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Don't blame bullets on U.S., shooting victim says

A recent rampage had the flavor of America, not Montreal. Just an extra reason for Canada to keep its gun laws, the student argues.

By V ANESSA GEZARI
Published September 24, 2006

MONTREAL - The first bullet is lodged in the back of his head, near the layer of tissue that enfolds his skull.

The second lies embedded in his neck, beneath a thick black scab. It is touching his spine. A millimeter deeper and he would have been paralyzed or dead.

Both bullets - and a third that passed cleanly through his left calf - entered Hayder Kadhim's body Sept. 13, when a man with a semiautomatic rifle strode into a junior college in downtown Montreal, shattering the peace of a Canadian afternoon with a particularly American outbreak of violence.

The gunman, 25-year-old Kimveer Gill, wore a black trench coat and left behind an Internet blog entry about playing a video game called Super Columbine Massacre. In and around the packed cafeteria at Dawson College, he killed Anastasia De Sousa, an 18-year-old business student, and wounded at least 19 others, including Kadhim, before being shot by police and turning his gun on himself.

"We know that in America, those stories are pretty common," said Kadhim, seated in an armchair in his family's Montreal apartment a week after the shooting. "One day you'll hear about Columbine. Another day, someone shoots himself. You can definitely call Canada peaceful compared to the U.S."

It would be easy for Canadians to blame the Dawson shooting on America's culture of violence, and it wouldn't be the first time. When Toronto's gun-related homicide rate nearly doubled last year, politicians pointed to smuggled American weapons and gang activity with roots to the south.

"The U.S. is exporting its problem of violence to the streets of Toronto," Toronto Mayor David Miller said then.

But America and Canada are increasingly intertwined, making it harder than ever to trace the origins of cultural influence. In a Dawson bathroom, a Wal-Mart poster shares space with antiwar graffiti. In southern Afghanistan last week, four Canadian soldiers died in a U.S.-led military campaign that some Canadians support and others question.

A week after the shooting, students in an American history class at Dawson dutifully took notes on lynchings, Jim Crow laws and the brutal killing of Emmett Till. Yet some said they don't see America as extraordinarily violent compared with Canada.

"A lot of people bash the Americans, and I don't think they know what they're talking about," said Michael Sinai, 18, who has family in Vermont. "It's not black and white."

The Dawson shooting quickly faded from American headlines, but it has dominated the news in Canada and sparked calls for an overall gun ban. In this country of 32-million, only 172 homicides were committed with firearms in 2004. In America, where the population is 10 times greater, the number of gun homicides that year was 10,654, more than 60 times Canada's.

"It's hard to believe that the world just keeps on turning after something like this," someone wrote on a piece of poster board attached to a fence near Dawson, where bouquets piled knee-high in the days after the shooting. "I swear Montreal just stood still holding its breath for a long time, in shock, hoping somehow that it wasn't true, that it didn't really happen. It's unbelievable!"

Nearby lay a spray of blue orchids, with a card that said, "From USA: We understand and are sorry for your loss."

When Dawson officially reopened on Monday, students flocked to the cafeteria, where the bullet holes in columns had been repaired and a wall of shattered glass doors had been covered in plywood. Everybody wanted to look. A white-haired couple wandered in with a video camera. Vincent Pascale, a Dawson security supervisor who helped dozens of students escape on the day of the shooting, pointed out the place where Gill had fallen after being shot by a police officer on a balcony one floor up.

A woman asked Pascale if school security guards would carry guns from now on.

"We don't live in that kind of society where you have to worry about that," he told her. "This was an isolated thing."

It isn't Canada's first encounter with school violence. The 1989 shooting deaths of 14 women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal prompted lobbying that helped create most of the country's gun-control measures, including a gun registry that Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said he wants to get rid of this fall.

The registry has cost much more than expected, and Harper wants to impose stiffer criminal penalties instead.

Hayder Kadhim is 18, 6-foot-1 and slender with a gentle smile. An aspiring hip-hop artist who goes by the musical handle Jiggy, he sometimes raps about war, terrorism and his family's Iraqi roots but doesn't consider himself political.

One night in the hospital, a few days after the shooting, he couldn't sleep. His brother had told him there were lots of reporters around, so he decided to write an open letter to Prime Minister Harper in the hope of handing it off to them, something he hasn't yet felt well enough to do.

In it, he asked Harper to imagine that his own son had been shot. He asked him to imagine living the rest of his life with two bullets in his body. And he implored Harper not to get rid of the gun registry.

Doing away with the registry, Kadhim wrote, would turn Toronto and Montreal into "big, dangerous, American-like cities."

It's not that he blames the shooting on American culture, he said. It's just that Canada's low crime rate is something he would like to preserve.

"Those kind of things can happen anywhere, at any time," he said.

"I don't think it's like this contagious sickness that he got from America, I just think it's a psychological problem in that person. I think it could happen in America, Russia, Iraq."

He doesn't want Canada to turn into the kind of place where there are so many guns that carrying one makes you feel safer.

"I feel in America, whether you're an angel or a gangster, you need to have a gun."

Like other young Canadians, Kadhim is a cultural hybrid. He remembers hearing gunfire on a childhood visit to New York, but he also lost a close friend to a neighborhood shooting in Montreal. He grew up playing hockey and listening to Tupac Shakur.

"Tupac, he's not as holy as the prophet Mohammed," Kadhim said, "but he is holy to me."

On Sept. 13, the 10th anniversary of Shakur's shooting death, Kadhim put on a T-shirt bearing his musical hero's face and headed to a chemistry class at Dawson. In his backpack he carried a CD for Anastasia De Sousa. Kadhim's friend sold jackets and De Sousa had told him she wanted to buy one; he was bringing her the CD with pictures so she could choose.

As he chatted with a friend on the sidewalk, he turned to see another student fall flat on his back. It looked to Kadhim as if a piece of the student's head had flown out. He didn't see a shooter, though he heard shots. Then Kadhim fell, too.

"As if someone pushed me real hard or I tripped. I guess that's when I got shot in the head, but at the time I felt no pain."

He started running. He felt the holes in his body, air against raw flesh. He made it nearly a block, hopping when he realized his left leg was no longer in synch with his right. He touched the back of his head and came away with a handful of his own blood.

"I felt that if I die at that moment, then I'm ready to die," he said. "If not, this is definitely something that will change my life forever."

They loaded him into an ambulance, and he slipped into a coma. When he regained consciousness 20 hours later, he was strapped to a hospital bed. One of the bullets had lodged near the part of the brain that controls vision and hearing. Whenever he shifted his gaze, he would see double for a few seconds while his eyes adjusted.

A friend told him about De Sousa.

"That was more painful than the bullet wound," he said. "She was always smiling. Every time you'd see her, you'd feel good."

Kadhim knows that Gill owned his guns legally. But he doesn't understand why.

"The license should go to someone who has a reason: a security guard or a cop or a hunter," he said. "A young 25-year-old man that is depressed about life and everything, how is it so useful for him to have a gun, three guns, and big guns, semiautomatic guns?"

The doctors told Kadhim it would be more dangerous to remove the bullets in his head and neck than to leave them. He worries that the metal will poison his blood. He worries that he'll be stopped at airports for the rest of his life.

On a recent afternoon, sunflowers wilted on his living room windowsill amid dozens of bouquets. An Iraqi channel played on TV, and pictures of Muslim shrines hung on the wall, near a photo of Kadhim in a pink tie at his high school prom.

When he feels better, he plans to wade deep into Canada's gun control debate. He wants to drop a few classes at Dawson, where he's studying health science, to make more time for activism. He wants Prime Minister Harper to hear his voice.

That voice is occasionally silenced by bolts of pain. He forgets words; he apologizes. When voices echo, he winces and sticks his fingers in his ears. He sits quietly for a minute. Then he starts talking again.

Vanessa Gezari can be reached at vgezari@sptimes.com or 727 893-8803.

[Last modified September 24, 2006, 01:30:26]