The family of Maya Gebala, the 12-year-old Tumbler Ridge shooting victim who is fighting for her life at BC Children’s Hospital, has filed a civil claim against artificial intelligence company OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
OpenAI has come under fire after it was revealed that the ChatGPT account of shooting suspect Jesse Van Rootselaar had been flagged internally for being misused in “furtherance of violent activities” in 2025, months before Van Rootselaar was accused of killing eight people in February.
“The purpose of this lawsuit is to learn the whole truth about how and why the Tumbler Ridge Mass Shooting happened, to impose accountability, to seek redress for harms and losses, and to help prevent another mass-shooting atrocity in Canada,” the plaintiff’s law firm, Rice Parsons Leoni & Elliott LLP, said in a news release Monday.
Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT account was banned after it was flagged in 2025, but OpenAI says she got around the ban by creating a second account.
The company told 1130 NewsRadio in February it considered referring the account to law enforcement but determined the user’s activity didn’t meet the threshold to do so. In order to meet the threshold, the activity would have had to indicate “an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others,” which it did not appear to do, the company said.
Calling OpenAI “reprehensible and morally repugnant,” the family’s lawsuit blames the company not only for its failure to sound the alarm, but for what it calls the “negligent design” of ChatGPT itself. It says the chatbot was programmed to “mirror and affirm user emotions.”
The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI designed ChatGPT “to foster a close, personal, and pseudo-therapeutic bond with the Shooter” and that the platform became a “trusted confidante, friend, and ally to the shooter.”
It alleges that OpenAI was “aware of the risk that an individual such as the shooter would become psychologically and socially dependent on ChatGPT.” It goes on to say ChatGPT “equipped the shooter with information, guidance, and assistance to plan a mass casualty event.”
The lawsuit seeks compensation for losses and punitive damages on behalf of Maya, her sister, and her mother.
CityNews has reached out to OpenAI for comment.