DEATH IN A CLASSROOM - Aug 24, 1992

A lone gunman terrorizes a university

Dateline: Montreal, Que.

A 7.65-mm bullet pierced Phoivos Ziogas's abdomen and ricocheted inside his body, severing two major arteries and destroying a kidney. Four bullets struck Matthew Douglass in the head, face and hand. Michael Hogben was cut down by three shots, fired at short range into his head, throat and back. Aaron Jaan Saber was hit twice, once in the head and once in the side. A single bullet lodged in Elizabeth Horwood's thigh. All five victims were employees of Montreal's Concordia University, and all had the misfortune on Aug. 24 to encounter a gunman who went on a shooting rampage last week at the university's downtown campus. ``The gunman appears to have been searching for vengeance,'' said Pierre Sangollo, director of the Montreal police department's major crimes unit. ``And it looks as if most his targets were deliberately selected.'' Police charged Valery Fabrikant, a 52- year-old Soviet-trained associate professor of engineering with impressive credentials and a long history of aberrant behavior, with murdering Douglass and Hogben, and with the attempted murder of Saber, who died the next day.

The violent episode was eerily reminiscent of a Dec. 6, 1989, rampage in which a man shot and killed 14 women in the University of Montreal' s Ecole polytechnique. That gunman, Marc Lepine, who subsequently took his own life, left a suicide note in which he accused feminists of ruining his life. But if vengeance was behind the Concordia killings, it appeared to be of a a different kind.

According to university officials, Fabrikant, who moved to Canada from the Soviet Union in 1979, had been engaged for nearly two years in a bitter, increasingly bizarre feud with Concordia's administrators and his own colleagues in the university's engineering and computer sciences department. An acknowledged authority on mechanical elasticity, a branch of mechanics concerned with the behavior of materials when subjected to loads, he accused Concordia administrators of having sinister motives for denying him tenure and charged associates with financial corruption and academic plagiarism. A university spokesman said that Fabrikant launched numerous legal actions, made whispered innuendos and accusations about his colleagues and flooded the university's electronic mail system with rambling, often abusive diatribes directed against his colleagues and others. According to the spokesman, Fabrikant also intimidated some individuals at the university and made veiled threats. ``Everybody knew the guy had serious psychological problems, but I guess few of us wanted to believe that it could ever spill over into this kind of tragedy,'' said a Concordia colleague, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The deadly shootings erupted on the ninth floor of the Henry F. Hall Building in the heart of Montreal's business district. Ziogas, 48, chairman of Concordia's electrical and computer engineering department, was in serious condition at Montreal General Hospital late last week after undergoing five hours of abdominal surgery. Douglass, a 65-year-old civil engineering professor, died at the scene, along with Hogben, 52, an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry. Saber, 46, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, died in hospital following the assault. Elizabeth Horwood, the secretary of Mohammed Sam Osman, chairman of the mechanical engineering department, escaped relatively unscathed. The 66-year-old woman was released from hospital a day after having her thigh wound treated.

Arrested by police at Concordia, Fabrikant was taken to hospital later in the day after complaining of chest pains. Fabrikant had been teaching at Concordia since 1980, shortly after arriving in Canada from what was then the Soviet Union. Born in 1940 in Minsk, now the capital of independent Belarus, Fabrikant graduated from the Power Engineering Institute of Moscow with a PhD in applied mathematics and engineering mechanics in 1966. He is married to Maya Tyker, a fellow Soviet immigrant. The couple have two children, aged 8 and 10. Fabrikant had been pressing for tenure for several years, and wanted Concordia to count the time he spent working as a researcher at the university as part of his waiting period for tenure. But the spokesman said that the university had refused to agree to this.

During a brief appearance in Quebec Court to face a raft of charges, including charges of murder, Fabrikant complained of his treatment by the police. ``They took away my shirt just so I would look ridiculous, '' he told Judge Micheline Corbeil-Laramee in impeccable English. ``And they took away my glasses so I see nothing.'' He also indicated that ``unless I can find a lawyer that shares the ideology of the defence, I will have to represent myself.''

The shootings raised a number of troubling issues. Concordia officials, who said that they had warned the police about Fabrikant's potential for violence, were under pressure to explain why nothing was done to curb his activities. And Quebec police faced a host of questions arising from the fact that Fabrikant had in his possession three legally registered handguns -- a .38-calibre revolver and two semi-automatic pistols, 6.35 mm and 7.65 mm. In 1990 the Surete du Quebec, the provincial police force, granted Fabrikant a permit to possess the revolver. Although the Surete rejected subsequent applications by Fabrikant for other permits, his wife, who is a member of a gun club, obtained permits for the two semi-automatic pistols.

Following the University of Montreal killings, Ottawa redrafted a proposed gun control law to provide tougher screening for people applying for permits. Those measures are due to come into effect next January - - a sad irony for the families of the Concordia victims.

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