Man who shot 20 on campus leaves chilling portrait on Web
MONTREAL – The night before Wednesday’s deadly shooting rampage at a Montreal college, Kimveer Gill, 25, wrote on his blog that he was drinking whiskey and listening to heavy metal music. He also lamented that he had nothing special to write about.
Hours later, after a bit of sleep and a breakfast of eggs, toast and more whiskey, Gill headed to Dawson College, police said, armed with an AK-47, a semiautomatic rifle and a handgun.
At 12:41 p.m., he opened fire, killing Anastasia Desousa, 18, and wounding at least 19 others. Four of the victims remained in critical condition Thursday, including three in extremely critical condition and one in a deep coma, hospital officials said.
Then, as police shot Gill in the arm, he lifted his gun to his head and fired one last shot.
The picture that emerged Thursday of the Mohawk-coiffed shooter, from his own pages on a Goth Web site called VampireFreaks.com offered a chilling portrait of a disaffected young man, consumed by hate, rejection and a desire “to die in a hail of gunfire.”
Gill seemed to have modeled his rampage on the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Colorado, even wearing a black trench coat and boots like the Columbine shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris.
Gill’s handle on the site was “fatality666” and he introduced himself in third person, writing, “His name is Trench. You will come to know him as the Angel of Death.”
He posted more than 50 photos, some showing him wearing a black trench coat and hoisting a semiautomatic weapon. In another picture, he was aiming the gun at the camera, with a caption reading, “I think I have an obbsetion (sic) with guns muahahaha.”
His blog, written over the course of nine months, provided an instant history of his fixations: Columbine, video games, and high school slights and crushes, though high school was long behind him. His favorite video games included “Postal,” in which the player goes on a shooting killing spree. He was a Canadian whose parents were from India, and lived with his mother in Laval, a suburb just outside of Montreal.
The blog even gave a glimpse of his predicted end: an image of a tombstone with his name on it, and an epitaph “Lived fast died young. Left a mangled corpse.”
Police spokesman Chantal Mackels confirmed the shooter’s name and said he was Canadian-born.
Jack Jedwab, the Executive Director of the Association for Canadian Studies, said Thursday that Gill was part of a community of alienated young people from around the world who found and encouraged each other on the Internet, expressing rebellion through hatred and violence.
Warning signs abounded, he said, but went unmonitored. Gill offered up the results of a survey he took from a Web site called “How Likely Are You to Go Postal?” His results: “You have a 84 percent chance of going postal!” His “Probability of killing” was 86 percent.
“Consider yourself a danger to society,” the site told him.