The victim has been identified as Anastasia DeSouza, 18. At least six of the injured are said to be in a critical condition.
Reports in the Toronto Star and Le Press, a French daily from Montreal, say Gill, dressed in black, parked his car outside the college gate around 12.45 pm, took out three guns, including an automatic rifle, out of the trunk and walked into the campus cafeteria and began firing indiscriminately. All three weapons were legally registered.
Panic-stricken students rushed into nearby classrooms and barricaded themselves.
The police arrived within minutes, and when the man responded to the call to put down his weapons with an obscenity, he was shot dead. While the police have not officially named him, the Canadian dailies have identified him as Kimveer Gill, 25.
He is said to have frequented a Gothic cult website, vampirefreaks.com, which is full of anti-establishment rhetoric and abuse.
The Toronto Star says his website reveals Gill was born in Montreal on July 9, 1981, and is of Indian heritage.
'With a weakness for laziness and a fear of nothing', 'his goal for this year was to stay alive with a self-deprecating dig at his most overused phrase on instant messenger being heavy Metal Rul3z,' it says. He hated authority figures like police, principals and teachers and singled out `jocks' for bullying.
In his online diary in which he reportedly made his last entry at 5 a.m. (Tuesday), he says, `It's not only the bullies fault, but the principal's fault for turning a blind eye .It's the police's fault for not doing anything when people complain (ooooops) my mistake, the cops are corrupt sons of whores, so it's not like they can do anything about it. F..the police.'
He describes Natural Born Killers, as his favorite movie, and lauds the Tec-9 semi-automatic handgun, lamenting that it was not legal in Canada.
`Work sucks . school sucks . life sucks . what else can I say?' he says.
Soon after the shooting incident, there were rumours that there were three men involved, and that they had targeted women and minorities. There were also reports of the killer having used a machine gun, and of gunshots in a nearby mall. All the reports were false.
But the fear among the students and their parents was real.
Dipti Gupta, a teacher at Dawson into whose class the panicked students had rushed for shelter, recalled one student who thought she had grazed her leg while fleeing. It turned out be a bullet wound. Gupta and some of her students tried to soothe her while urging her to stay quiet lest the gunman heard the screams and came after her.
'If you can make sense of this, let me know,' says a headline in the Globe and Mail today.
At the moment, no one can.
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