the company's actual safety practices matched what it said they were. That question can be answered from OpenAI's own records, whichever way a court classifies the output. In a set of cases where the classification fight comes first every time, a claim that does not depend on winning it is worth a great deal.

Why These Cases Are in Federal Court

There are two separate groups of ChatGPT lawsuits in California, in two different court systems. Which court a case goes to depends mostly on where the people suing live.

The Tumbler Ridge families and survivors are Canadian. When someone from another country sues an American company, federal court is open to them. That is why these cases were filed in federal court in San Francisco, the city where OpenAI is based.

Most of the other ChatGPT lawsuits were brought by Californians against a California company. That combination keeps a case in state court. About a dozen of them have been grouped together there in front of a single judge, which we cover in our guide to JCCP 5431.

The claims are different too. The state cases were brought by people who used ChatGPT themselves, or by their families. The Tumbler Ridge plaintiffs never used it. Their case is about what OpenAI knew about someone else and what it did with that information.

What this means in practice is that the two groups move separately. They have different judges, and a decision in one group does not settle the other. The same basic questions about whether OpenAI can be held responsible may end up answered twice, and the answers may not match.

The Canadian Dimension

The shooting occurred in Canada, the U.S. lawsuits were filed in California, and an earlier civil claim proceeds in the British Columbia Supreme Court. Cross-border litigation adds questions about jurisdiction, applicable law, and coordination between proceedings. The U.S. filings against a U.S. defendant in its home district are the more direct path to OpenAI's internal records. The legal team reflects that structure, with Edelson in Chicago and Rice in Canada.

What happens next

Case numbers. The September complaints were filed on the morning of September 2 and court records take time to appear. Case numbers, judge assignments, and whether the new cases get tied to the April seven are the first things to confirm.

Motions to dismiss. OpenAI will ask the court to throw the cases out before any evidence is exchanged. Watch whether the safety-operations claims survive better than the design claims.

The aiding-and-abetting count. It requires proving the company intended to help, which is a much higher bar than carelessness. It is the claim most likely to be tested first.

The emotional distress claims. Whether people who were present but not shot can recover for what they went through is an open question, and it decides how far the second wave reaches.

Discovery into the referral decision. Internal messages, escalation memos, and the threat-detection logs are the evidence the whole chain-of-command claim depends on.

Common Questions About the Tumbler Ridge Lawsuits

How many Tumbler Ridge lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI?

Thirty-seven. Seven were filed on April 29, 2026 by families of those killed and injured. A second wave began on September 2, 2026, brought by people who were inside the school during the attack. Counsel has said it will total thirty, filed as separate cases rather than as one document, and press accounts of how many have landed so far differ. All name OpenAI and Sam Altman, and all request a jury trial.

Who are the plaintiffs in the September 2026 Tumbler Ridge lawsuits?

Global News reports they are educators, a principal, and students who were present during the attack, including two minors identified by initials and a seventh-grade teacher, Deidre Rushlow. Their claims center on the harm of surviving the event rather than on the death of a family member.

Is Chris Lehane a defendant in the Tumbler Ridge lawsuits?

No. The complaints allege that OpenAI's global affairs team, which Lehane leads, overruled a recommendation to alert Canadian police, and the Rushlow complaint pleads on information and belief that the decision was made by Lehane or someone in his chain of command and ratified by Sam Altman. NPR reports that Lehane is not named as a defendant. OpenAI's chief strategy officer has said the allegation about his involvement is false.

Why were the lawsuits filed in California if the shooting happened in Canada?

OpenAI is headquartered in San Francisco, making the Northern District of California its home federal district. Suing a U.S. company in its home district is the most direct route to its records and avoids cross-border enforcement complications.

How are the Tumbler Ridge cases different from Raine v. OpenAI?

Raine centers on design choices in the model itself. The Tumbler Ridge suits center on safety operations: systems allegedly flagged the danger, investigators allegedly recommended a police referral, and the company allegedly did not make one. That theory does not depend on whether the output is classified as a product.

What is Rushlow v. Altman?

One of the second-wave complaints, No. 3:26-cv-09344-PHK, filed September 2, 2026 by Deidre Rushlow, a grade 7 teacher who was inside the school during the attack. It pleads nine counts against Sam Altman and three OpenAI entities. The full complaint is available as a PDF on Lawsuit Center.

Why do the Tumbler Ridge complaints name Sam Altman personally?

They allege he directed the compressed safety testing before the May 2024 launch of the model at issue, and that he ratified the decision against a law enforcement referral. Naming an officer personally requires alleging his own conduct rather than the company's, which is what those paragraphs are built to do. OpenAI disputes the account of how that decision was made.

Why are the Tumbler Ridge cases in federal court when other ChatGPT cases are in state court?

Because the people suing are Canadian. When someone from another country sues an American company, federal court is available to them. The other California ChatGPT cases were brought by Californians against a California company, which keeps those cases in state court. Those are grouped together in JCCP 5431.

Are more Tumbler Ridge lawsuits expected?

The docket has grown from seven claims in April to a second wave targeted at thirty, and the wider AI wrongful death docket continues to expand. Our OpenAI Lawsuits hub tracks new filings.

Sources and further reading

• Lawsuit Informer: OpenAI School Shooting Lawsuits and AI Product Liability
• Lawsuit Informer: OpenAI Lawsuits Hub and Case Tracker
• Lawsuit Informer: Is AI Output a Product or Content?
• NPR: New lawsuits claim OpenAI execs put image ahead of safety in Canadian mass shooting
• Global News: Tumbler Ridge shooting survivors among 30 new plaintiffs suing OpenAI
• TechCrunch: OpenAI faces 30 more lawsuits tied to Tumbler Ridge shooting
• Reuters: Families of Canadian mass shooting victims sue OpenAI, CEO Altman in U.S. court
• Wall Street Journal: OpenAI sued by seven families over mass shooting suspect's ChatGPT use
• Associated Press: Coverage of the Tumbler Ridge lawsuits

Educational commentary only. Not legal advice. No attorney-client relationship is created.