Rampage (4 page)

Rachid was permitted to see his children once a week, albeit under the supervision of a social worker. Gamil never looked forward to the visits. On one occasion, Monique was driving them to meet Rachid at an ice cream parlour when she informed her son that he was going to see his daddy. Without warning, the six-year-old seized the steering wheel and attempted to veer the vehicle off road. Fortune prevailed and nobody was hurt, but it would be the last occasion Gamil would ever spend in Rachid’s company. In fact, he never spoke of his father again unless he was forced to. Not long after, Monique discovered Gamil cowering behind a cupboard because he was afraid that a workman at their new apartment would hit him.

Desperate, Monique applied for social assistance, but was unable to get by without Rachid’s financial support. With few options, she returned to nursing full time at Royal Victoria Hospital, hiring a Francophone family in Pointe-aux-Trembles to care for her children. Overworked and taking professional development courses three nights a week, in 1972 Monique decided to leave Gamil and Nadia with their caregivers throughout the week. They would stay with her on weekends at her Sherbrooke Avenue apartment, where they would play board games and enjoy home-cooked chicken dinners. In January 1974, their caregivers moved away, and Monique passed them off to a retired nurse in Saint-Michel. The children did not adjust well to the disruption. Their school marks plummeted, and Nadia began bedwetting. After several months, Monique found another family for the children to live with during the week: two ex-teachers who owned a farm in the Eastern Townships village of Bethanie. To Monique, Gamil and Nadia seemed happier there, and they attended the same school as the couple’s daughters. Little did she know that her children were feeling increasingly abandoned by their mother, creating emotional instabilities that would ultimately lead them both to early graves. One of Marc’s caretakers would later tell Monique:

We had to watch your son closely. Once, when we were camping, my husband asked him to get a propane tank from the car. When he came back with it, for no apparent reason, he threw it into the campfire, where it exploded. Luckily no one was hurt. Another time, after all the equipment was packed up on top of the car, he undid the straps that held it in place. Again, it was just by chance that we noticed before we got on the road.
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Sibling Rivalry

When Monique’s expensive divorce was finalized in 1976, her financial situation improved, and Gamil and Nadia begged to move back in with her. Having worked her way to the position of director of nursing care at the Montreal Convalescent Hospital, Monique agreed. She rented a three-bedroom apartment for them on rue Van Horne, and left twelve-year-old Gamil to care for his sister while she worked. The following year, she purchased a bungalow in suburban Pierrefonds. Here, the first signs of Gamil’s disturbance came to light. In one eerily prescient incident, he had been fighting with his sister during the day and had become extremely upset. As the sky darkened over the sleepy subdivision, he grabbed a shovel and began digging a hole in the backyard. By the time he was finished, an empty grave lay gaping in the moonlight. Acting as if on autopilot, Gamil fashioned a makeshift tombstone upon which he wrote
NADIA
, and attached a photograph of his little sister to it. With his work complete, he stepped back and stood staring blankly at his creation. Monique accused him of bad taste and told him to get rid of it. Gamil complied without protest, disassembling the monument in the same methodical manner with which he had erected it. Months later, Monique’s beloved cat disappeared. When she asked her children if they had seen it, Nadia confided that she had watched her brother bind a rope around its neck. Confronted by his mother, Gamil denied any responsibility. Monique never saw her pet again.

Despite these seemingly isolated incidents, young Gamil was a great help around their new home — shovelling snow, mowing the lawn, and fixing things for his mother. Regardless of what Gamil may have thought about Monique, one thing is abundantly clear: he despised his father. In his first day of classes at Pierrefonds High School, a teacher requested that each student stand when he read their name for roll call. When the words “Gamil Gharbi” stumbled from his lips, nobody rose. He repeated them. After a long pause, the boy slowly rose to his feet at the back of the class, glaring at the rest of the students: “Present.” At age thirteen, sick of being called “Arab” and having to explain about his loathed Algerian father, Gamil Gharbi officially changed his name to Marc Lépine.

During his stint at Pierrefonds High, Marc befriended Jean Belanger. They had first met on a school bus in September 1977, when Jean had noticed Marc sitting alone and decided to talk to him. The two became best pals, shooting at pigeons with air rifles from the Bordeaux Bridge. The only negative experience Jean recalls was the time he asked Marc where his father was. Angered, Marc told him that he had probably moved back to Algeria and to mind his own business. Jean got the message and never broached the subject again. It was obvious that his friend was struggling with some major issues. Marc was painfully shy, so much so that he struggled to say hello to Jean’s parents, despite the fact that they repeatedly demonstrated their fondness for him. More confident than his friend, Jean began dating Gina Cousineau. There was many a time when Marc stood awkwardly by, not knowing what to do, as the two lovers made out. When he finally tried his luck with a neighbourhood girl one summer afternoon, Nadia spotted them kissing in the backyard and laughed mockingly. Furious, Marc pushed the confused girl away, choosing solitude over his sister’s jibes.

Jean disliked Nadia and the way she treated his friend. She was constantly calling Marc names in front of other people, accusing him of “having no balls,” and insinuating that he was homosexual. Whereas Jean and Marc devoted themselves to constructive intellectual pursuits like building electronic gadgets in the basement, Nadia fell in with a bad crowd, and began drinking and taking drugs.

What remaining close relationships Marc had established perished in the summer of 1982, when his mother sold the family home in Pierrefonds and moved with her two children to a rented two-storey row house in the suburb of Saint-Laurent. Life at 2675 Marlborough Court had the advantage of being closer to St. Jude’s Hospital in Laval, where both Monique and Marc were employed; the former as a nursing director and the latter washing dishes in the hospital kitchen. By September, Marc had finished his summer job and was entering his first semester of a two-year CEGEP program in Pure Sciences at Saint-Laurent Junior College. At the same time, he was beginning to show signs of mental disturbance. Just after his seventeenth birthday he was debating a “controversial topic” with his mother when suddenly he seized her arm and gouged his fingers into her skin. When she threatened to kick him out of the home, Marc snapped out of his trance and let go, retreating in shame to his bedroom. Often he had professed to friends that he wished he had been able to save Monique from Rachid’s abuse — now, for an instant, he had taken his father’s place.

It was merely the beginning. After excelling academically in high school, Marc failed two classes in his first term at CEGEP, spending most of his time locked in his cluttered room playing on his computer or reading. He applied for the army that same year but was rejected for displaying anti-social behavioural traits. In order to best understand Marc Lépine’s state of mind in 1982, we need only look at one of the first lines in his 1989 suicide note: “It has been seven years that life does not bring me any joy.” If we are to trust the judgment of the gunman himself, this period marked the beginning of a radical negative shift in his emotional well-being.

Seven Years of Sorrow

Without the benefit of hindsight, in 1983 Marc Lépine seemed angelic compared to his sister, Nadia, whose habitual disobedience had landed her in a boarding school for troubled teens. Lépine was not sorry to see her go. For years she had constantly taunted him in front of his friends, exacting a devastating toll on his fragile self-esteem. Though Lépine had fared poorly in his fall 1982 term at CEGEP, by winter 1983 he had revitalized his academic performance, earning grades which ranged from the seventies to the nineties. His boyhood dream of entering the engineering program at École Polytechnique was now close to becoming a reality.

In the meantime, he continued to work part-time as a custodian at St. Jude’s Hospital, and was also responsible for serving meals to patients. Here his social shortcomings became increasingly evident. Considered weird and loud by his workmates, Lépine was judged to be seeking attention. Though he made friends, he argued with them constantly, a trait which some found annoying. Nicknamed “James Bond” for his high IQ and puzzle-solving abilities, sadly Lépine lacked 007’s confidence and easy charm with the ladies. He would routinely take meals and breaks with female co-workers, but was stifled in his efforts to court them by his crippling shyness. Plagued by terrible acne, instead of opening up to women, he continually guided conversations back to areas of his expertise, where he felt self-assured. Like the computers he so revered, Lépine was intelligent but unable to effectively process emotions. He also struggled with authority, slacking on his hospital duties and treating his bosses with disdain. Chronically distracted, he was prone to making simple errors in day-to-day tasks, which he would unfailingly acknowledge with his token “Ah, shit.”

When autumn of 1983 came, Lépine suddenly changed academic direction, dropping out in the middle of his two-year Pure Sciences program in favour of a three-year vocational trade program in Electronics Technology. He continued to achieve good grades, including an 82 in Industrial Electronics and an 87 in Control Systems. However, in both the school and the workplace, he was regarded as high-strung — a bundle of nerves who was “always in a hurry.” Lépine would often slam meal carts, spilling soup, which his co-workers interpreted as aggression, though it is possible that his attention and coordination were distracted by his overwhelming anxiety. During this period, Nadia and Isabelle Lahaie, her roommate at boarding school, often visited the apartment at 2675 Marlborough. Isabelle remembers Marc as a “good guy” but “closed” with a “strange look — his eyes were lit up, he had the same smile all the time … You could see he was unhappy.”
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A troubled teen herself, Nadia seemed indifferent to her brother’s problems, even advising Isabelle that the best ways to “get him mad” were to “call him Gamil, and tell him he is ugly and stupid.” Unsurprisingly, when Nadia returned to living at 2675 Marlborough in 1986, Lépine’s behaviour took a turn for the worse. With only nine courses left before graduating CEGEP in Electronics Technology, on January 31, 1986, the twenty-one-year-old simply stopped attending classes. He applied for the engineering program at École Polytechnique and was predictably rejected. Next he enrolled in summer courses, but dropped out. When July came, Lépine relocated to apartment 401 at 4185 St. Martin Boulevard in suburban Laval, away from his sister’s acerbic tongue.

Lépine’s habitual clumsiness resulted in him being transferred to the cafeteria at St. Jude’s, but the constant steam from the kitchen only worsened his repulsive acne. Fellow employees mocked him and refused to let him serve their meals. Lépine grew a patchy beard in an attempt to disguise his complexion, but if anything, it only accentuated his imperfections. Eventually, he was relegated to the back of the kitchen where nobody could see him — a modern Quasimodo, whose deafening “bells” were grease and steam.

That summer, Lépine befriended nineteen-year-old Dominique Leclair, the daughter of the man who ran the hospital. “I was kind to him because he was so hyperactive and nervous,” Dominique recalled. “Nobody would talk to him at lunch or break time.… Everyone else tried to avoid him because he was a bit strange because of his shyness.… He was always rushing things. He would never be calm.”
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Regarding his co-workers, she readily admitted, “They were mean.” If Lépine ever had any romantic interest in Dominique, she did not pick up on it. Even when they dined together, he kept his eyes on his food, stirring it continuously.

“I’ve asked a lot of girls out, but they have all refused,” he once confessed to her. “I know so many girls, but they won’t go out with me. I’m not good looking.…” The two finally went their separate ways in September 1987, when Dominique returned to school. Lépine was fired from his job at the hospital and attended a CEGEP in Montmorency.
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Although he received a $2,400 severance package, he was infuriated. One witness remembers him threatening to go on a killing rampage that would culminate with his own death. In a chilling coincidence, the last victim of the Polytechnique massacre would turn out to be Dominique’s cousin Maryse. He had repaid her kindness with a lifetime of agony.

“Ah, Shit”

The cafeteria at École Polytechnique was adorned with red and white balloons to mark the holiday season. At 5:18 p.m., approximately one hundred people were gathered around the tables, chatting, eating, and sipping complimentary wine to celebrate the end of term. Stepping off the escalator, Marc Lépine entered the cafeteria and opened fire, striking a female student by the kitchen. Terrified onlookers began to flee the cafeteria in droves. When his victim fell dead, Lépine stalked across the large room, firing and wounding another. He reached a storage area known as the Polyparty, where he encountered two more female students and unloaded the Ruger, killing them. He spotted a male and female student attempting to conceal themselves beneath a table, and ordered them to “get out from there.” For unknown reasons, he allowed them to escape unharmed.

Exiting the cafeteria, Lépine roamed around aimlessly for a number of minutes before stomping up a non-functional escalator to the third floor. There he encountered a group of students in the hallway and opened fire, wounding three: two men and one woman. Continuing down a short corridor, he turned left and entered room B-311, where three students stood on a raised platform. Clad in a brand-new red sweater, Maryse Leclair had her back to him and was scribbling on the blackboard.