‘I feel like I accomplished my mission’: Minassian
Warning: Disturbing content follows.
Nine hours after he used a rented van to run down pedestrians on Toronto’s Yonge Street, leaving a 2.2-kilometre stretch of death and carnage in his wake, Alek Minassian sat in an interview room at a nearby police station and calmly explained how he planned and carried out a massacre that he hoped would inspire more acts of violence.
“I feel like I accomplished my mission,” Minassian, now 26, said when asked by Toronto police detective Rob Thomas how he felt about the 10 people killed and 16 injured.
Minassian’s video interview was submitted to court during a pretrial hearing earlier this year.
It can now be published after Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy rejected the defence request for a publication ban on the interview until the start of Minassian’s February 2020 trial before a judge without a jury.
There is no dispute that Minassian drove the van and killed eight women and two men. The trial is expected to centre on Minassian’s state of mind before and during the attack.
When asked by Thomas to explain what he did, Minassian said he just started “using (the van) as a weapon.” Thomas asked what he means by that. Minassian replied: “The vehicle collided with several pedestrians some of who are no longer alive as a result.”
When the interview began at 10:46 p.m. on April 23, 2018, the devastating extent of the worst mass violence the city has ever seen was still being realized.
Minassian had been charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder and 15 counts of attempted murder. That was later increased to 16 counts of attempted murder.
The pedestrians killed and injured on the sunshine-soaked afternoon in North York were local seniors, university students, tourists and employees on breaks. Many who survived still have catastrophic physical and mental injuries. First-responders and witnesses continue to be haunted.
In stops and starts over four hours, Thomas, a veteran police interviewer who heads up the Toronto police sex crimes polygraph unit, asks Minassian about his motivation for the attack, how he planned it and why he chose the location and the people he killed.
The defence has not yet had the opportunity to cross-examine Thomas about the interview.
Some of Minassian’s claims in the interview — including that he communicated with two mass murderers — are not substantiated in available court documents.
Minassian initially declined to answer questions but eventually opened up to Thomas, often using bizarre and detached language to describe his actions and those of other mass killers.
He described feeling a growing animosity toward women after a “crushing rejection” in 2012 and said he became “radicalized” in the violent and misogynistic “incel” (short for involuntarily celibate) online forums starting in 2014.
Minassian said he began daydreaming about committing a mass killing in 2014 but only started planning the van attack in earnest a month before, booking the van at the start of April. He did not describe a specific reason for why he started to make a plan or why he chose the date of the attack, other than that it would be “symbolic” if it happened after his exams for his software development degree at Seneca College.
Minassian claimed that he wanted to spark an “incel uprising.”
The term incel has morphed into the self-identifier for a mainly male online community that celebrates and glorifies violent hatred of women for — in their view — rejecting them or refusing to have sex with them.
Minassian said he did not specifically pick the intersection of Yonge and Finch to begin the attack. His plan was to drive down Yonge because he knew it would be busy, he said.
Eight of the 10 people killed were women, which led to speculation that Minassian deliberately targeted women, but Minassian said he just saw “all these people” and thought “it’s time to go for it.” He only stopped, he said, “because someone’s drink got splashed on my windshield and I was worried that I would crash the van.”
At the end of the interview Thomas asked what Minassian would say to the families of the people who were killed and injured if they were in the room.
“I honestly don’t know what I would say,” he said. “Would you apologize?” Thomas said.
Minassian replied: “I honestly don’t know.”
When asked about his feelings toward women, Minassian began with a milder version of what he would later say. He was “sometimes a little bit upset they choose to date obnoxious men rather than a gentleman,” he said.
Later, when asked if he had had an intimate relationship with a woman, Minassian said no.
“I feel it’s because I’m too nice,” he said.