This weekend will mark the 20th anniversary of the mass shooting at Dawson College in Montreal. Some of those who were involved are returning to the school for a memorial. “Shivers to be honest; I think I have goosebumps,” said Jean-Marie Dufresne, a first responder who is returning for the first time in 20 years. “I was on parental leave from my paramedic job, and my daughter was three weeks old at the time, and I was giving a first-aid class at the college of medicine with another instructor, and we decided to go for lunch at the Plaza Alexis Nihon,” he said. It was at lunch when Dufresne saw a crowd of panicked students coming towards him. His instincts told him to run outside. “When I saw the blood, I said, ‘this is a gunshot for sure. This is a gunshot,’” he said. Armed only with gloves, he and his colleague ran to help two victims outside the school’s entrance on Maisonneuve Street. The shooter was already inside. While Dufresne worked to save a young man with a head wound, his partner worked on Dawson student Meaghan Hennegan. She and her mom were heading to a medical appointment when she saw the shooter. “It was like in a movie, the whole flip out from underneath his trench coat, and there’s so many different art students at Dawson that I thought people were making a movie,” said Hennegan. Moments later, she was on the ground, shot in the arm and upper leg. “I just kept asking my mom why,” she said. Police officers quickly descended on the school. The head of Dawson at the time, Richard Filion, ran from his office when he heard there was a shooting. “Police could not get into the college from this side, so they had to come from the Sherbrooke side, and they joined me at the mezzanine,” he said. It was in the mezzanine that the shooter was cornered. “The cops came here and decided to shoot, bang, bang, bang, and bullets flew over my head here,” said Filion. The gunman took his own life after being shot by police. In the end, 19 people were injured, and one student, Anastasia De Sousa, was killed. An officer happened to be parked outside of Dawson when the shooter arrived. “They found his bag with 1,500 ammunition rounds in this bag, so he was coming to do carnage,” said Filion. “It could have been very, very, very much worse, that’s for sure.” In the days that followed, a plan was put in place to clean up the building and get students back to school quickly. “We didn’t want the students to be left alone, on their own to deal with that trauma,” said Filion. For Dufresne, the experience only hit home at the end of the day. “I saw my wife at the time, with my daughter in her arms, and, I, at that point, I literally crumbled,” he said. It was a tragedy that formed the rest of his career. “I just made sure I made a difference every shift,” said the man who’s now head of security for Montreal’s Grand Prix. Hennegan has also kept moving forward. She’s now a mother and a tireless advocate for better gun control. “It’s always at the back of my mind,” she said. “What if, what if, what if? I don’t want other mothers to have to think about that. I don’t want another mother to feel the way my mom did, watching her baby on the sidewalk and thinking she was the lucky one.” Twenty years later, the community will gather to remember and to support each other. A ceremony will be held in the school’s peace garden that was created in Anastasia De Sousa’s memory.
