Dawson College sits on de Maisonneuve Boulevard in the Westmount area, adjacent to Place Alexis Nihon and Westmount Square, steps from the Atwater metro station. On September 13, 2006, it was a typical Wednesday at the CEGEP -- Quebec's unique post-secondary pre-university system -- and students were between classes or eating lunch. The gunman fired his first ten rounds at students on the steps outside the rear entrance at 12:42 p.m. He then jumped a low wall and entered the building, moving toward the cafeteria atrium. Two police officers happened to be at the college on an unrelated matter. One chased the gunman inside, shouting at him to drop his weapon. The officer fired at the gunman, who at one point held his pistol under his own chin. In total, the shooter discharged his rifle seventy-two times and his pistol six times.

One person died that day: an eighteen-year-old woman shot nine times in the abdomen who died at the scene. Nineteen others were wounded, eight in critical condition, six requiring surgery. One victim, eighteen-year-old Hayder Kadhim, was shot twice in the head and neck and spent two weeks in a coma on a ventilator before beginning a recovery that would eventually see him challenge Prime Minister Stephen Harper to a gun control debate on national television. A follow-up study by the McGill University Health Centre Research Institute found that thirty percent of Dawson students at the time of the shooting suffered mental health consequences including post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression, and social phobia -- a rate twice that of the general population. Eighteen percent developed a mental health disorder for the first time in their lives.

The aftermath engulfed downtown Montreal. Approximately eighty police vehicles and twenty-four ambulances surrounded the building. Place Alexis Nihon and Westmount Square were evacuated. The Montreal Metro's green line shut down for hours between Lionel-Groulx and McGill stations. The nearby Pepsi Forum went into lockdown. Concordia University's student union cancelled all orientation activities and opened its Sir George Williams campus as a crisis center, providing food, water, blankets, and counseling to evacuated Dawson students -- a striking gesture from a university that had experienced its own shooting fourteen years before. Dawson College closed until September 18, when it reopened with an 'Open House' for students to retrieve belongings and access support services before classes resumed the following day.

The shooting reopened debates that Montreal knew too well. The gunman had legally obtained his weapons. Security camera footage from Place Alexis Nihon showed him surveilling the area as early as August 10, more than a month before the attack. The incident prompted Monique Lepine -- mother of the Ecole Polytechnique gunman -- to speak publicly for the first time in seventeen years. Journalist Jan Wong drew immediate controversy with a Globe and Mail column linking all three of Quebec's school shootings to the province's language laws, arguing the perpetrators were alienated by Quebec society. The House of Commons unanimously condemned the article. The broader questions persisted: how a society prevents such violence, how communities heal from recurring trauma, and what it means for a city to have experienced not one but three fatal school shootings in seventeen years.