Ecole Polytechnique (Montreal) massacre 6 December 1989
École Polytechnique massacre
"Polytechnique massacre" redirects here. For the film describing this event, see Polytechnique (film).
Coordinates: 45°30?17?N 73°36?46?W
École Polytechnique massacre
Plaque at École Polytechnique commemorating victims of the massacre
Location Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Date December 6, 1989; 29 years ago
5:10–5:30 p.m.
Target Female students at École Polytechnique de Montréal
Attack type
School shooting, mass murder, murder-suicide, hate crime
Weapons
Ruger Mini-14
Hunting knife
Deaths 15 (14 victims + 1 perpetrator)
Non-fatal injuries
14
Perpetrator Marc Lépine
Motive Antifeminism
The École Polytechnique massacre, also known as the Montreal massacre, was a mass shooting at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, Canada that occurred on December 6, 1989. Twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine, armed with a rifle and a hunting knife, shot 28 people, killing 14 women, before committing suicide. He began his attack by entering a classroom at the university, where he separated the male and female students. After claiming that he was "fighting feminism" and calling the women "a bunch of feminists," he shot all nine women in the room, killing six. He then moved through corridors, the cafeteria, and another classroom, specifically targeting women to shoot. Overall, he killed fourteen women and injured ten other women and four men in just under 20 minutes before turning the gun on himself. His suicide note claimed political motives and blamed feminists for ruining his life. The note included a list of 19 Quebec women whom Lépine considered to be feminists and apparently wished to kill. It is the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history.
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Massacre
Sometime after 4 p.m. on December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine arrived at the building housing the École Polytechnique, an engineering school affiliated with the Université de Montréal, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife.[1] He had purchased a rifle on November 21, 1989, in a Checkmate Sports store in Montreal, telling the clerk that he was going to use it to hunt small game.[2] Lépine was familiar with the layout of the building since he had been in and around the École Polytechnique at least seven times in the weeks leading up to the event.[1]
oblique view of a long, modern building about 6 storeys high, with many windows and large main entrance Lépine sat for a time in the office of the registrar on the second floor. He was seen rummaging through a plastic bag and did not speak to anyone, even when a staff member asked if she could help him. He left the office and was subsequently seen in other parts of the building before entering a second-floor mechanical engineering class of about sixty students at about 5:10 p.m.[1] After approaching the student giving a presentation, he asked everyone to stop everything and ordered the women and men to opposite sides of the classroom. No one moved at first, believing it to be a joke until he fired a shot into the ceiling.[3]
Lépine then separated the nine women from the approximately fifty men and ordered the men to leave.[4] Speaking in French, he asked the remaining women whether they knew why they were there, and when one student replied "no," he answered: "I am fighting feminism." One of the students, Nathalie Provost, said, "Look, we are just women studying engineering, not necessarily feminists ready to march on the streets to shout we are against men, just students intent on leading a normal life." Lépine responded, "You're women, you're going to be engineers. You're all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists." He then opened fire on the students from left to right, killing six, and wounding three others, including Provost.[1][5] Before leaving the room, he wrote the word shit twice on a student project.[4]
Lépine continued into the second-floor corridor and wounded three students before entering another room where he twice attempted to shoot a female student. When his weapon failed to fire, he entered the emergency staircase where he was seen reloading his gun. He returned to the room he had just left, but the students had locked the door; Lépine failed to unlock it with three shots fired into the door. Moving along the corridor, he shot at others, wounding one, before moving towards the financial services office where he shot and killed a woman through the window of the door she had just locked.[1]
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