News Stories Related to School Shootings

Sept. 14, 2006 - Montreal, Quebec - College Shooter Showed Rage, No Motive Known - 1 killed and 19 wounded

MONTREAL, Quebec (CNN) -- Hate-filled Web postings by the Montreal college gunman show bitterness but no real motive for the shooting rampage Wednesday that killed one woman and injured 19 other people.

Kimveer Gill killed himself with a shot to the head after firing on students at Dawson College, Montreal police told CNN on Thursday. Police initially said Gill was killed by officers. But, according to the preliminary autopsy report, Gill turned a gun on himself after officers shot him in the arm, police said. Investigators are scrutinizing entries made by Gill on a Web site called "VampireFreaks.com" including pictures of the man dressed in black posing with guns and a knife, Quebec Provincial Police spokesman Lt. Frances Dore told CNN Thursday.

A user called "Trench" with the sign-on name "fatality666" -- who has been identified as Gill by other users on the site -- said he liked playing a video game based on the Columbine High School massacre, media reports said Thursday. Just two hours before the shooting, "fatality666" who also called himself the "Angel of Death" wrote, "Whiskey in the morning, mmmmmm, mmmmmmmmm, good !!" and listed his mood as "no mood." In two other postings earlier that morning, the writer described his mood as "crazy" and "postal." On Tuesday he said his mood was "dead."

"I hate this world, I hate the people in it, I hate the way people live, I hate God, I hate the deceivers, I hate betrayers, I hate religious zealots, I hate everything ... I hate so much ... (I could write 1,000 more lines like these, but does it really matter, does anyone even care)," said an entry from March.

Dore said Gill had no criminal record and was not known to police. "He's a deranged person, that's for sure," Dore said, adding police have "absolutely no motive right now" for the shootings. "He had a car, got out of his car, took some guns from the trunk and went inside, killing people," Dore said.

Police believe the man picked his targets at random. (Watch what happened during the shooting, captured on a cell phone -- 0:50) "No connection whatsoever; he's not a student at Dawson, he's not a former student at Dawson," Dore said.

The spokesman said Gill lived with his parents in a suburb north of Montreal, and most of the pictures on the Web site were taken in the basement of his parents' home. The parents "were in shock, that's for sure," when told their son was dead and how he died, Dore said.

'No emotion in his face'
Six of the 19 people wounded remain in intensive care on life support at Montreal General Hospital, according to Dr. Tarek Razek.

The facility received 11 of the 19 people hurt, ranging in age from 17 to 48 years old. (Watch a student describe his escape from "pale-face" gunman -- 4:03)

Montreal police chief Yvan Delorme said two police officers -- responding to an unrelated call -- heard gunfire and spotted a gunman outside the school at 12:41 p.m. Wednesday. The officers followed the gunman into the building, engaging him minutes later in an exchange of fire that killed him.

A student, Daniel Mightley, 21, told CNN the shooter he saw had a "black Mohawk" haircut. "I saw his face and he had no emotion in his face whatsoever," he said. "He was walking toward us very slowly and just shooting."

"The school that I once knew wasn't what it looked like a couple of hours previous," Mightley said on CNN's "American Morning" Thursday. "There was bullet holes all over the place, police officers all over the place -- blood in our cafeteria, .... pools of blood in our cafeteria."

The college has 7,000 day students and 3,000 night students, according to the Dawson College Web site.

Montreal was the scene of another college shooting almost 17 years ago. Marc Lepine opened fire at Ecole Polytechnique on December 6, 1989, killing 14 female students and wounding 13 other people before killing himself. Lepine left behind a three-page letter blaming feminists for his not being able to get into the school.

'Dark-clad loner'
On the VampireFreaks.com site Thursday morning, a search for "Trench" turned up a message from the administrators of the site saying that the user called Trench "has been deleted." The reason for the deletion was left blank.

One of Gill's postings said he liked to play "Super Columbine Massacre," an Internet-based game that simulated the April 20, 1999, shootings by two students at a Colorado high school that left 13 people dead, The Associated Press reported.

Near the home where Gill lived, a neighbor told the AP that Gill was a loner. "There were never any friends," AP quoted Louise Leykauf as saying. "He kept to himself. He always wore dark clothing."

AP reported that VampireFreaks.com came up in a murder investigation earlier this year. A 23-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl accused in a triple murder in Medicine Hat, Alberta, had profiles on the Web site. CNN.com