Teen Charged With Killing 6 Near Canada's Capital

UPDATE Mar 8, 2024 4:07 AM CST

A 19-year-old from Sri Lanka has been charged with six counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder in one of the worst mass killings Canada's capital region has ever seen. Police initially described the Wednesday murders in a home in the Ottawa suburb of Barrhaven as a mass shooting but they said Thursday that a "knife-like" edged weapon was used, the CBC reports. The victims were identified as a 35-year-old mother and four of her children, a 7-year-old son, a 4-year-old daughter, a 2-year-old daughter, and a 2-month-old baby girl, per the AP. A 40-year-old acquaintance of the family was also killed. Police said all the victims are from Sri Lanka. The suspect, Febrio De-Zoysa, is also an acquaintance of the family and was living in the home, police said.

Mar 7, 2024 9:30 AM CST

A mass shooting rocked Canada's capital late Wednesday, leaving six people dead, including four children believed to be members of the same family. Police responding to 911 calls around 10:50pm local time found two adults and four children dead inside a townhome on Berrigan Drive, "a residential area close to two schools" in the Ottawa suburb of Barrhaven, per the CBC. Another person was found injured and transferred to a hospital. A male suspect was taken into custody at the scene, according to a police statement issued early Thursday, which said there was no lingering threat to the public.

"The manner of the homicide, we are not disclosing at this time," Ottawa Police Chief Eric Stubbs said Thursday, per CTV News. He separately described the incident as a "mass shooting," per the CBC. He declined to comment on the relationship, if any, between the suspect and the victims, who haven't been publicly identified. But he said investigators "do not believe the incident was domestic or involved an intimate partner-related incident," per the Barrhaven Independent. Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe said the shooting was "one of the most shocking incidents of violence in our city's history." Barrhaven has seen only four murders, each with just one victim, in the last 20 years, per the Independent. (More Ottawa stories.)