It seemed like a bad end-of-semester prank.
At dusk on an icy evening 25 years ago, a young man cradling a .223-caliber rifle suddenly strode into Room 230 at the Ecole Polytechnique, the engineering school at the University of Montreal.
“Everybody stop everything,” shouted the man, who wore a gray jacket and a ball cap advertising tractors. “Separate yourselves: Girls to the left, guys to the right.”
It seemed absurd.
“We practically laughed,” a male student recalled.
The mirth ended when he fired an attention-getting shot into the ceiling.
The 60 students in the room, nine women and the rest men, divided by gender.
“Move your asses,” he said, pointing the males toward the classroom door.
As the last of the men left, the gunman turned toward the huddled women and asked whether they knew why he was there.
No, they stammered.
“I’m here to fight against feminism,” he announced.
And with that, he leveled his weapon on the defenseless women and opened fire with as many as 30 rounds, chasing down those who scrambled for cover under desks.
He killed six of the nine and seriously wounded the other three. But the man was just getting started. He stalked out in search of more of his sworn enemy: females.
The killer was Marc Lepine, 25. His rampage on Dec. 6, 1989 — a decade before the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. — served as a prototype for the modern mass killing at a school by an alienated, suicidal maniac.
Lepine’s primary beefs: He couldn’t get a date, and women had no business studying engineering.
Lepine left Room 230 and walked the school’s corridors, pinging shots at women unlucky enough to cross his path. He made his way to a cafeteria, packed with nearly 100 students. He shot four of them, then moved on to a storage room, where he killed two more.
He went up an escalator to the third floor and found another class in Room 311. He shot a female student who was leading a presentation, then moved relentlessly up and down the room’s aisle, firing at women cowered behind desks but sparing the men.
Lepine returned to the front of the room, drew a knife and stabbed the wounded woman presenter. He sat down, removed his cap and placed several full boxes of ammunition on a table beside him. He then blew his brains out.
Lepine had fired about 100 rounds, killing 14 women and wounding 10 others. (Four men also were injured.)
Slain were Annie Turcotte, 20; Genevieve Bergeron, Anne-Marie Edward and Michele Richard, all 21; Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Lemay and Annie St-Arneault, 22; Maryse Leclair, Hélene Colgan and Nathalie Croteau, 23; Maryse Laganiere, 25; Sonia Pelletier, 28; Maud Haviernick, 29, and Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, 31.
The toll could have been worse. He left behind 60 live rounds.
As Dr. Teresa Sourour, the investigating coroner, said, “Thank heaven, he decided on his own that enough was enough.”
In the killer’s pocket police found a three-page note in which Lepine tried to rationalize his irrational deed.
“Even if the Mad Killer epithet will be attributed to me by the media,” he wrote, “I consider myself a rational erudite that only the arrival of the Grim Reaper has forced to take extreme acts.”
He said, “I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their maker.”
How did they ruin his life?
“They want to keep the advantages of women … while trying to grab those of the men.” He cited these benefits: cheaper insurance and maternity leave.
Canadians were stupefied. This was the sort of violence that was supposed to happen in the United States, not Canada.
The government spent months investigating where it had gone wrong with Lepine, the son of an abusive Algerian immigrant father and French-Canadian mother. (The killer had changed his surname from his father’s Gharbi to his mother’s Lepine after the couple split up.)
Lepine was a socially awkward, below-average student who resented the menial jobs he was forced to work when he flunked out of college. He somehow blamed women. This festering misogyny erupted when he faltered in an application to study at the engineering school.
Justice Minister Douglas Lewis concluded, “We can’t legislate against insanity.”
But Lepine had been able to buy his murder weapon just two weeks before the massacre, and that prompted Wendy Cukier, a Ryerson University professor, to found Canada’s Coalition for Gun Control.
The group, with 350 signatory organizations, pushed through sweeping changes in the country’s already-tough gun laws, including the creation of a national firearms registry and new restrictions on gun sales.
A quarter-century later, Cukier told the Justice Story, the gun-control legacy of the Montreal Massacre is under assault.
The Conservative government pushed through a 2012 law that eliminated the registry. Cukier cited “the global influence of the NRA,” which for years had targeted Canada’s gun registry.
Gun purchases still are strictly regulated in Canada. Cukier said she doesn’t see that in America’s future, despite school-shooting atrocities like those at Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook in Connecticut.
“Sadly, mass shootings are so common in the USA, each one worse than the last, that people seem to accept them as inevitable and almost ‘normal,'” she said.
