MONTREAL - A 25-year-old man
who mounted a deadly shooting rampage at a downtown Montreal college had posted
pictures of himself on the Internet with a rifle and said he was feeling "crazy"
and "postal" and was drinking whiskey hours before the attack.
The man, identified by police as Kimveer Gill, also said on a blog that he
liked to play a role-playing Internet game about the Columbine High School
shootings in Colorado and wanted to die "in a hail of gunfire."
Tearful students make
phone calls from a secure area to give news following a shooting rampage
at Dawson College on 13 September 2006 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The
gunman who went on a fatal shooting spree at a Montreal college was a
25-year-old Indian-Canadian, police said, depicted by the press as
obsessed with weapons, violent video games and the Goth subculture.
[AFP] |
In the end, Gill, dressed in a black trench coat like the Columbine shooters
put his own gun to his head and pulled the trigger during a shootout with
officers at Dawson College on Wednesday, police said.
Gill, wielding a rapid-fire rifle and two other weapons, had already wounded
20 other people by the time he took his own life. One of his victims, an
18-year-old woman, later died. Four others remained in critical condition
Thursday, including three in extremely critical condition and one in a deep
coma.
The Internet postings and neighbors' accounts reveal an angry, solitary young
man who lived with his mother in Laval, near Montreal. He sported a mohawk,
dressed in black and was filled with hatred for everyone from jocks to preppies
and everything from country music to hip-hop. He once worked for a carpet
company and more recently an auto parts business.
"Work sucks ... school sucks ... life sucks ... what else can I say? ... Life
is a video game you've got to die sometime," he wrote in his profile for a Web
site called vampirefreaks.com.
Authorities searched Gill's home Wednesday evening and seized his computer
and other belongings.
"I don't know what they found in the computer," said a woman who answered the
phone at Gill's home and said she was his mother. "They took everything."
She described her son as "a good man."
"Just ask anybody. Ask the neighbors. He was a good son," the woman told The
Associated Press. She refused to give her name.
A neighbor across the street said he was a loner.
"There were never any friends," Louise Leykauf said. "He kept to himself. He
always wore dark clothing."
Another neighbor, Mariola Trutschnigg, said she noticed a changed in his
appearance in recent months when he "started wearing a mohawk and black
clothes."
In postings on vampirefreaks.com, blogs in Gill's name show more than 50
photos depicting the young man in various poses holding a rifle or a knife and
wearing a black trench coat and combat boots.
One photo has a tombstone bearing his name and the epitaph: "Lived fast died
young. Left a mangled corpse."
The last of six journal entries Wednesday was posted at 10:41 a.m, about two
hours before Gill died at Dawson.
He said on the site that he felt "crazy" and was drinking whiskey that
morning and described his mood as "postal" the night before.
"Whiskey in the morning, mmmmmm, mmmmmmmmm, good !! :)," he wrote.
"His name is Trench. you will come to know him as the Angel of Death," Gill
wrote at another point on his vampirefreaks.com profile. "He is not a people
person. He has met a handful of people in his life who are decent. But he finds
the vast majority to be worthless, no good, conniving, betraying, lying,
deceptive."
This inscription is below a picture of Gill aiming a gun at the camera: "I
think I have an obbsetion (sic) with guns ... muahahaha."
"Anger and hatred simmers within me," said another caption below a picture of
Gill grimacing.
He wrote that he is 6-foot-1, was born in Montreal and is of Indian heritage.
It was unclear whether he meant east Indian or American Indian, but Gill is a
common name in India.
He said his weakness is laziness and that he fears nothing. Responding to the
question, "How do you want to die?" Gill replied "like Romeo and Juliet or in a
hail of gunfire."
Gill repeatedly said on his blogs that he loved black trench coats. He wore a
black trench coat during the shooting and opened fire in the cafeteria just as
Columbine students Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did in 1999.
He also maintained an online blog, similar to Klebold and Harris, devoted to
Goth culture, heavy metal music such as Marilyn Manson, guns and journal entries
expressing hatred against authority figures and "society."
He said he liked to play "Super Columbine Massacre," an Internet-based
computer game that simulates the April 20, 1999, shootings at the Colorado high
school when Klebold and Harris killed 13 people and then themselves.
Gill complained that a video shooting game, "Postal 2," was too childish. He
wanted one that allowed him to kill more and go "beserk."
"I want them to make a game so realistic, that it looks and feels like it's
actually happening," he wrote in his blog.
Danny Ledonne, the creator of "Super Columbine Massacre," posted a message of
sympathy on his site.
"I am, like most, saddened by the news of the recent shooting at Dawson
College. I extend my condolences to those affected by this painful event,"
Ledonne wrote.
A 23-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl accused in a triple murder in
Medicine Hat, Alberta, earlier this year also had profiles on vampirefreaks.com.
Montreal Police Chief Yvan Delorme said the lessons learned from other mass
shootings had taught police to try to stop such assaults as quickly as possible.
"Before our technique was to establish a perimeter around the place and wait
for the SWAT team. Now the first police officers go right inside. The way they
acted saved lives," he said.
Delorme said some officers were at the school on an unrelated matter when the
shooting began and reinforcements were sent in.
Witnesses said Gill started shooting outside the college, then entered the
second-floor cafeteria and opened fire without uttering a word. Anastasia
DeSousa, 18, of Montreal was killed.
Police initially said Gill shot himself but later Wednesday they said they
thought officers killed Gill during an exchange of fire. On Thursday, however,
Francois Dore of the Quebec provincial police said "preliminary results of the
autopsy showed that he died of self-inflicted wounds." Dore said police shot
Gill in the arm before he turned his gun on himself.
Canada's worst mass shooting took place in Montreal when gunman Marc Lepine,
25, killed 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnic on Dec. 6, 1989, before shooting
himself.
That shooting spurred efforts for new gun laws achieved mainly as the results
of efforts by survivors and relatives of Lepine's victims.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said it was too early to begin questioning how
tougher gun control laws might have averted Wednesday's rampage, but that
current laws clearly did not work. "The laws we have didn't prevent this
tragedy, which is why our government will be in the future because of this
incident and many others looking to make our laws more effective," Harper said.
Canadian laws prohibit the possession of unregistered handguns, and the rules
for ownership of registered guns are stringent. Many politicians and police
contend illegal guns flowing across the U.S.-Canada border are behind a recent
spike in firearm violence.