Mother of critically injured Tumbler Ridge victim feels compassion for shooter’s mother

WARNING: This article contains graphic images and explicit details of a mass shooting event.

For 12-year-old Maya Gebala’s parents, any movement — even a tiny leg twitch — is reason to rejoice. It comes after watching their child intubated and treated by emergency health professionals.

The Grade 7 student was one of the victims shot Tuesday at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School — an attack that left eight people, including six children, dead.

Maya was airlifted to B.C. Children's Hospital and has been fighting for her life since.

Forty-year-old Cia Edmonds says she feels blessed her child survived, and is urging Canadians to support all the families whose children or loved ones were killed or critically injured.

Posts of Maya’s progress on social media are being met by thousands of comments — people moved by the image of the tween grinning in her hockey helmet, juxtaposed against the devastating reality of her bruised and bandaged face. A GoFundMe has raised thousands for her care.

It is painful for Maya’s parents to see this tenacious hockey player, who taught herself how to walk on stilts, now so motionless.

“She's way too stubborn to let this…” David Gebala said, as his voice trailed off while sobbing. “She'll pull through this, I believe that she will."

He says thousands of well wishes from around the world help, but posts that attack or politicize this tragic massacre, trouble both of them.

He and his former partner are frustrated that some of the posts have attracted vicious, angry comments directed at the mother of the shooter, after she was also shot and killed in the tragedy.

Edmonds says she was friends with the suspect’s mother, Jennifer Strang, and she used to babysit the shooter — 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar — as a child.

Edmonds weeps for all hit by this tragedy, including the perpetrator's mother.

Edmonds says she watched the single mother, who worked long shifts at a nearby mine, fight to help her child. Edmonds says at one point, Van Rootselaar tried to light a mattress on fire “and burn the house down.” She adds the teen had been hospitalized several times with mental health issues.

“People are trying to politicize what this is about. It's not about guns. It's not about transgenderism. It's about mental health. It's about a lack of resources,” Edmonds told CBC News.