‘We have 14 victims’
Twenty-five years later, candles burn for École Polytechnique dead
Two hours into darkness on Dec. 6, 1989, the snow fell in wet gobs on the north side of Mount Royal. The cab dropped us at the bottom of the slope, where police had closed the road. Ahead through the darkness, lights, many lights, flickering red and blue. Mingled with the fluttering snowflakes, the scene looked almost festive.
Then, there, at the mountain’s top: Paramedics rushing stretchers out of a modern building, plowing through the snow to waiting ambulances. Dozens of them.
It was seven hours later, at about 2 a.m. on Dec. 7, that we learned the full scope of the horror: A gunman had killed 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique. Only the women. Because they were women.
That Wednesday night 25 years ago, working at The Gazette in Montreal, I had a new-guy job listening to police radios, squawking intermittently with cops calling out numeric codes in French. 10-20 meant accident, 26 was a stolen car, 001 meant homicide.
Near quitting time that night, great staccato bursts of number codes. I pawed through the manual to decipher them when the black dial desk phone rang. My girlfriend
There’s something happening at the Université de Montréal
at the time, who worked at The Canadian Press in the next building, came on the line.
“There’s something happening at the Université de Montréal,” she said. “I’m going over to have a look.”
Police apparently thought it might be a hostage-taking. We shared a cab.
A tall four-sided art deco tower with a domed roof dominates the university’s central entrance; the École Polytechnique, or engineering building, occupies a more modern six-storey complex to its east. In these days long before Columbine or other mass shootings, police did not know what to do, and surrounded the building for a long time before ever venturing in.
Lynn Moore, a Gazette reporter, walked into the building not long after police, and chronicled a scene of blood-soaked classrooms; Allen McGinnis, a photographer, persuaded two students to boost him onto the windowsill so he could shoot through a gap in the drapes, where he photographed a student slumped dead in a chair while a policeman took down a sign that read, “Bonne Année.”
We learned that a man students did not know had entered the school at about 5:15 p.m., the last class on the last day of school before exams, armed with a .223-calibre Sturm Ruger and, apparently, hunting women.
“I heard the gunman say, ‘I want the women,’ ” student François Bordeleau said. Student Roger Tiffault, 23, said the gunman shot two women in his class, including a female friend standing less than a metre from Mr. Tiffault.
I asked Mr. Tiffault why he had not been killed. He replied: “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Prof. Yvon Bouchard said in his classroom the gunman shot into the ceiling when male students disobeyed his order to leave. The men filed out, the doors closed and the shooting began.
At midnight I walked uninvited into Room E310, a tiered lecture hall near the main entrance of the university.
Distraught, hollow-eyed couples stumbled in, stamping slush off their shoes, and sat silently, waiting to learn whether their children had been slain. A police officer entered and approached a couple who had just removed their fur coats. He said something and a boy standing with them burst into tears.
Later I stood in the main foyer of the university, joining a growing phalanx of reporters, which by 2 a.m. included writers from The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.
At 2:35 a.m. Jacques Duchesneau, head of the organized crime squad of the Montreal Urban Community Police, as it was then known, addressed the media from a podium set in this cathedral-ceilinged temple of higher education. After the chaos of the night, you could have heard a pin drop as he spoke.
“We have 14 victims,” he said. “They are all women.”
We were the first to learn the awful nature of the crime. MarieClaude Lortie, a young reporter at La Presse, stood next to me. We hugged each other. Then we continued working.
For the remainder of the week I returned to the university every day, to write follow-up articles, and to the Basilica on Mount Royal just west of the school, where candles in jars lit hundreds of steps up the mountain as thousands gathered to remember the slain. Geneviève Bergeron. Hélène Colgan. Nathalie Croteau. Barb Daigneault. Anne-Marie Edward. Maude Haviernick. Maryse Laganière. Maryse Leclair. Anne-Marie Lemay. Sonia Pelletier. Michèle Richard. Annie St-Arneault. Annie Turcotte. Barbara Klucznick-Widajewicz. Activists used the shooting as a rallying cry to enact a long-gun registry. That registry only served to divide Canada bitterly, and failed, even during its life span, to put a meaningful restriction on the gun the shooter used.
Far more important than the weapon used was his target: women. While this shooting remains Canada’s deadliest mass slaughter, it is also the continent’s most horrifying attack on women.
But if the shooter wanted to somehow, in his crazed way, to protest the climb of women in Canada to equality, he failed miserably.
The conversation about the relative power of women and men in Canada is far from over, as the scandal of Jian Ghomeshi at the CBC , the assaults on aboriginal women and many more bad moments every day in every city, remind us.
Perhaps this conversation will never end.
But the world my daughter was born into is a different one than the one I grew up in, and for that women and men both can be grateful beyond words.
My daughter is 16. She loves chemistry and physics. She speaks of studying forensic law. Like every parent, like the parents of the Polytechnique students, I only hope that she will thrive.
At her high school this week students wore white ribbons, a symbol of ending violence against women, watched a documentary in the library on the Polytechnique shooting, and exited their classrooms to watch a procession of students dressed in black carrying 14 candles in honour of the Polytechnique dead.
The candles burned in t he school’s office all afternoon.