TRIBUTES TO MASSACRE VICTIMS
Marking 30th anniversary of tragedy
Two Windsor ceremonies marked the 30th anniversary of the mass shooting at École Polytéchnique Montréal where 14 women were targeted and killed.
On Friday, the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, crowds gathered at memorial services at the University of Windsor’s Memorial of Hope and across the city at Ypres Avenue and Chrysler Centre to remember the women, mostly engineering students, who were killed because they were women.
A new plaque at a Montreal memorial park for the worst mass shooting in Canadian history now calls the massacre an anti-feminist attack.
Cherisse Fernandes, a third-year University of Windsor engineering student, placed a rose for 21-yearold metallurgy student Michele Richard, killed 30 years ago Friday while giving a presentation to her class. The first time Fernandes heard about the massacre was in a first-year engineering course. It saddened her to learn the killer targeted women.
Decades later, there is victory in the sadness, she said.
“The perpetrator didn’t want this kind of reaction. Thirty years today, it’s the victims we remember,” Fernandes said. “It didn’t stop anybody .... We are still encouraging women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). We’re still encouraging women to break free of the mould that has been placed on us for centuries.”
Representatives from the Womxn’s Centre and the university’s Women in Engineering held the vigil for the women killed in the Dec. 6, 1989, massacre and also had a rose for Lori Dupont, a Windsor nurse who was murdered in 2005.
“It’s still impactful because it still happens,” Deanna Fisher, a first-year forensic science student who translated the ceremony into French, said of the 30th anniversary.
Also on Friday, about 50 men and women gathered near the corner of Ypres Street and Chrysler Centre at the memorial stone for Mary Lou Hyjek, a former Unifor member who was killed by her husband in 1998.
During that service, 14 women held an image of one of the 14 women killed during the Montreal massacre and placed a white ribbon for each woman on a wreath. People lined up to place white carnations on top of the memorial stone.
Jennifer Wardell, vice-chair of the Unifor Local 444 Women’s Committee, said the event was about coming together to remember those killed by gender-based violence, and to encourage the federal government to create a national action plan against gender-based violence.
“Yes, we’ve come a long ways in 30 years, but we still have a long ways to go.”
It’s very important that our youth know every person needs to be respected and cherished, Wardell said. “If we educate our youth now, hopefully they grow into young men that respect women, and hopefully this won’t become an epidemic in years to come and our shelters won’t be overflowing like they are now.”
Also present were John Taggart and Jolayne Lausch, parents of Autumn Taggart, the Windsor woman who was sexually assaulted and murdered in her apartment in June 2018. They held a large photo of Autumn and they tied a white ribbon with Autumn’s name on it around a tree trunk.
“I don’t think it ever really gets any easier,” Taggart said.
Lausch said they came to the ceremony to support action to stop violence against women.
“We will never stop fighting for (Autumn),” Lausch said. “It’s torn us apart.”
At the university, some of the students placing roses weren’t born until a decade after the massacre. Teagan Grinwis, a third-year environmental engineering student who is 20, read the name and brief biography of 22-year-old engineering student Barbara Daigneault, one of the 14 women killed, and placed a red rose in her memory.
“It puts a face to the name and you realize these were real people, not just someone you learn about in history class,” said Grinwis.
Thirty years today, it’s the victims we remember. It didn’t stop anybody.