Federal prosecutors in Seattle charged James Cody Bryant, a 30-year-old from Bellingham, Washington, on Tuesday with conspiring to murder people in a foreign country, alleging he spent six months as the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s confidant, small-dollar financier and designated livestream audience. Most of today’s coverage casts him as a cheerleader, but we read all 41 pages of the government’s complaint, and it describes something worse: a man who argued against the massacre in writing, then helped make it watchable.
The filing even carries a section headed “Bryant’s Statements of Disapproval and Attempts to Convince Van Rootselaar to Delay or not Commit the Attack.” On January 4 he wrote to Jesse Van Rootselaar, the 18-year-old who killed eight people on February 10, “I truly hope you reconsider today.” By the end of that same conversation he was on her Twitch page confirming the test stream worked. “I saw your lighter,” he told her.
Conspiracy law does not grade on effort. It asks whether you agreed, and whether you acted. Here is what the complaint says he did:
- Agreed in August 2025 to screen-record her livestream of the attack and post it for the public to see.
- Offered tactics. “Wide open spaces means numbers,” he wrote while she weighed targets. She “should have a handgun.” A working suicide vest beat a fake one, because “function over form.”
- Sent $124.47 over PayPal, labeled “Happy late birthday,” for the shoes she wore during the attack.
- Sent $14.33 for a lighter to fuse the explosive device she later threw near the school library.
- On February 10, opened her stream as its only viewer, then talked her through starting the car she drove to the school.
He knew what his silence was worth. “I know I can like, save lives I guess but idk,” he wrote in August. Two weeks later: “I might be the only one who can at this point.” On January 6 she floated attacking her old high school in town. He said that would make him report her, asked her to stop telling him things like that, and signed off the thread with “People die no matter what.” Thirty-five days later she drove to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School.
He later told FBI agents he had steered her away from a school, suggesting a grocery store or a church instead. He seems to have thought that helped.
Every System Saw a Piece of It
Bryant is the one link in this chain that cannot point to a terms-of-service page. Look at the others:
- OpenAI banned her ChatGPT account in June 2025 for violent activity and did not call police. Sam Altman later apologized.
- Discord stored months of direct messages about weapons, stolen ammunition, incendiary devices and target evaluation, and handed them to the RCMP after the shooting.
- PayPal deactivated her account and reversed the $14.33, for reasons the complaint does not give. It was the only interruption the plot ever met, and it was an accident.
- Twitch carried a 20-second stream to an audience of one.
We think the charge is right, and we think it is late. Homeland Security agents interviewed Bryant at home on February 12, two days after the killings, and he admitted he was the account in the chat and had watched the stream. The FBI had his Discord messages by March 26. The complaint was signed October 2, and he was arrested Tuesday, 236 days after that first interview. Nothing in the filing explains the wait, and Seattle’s top federal prosecutor, Neil Floyd, owes the families in Tumbler Ridge that explanation. It is the second time this year American prosecutors have reached past a school shooter, after Georgia convicted Colin Gray of murder over his son’s attack at Apalachee High, and both cases rest on the same idea: the people who make a shooting easier are part of it.
Bryant “had the information and ability to alert law enforcement,” Floyd said Tuesday. FBI Special Agent W. Mike Herrington went further, telling reporters that without Bryant’s “misplaced loyalty and willingness to operate the livestream, we don’t ultimately know if the shooter would have gone through with the crime.”
Bryant appeared in federal court in Seattle on Tuesday afternoon, and online court records showed no lawyer for him yet. The charge carries up to life in prison. A complaint only establishes probable cause, so prosecutors now have 30 days to bring a grand jury indictment, and that filing is where the 236 days will have to start making sense.