Survivors recall École Polytechnique shooting

Heidi Rathjen feels the same way but this day she’s not talking about engineering. Rathjen, who went from being an engineering student to a tenacious advocate for the reform of Canada’s gun laws, is rolling up her sleeves again to protect the controversial federal gun registry. “I’m going to keep fighting,” she said in an interview, insisting that gun registry costs are under control and it saves lives.

Twenty years ago, Rathjen was studying in a Polytechnique lounge when a pale-faced student burst in and yelled there was a man with a gun outside. She didn’t understand what he was babbling about and she wasn’t afraid—until she heard shots.

There were more shots. Screams.

Rathjen and other students huddled in the room and tried to hide, turning off the lights. Only a fragile door with a flimsy lock stood between them and Lepine, whose weapon blasts sounded like “planks of wood hitting the floor.” Forty minutes later, police showed up and took Rathjen and the others to safety.

Looking back, Rathjen smiles slightly as she remembers one of her friends, who was among the 14 killed. “We were in the same clubs, we went to classes and organized the student yearbook and things like that together,” she said of Lemay. “She was a wonderful girl, a total sweetheart.”

Rathjen, who now works for an anti-tobacco organization, says her advocacy helped her deal with the tragedy. “One of the things I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to do is to help out at the school and to work on something that I believed in that would help prevent similar tragedies.

“My involvement in gun control stems from the tragedy—it’s a normal reaction—but I came to absolutely believe in it,” said Rathjen, who now has a daughter. “In fighting back in whichever way we can, we can’t bring the victims back but we can work to make the system safer, to make it harder for an angry individual to commit the same kind of horrible crime. It was too easy for Marc Lepine to get his gun.”

Riopel would like to see one other change as the world moves on 20 years after the Montreal Massacre. She would like to never hear Lepine’s name again. “We have given him enough publicity. Out of respect for the victims, the killer should be completely anonymous.”

The Canadian Press