‘I WAS GOING TO BE LIKE GOD’
Bissonnette planned mall massacre
QUEBEC On Nov. 26, 2016, two months before he would kill six men at the Quebec City mosque, Alexandre Bissonnette drove to his parents’ house alone, drank two glasses of wine and gathered his guns.
He took two pistols and five magazines — a total of 50 bullets — placed them in his bag and headed to a local shopping mall.
There, sitting in a parking lot beneath Place Laurier, Bissonnette loaded one of the two guns. He continued to drink from a bottle he brought with him. Two outcomes bounced back and forth in his head: should he kill himself in the car, or enter the mall to kill others first?
In the end, a psychologist said during Bissonnette’s sentencing hearing Monday, the then 27-yearold decided he couldn’t do either option. He placed the gun back in his bag and went to a Starbucks in the mall before returning home.
Bissonnette, 28, has since pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder and six counts of attempted murder for his attack on the Quebec City mosque on Jan. 29, 2017. Testifying for the defence Monday, psychologist Marc-André Lamontagne attempted to explain the troubled and twisted thoughts that led Bissonnette to kill.
Lamontagne said Bissonnette had long battled suicidal ideas due to intense bullying at school. Through the years, he said, his depression first morphed into wanting to kill those who bullied him and later into an obsession with doing something he would be remembered for before killing himself. If he didn’t, he was convinced people would continue to mock him after his death.
“He had grandiose fantasies of doing something that would show the world he isn’t insignificant,” Lamontagne said. “He absolutely wanted to prove that he was special.”
Bissonnette first tried to kill himself when he was 16 years old, the court heard. Telling a psychiatrist he couldn’t take the bullying anymore at the time, he was given antidepressants.
Around the same time, he started reading about the Columbine High School massacre and identified with one of the culprits. He developed his fantasy of getting revenge; he thought about burning his school down.
His obsession with mass murderers would continue to grow through the years, though Lamontagne said he was less interested in their ideologies and more so in their pasts — he identified with how some had been bullied, felt victimized and wanted to take back control.
After Bissonnette decided he was going to kill others, Lamontagne said, he still needed to find a way to justify it in his eyes. In late December, a month after the incident at the mall, he drove by the mosque.
Due to “prejudices that came from somewhere,” Bissonnette was convinced there was at least one “religious fanatic or terrorist” inside the mosque and he could save hundreds of lives if he managed to kill a few, Lamontagne said. In his eyes, he felt the mosque was a “more acceptable” target than the mall.
In the month before the attack, the court heard last week, Bissonnette had immersed himself in content related to firearms, Muslims, immigrants and mass shootings.
He was obsessively following Donald Trump’s travel ban, and the online postings of right-wing American commentators, as well as conspiracy theorists, and altright and white supremacist/ neo-Nazi leaders. He told police he snapped when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau implied in a tweet that Canada was going to accept refugees turned away by the U.S.
Lamontagne, mandated to determine the level of danger Bissonnette poses and the chances he will re-offend, met with him for seven hours over the course of two days in early April.
When Lamontagne asked him why he went through with the shooting, Bissonnette told him he felt there was a demon or “something outside of him” that kept pushing him toward killing.
“I think I fell into a trap,” Bissonnette told Lamontagne. “I had to do something, something big, before committing suicide. Even if there was part of me that didn’t want to.”
After a life of being pushed around and feeling insignificant, he told him, he was looking for control.
“At least for the last moments of my life,” Bissonnette said, “I was going to be like God. I was going to decide life or death.”
Bissonnette could receive a sentence of anywhere between 25 and 150 years in prison without the possibility of parole.
In a 40-page report prepared for the sentencing hearing, Lamontagne concluded that especially considering the lengthy sentences at play, and given the right circumstances, it “wouldn’t be unrealistic” to believe Bissonnette could return to society one day.
“Do you think he can be rehabilitated?” defence lawyer CharlesOlivier Gosselin asked him.
“There are reasons to believe so,” Lamontagne answered.
Bissonnette’s sentencing hearing continues Tuesday at the Quebec City courthouse.