Thirty years ago today, a young man with a gun went into a classroom at the École polytechnique de Montréal, where an engineering class was being taught.
He separated the students by gender and let the male students go.
He said he was there because they were feminists. Police later found a letter amongst his effects blaming women for all the bad things in his life.
Then he opened fire.
Fourteen women died. Others were wounded. One of the survivors saw her friend close her eyes and knew she had just watch a friend die. She thought she would die herself.
Instead he killed himself.
Fourteen talented young women, cut down just as they were about to make a mark in their careers, fall in love, have a family; all the routine things of life that we cherish yet take for granted.
Until a man with a gun takes them away.
Each year I remember names and pictures of young women I never met, most of them a few years younger than me:
There were others wounded, of course. Ten additional women and four men were wounded as he prowled the building after the shooting began. They too are remembered.
That is a moving tribute, Northern Piper. The motto of Québec, “je me souviens”, is especially on point on this date.
And it is so painful how across the decades it still happens, making national news in Isla Vista, or hardly a local headline in some small town. Someone decides he’s going to “punish” her/them because she/they somehow are denying him what should be his, by merely existing and seeking lives of their own…
Thank you, Northern Piper. I don’t remember this at all, and I was even in college at the time. They had so much to live for and had already overcome so many obstacles. Even now the number of women in engineering is low.
Thanks for this Northern Piper. I was out of town when it happened, but it was a shock. I recall that the nutter felt he had been denied admission to the program because they had admitted woman.
One of the first policemen on the spot had the shock of turning over the corpse of his own daughter.
I will never forget the day this happened. I was in the first semester if my biology PhD program, and all I could think of was those hopeful, excited women, entering into their chosen, but male dominated, fields while I was doing the same.
What always strikes me about this terrible tragedy and the responses to it is how toxic masculinity somehow succeeds in devaluing people of both genders. The men who lived are cowards who shouldn’t have. The women are dead.
