Back in April, seven lawsuits were filed against OpenAI on behalf of the families of the victims, with the promise of at least two dozen more to be filed later.
That second shoe has dropped, as, on September 2, thirty new lawsuits were brought forward on behalf of “injured and traumatized students and educators.”
“Dozens of students and educators were front-row witnesses to the bloodshed,” says a release from the firm Rice Parsons Leoni & Elliott LLP who are working together with American lawyers from Edelson PC. These new lawsuits allege that “OpenAI’s own safety team identified the Shooter as a credible threat of imminent gun violence eight months before the attack, recommended that the company call the RCMP, and were overruled by OpenAI’s leadership.”
Like the previous lawsuits, these ones have been in the Northern District of California. While Rice Parsons Leoni & Elliott LLP were hoping to use the incident to bring about changes to BC Wrongful Death Laws.
Back in March, the law firm sent an open letter to the people of Tumbler Ridge, saying that in BC, the law does not permit cases on behalf of loved ones of those harmed or killed to proceed as a general rule. “Cases for loved ones of people who have suffered harms are especially challenging, and there is a significant body of case law that says wrongdoers don’t owe duties of care to the loved ones of the people they harmed, no matter how awful the harm they have caused. For example, ‘public policy’ arguments have made it hard for loved ones of those negligently killed by medical malpractice to advance their own legal claims, because we have a publicly funded health care system, and expanding lawsuits against doctors, nurses and hospitals on behalf of loved ones would be an extraordinary burden on taxpayers.
“On the basis, and given the egregious facts of this case, we could possibly make new law or develop factual arguments on existing law.”
While litigating in the US won’t change BC’s Wrongful Death laws, it may prove to be more punitive for the company. When the first seven lawsuits were filed, the company explained its decision to bring suit in the States. “Damages for pain and suffering [in BC] are capped at approximately $470,000 CAD. The largest punitive damages award ever made in Canadian history is $1.5 million CAD. With respect to the murdered children, their estates are not permitted to bring claims in British Columbia for damages against OpenAI, and in most cases the loved ones of wrongfully killed children are unable to recover any recompense under British Columbia’s Family Compensation Act.”
John Rice, lead Canadian counsel for the complainants, says “these students and teachers were eyewitnesses to gun violence, murder, and emergency life-saving efforts rarely seen outside of a theatre of war, and only in the most lawless of places on earth. If the allegations of fact are proven true in court, our clients and their families want justice. “In particular, the production of all chat-log material between the Shooter and ChatGPT before the Tumbler Ridge Mass Shooting, and all of OpenAI’s internal documents showing why corporate actors chose in June 2025 not to alert Canadian authorities that the Shooter was planning an imminent mass casualty event.”
Secondly says Rice, they want “historic compensatory and punitive damages,” as a way of punishing OpenAI for its “reckless disregard for public safety.” The hope is, he says, to deter OpenAI and all tech and AI companies from doing the same thing, and “to express society’s condemnation and outrage over such egregious corporate malfeasance.”
The third and final goal outlined is a desire to prevent another AI-facilitated mass shooting “through meaningful injunctive relief obliging major platform safety reforms, warnings, and mandatory law enforcement reporting requirements for all foreseeable and imminent acts of violence.”
While the court documents have yet to be made public, Rice says the cases are filed on behalf of “eyewitnesses and victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting.” (Note: the statement of one of the people—Deidre Rushlow—was made public. We’ve reproduced it here.)
“The new complaints set out allegations regarding OpenAI’s callous disregard for the Tumbler Ridge community when its safety team identified the perpetrator of the mass shooting as someone posing a credible threat of imminent and specific gun violence, but executives declined to inform law enforcement, preferring the interests of their company over the lives of innocent children. The complaints also detail what we say are the fundamental and extremely dangerous design flaws in OpenAI’s product, ChatGPT.”
Says Rice: “it is the honour and privilege of our careers to represent those harmed by the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, and we will fight relentlessly to get justice for each and every one of our clients.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
