Diane Riopel
L'École Polytechnique de Montréal has been a part of my life for 30 years: First as a student, then as a researcher and later as a professor. What happened on Dec. 6, 1989, changed my life and the lives of everyone at the school. We lost our innocence that night.
In the final hours of the fall term, students were celebrating and the school was a noisy, jubilant place. I left my office on the third floor at about 5 p.m., before the shooting started in the last classroom on that same floor.
The first I heard about the massacre was when I got home that evening. I had just walked in the door when my aunt called. She was so relieved to hear my voice and then told me what she had learned from the news. Still wearing my winter coat, I turned on the TV and watched the scene in horror. I thought, 'We love our students. We are so proud of them. What did we do to bring this evil into our school?'
"We lost our innocence that night."
By 7:30 p.m. I heard from my fiancé, who is now my husband. He had been teaching in the school and had evacuated his students because of a fire alarm that went off. When he went back inside the school, he saw blood in front of the photocopiers, but at the time he thought the ink cartridge had exploded. He could never have imagined the tragedy that had unfolded.
When I went back to my office after Dec. 6, one of my students called to tell me he wasn't coming back to school. I thought, God, give me the words to help this student return. He has always enjoyed the school, was proud of it. How can one person who hated our school take all that away?
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