The perpetrator of the 1992 Concordia University massacre that killed four people, Valery Fabrikant, died Saturday in prison.
Correctional Service Canada made the announcement Sunday in a statement, saying he died “of apparent natural causes” at the age of 86.
He had been serving a life sentence since June 8, 1993. Fabrikant died at Archambault Institution, a medium- and minimum-security prison in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, in the Laurentians.
As is always the case with a death, Correctional Service Canada will notify the police and coroner of the inmate’s death.
On August 24, 1992, Fabrikant, a former professor of mechanical engineering at Concordia University, opened fire in the university’s engineering department building, killing four professors and wounding a secretary.
Matthew McCartney Douglass, a professor of civil engineering, and Michael Gorden Hogben, a professor of chemistry, died the same day. Mechanical engineering professor Aaron Jaan Saber died of his wounds the day after the shooting, while Phoivos Ziogas, head of the electrical and computer engineering department, succumbed to it a month later.
The injuries of the secretary of the mechanical engineering department, Elizabeth Horwood, have been treated.
The massacre led the university to set up two commissions of inquiry, producing two reports. In the first report published in 1994 by John Scott Cowan of the University of Ottawa, Fabrikant spent 13 years at the university. During this period, he would have made “several people unhappy” and would have presented behaviors “that ranged from unpleasant to unbearable depending on the circumstances and the year,” the document reads.
Fabrikant was facing a firing as an associate professor of mechanical engineering in 1992 before he committed his crime. He also accused his colleagues of stealing his work.
The man has appeared in court on numerous occasions for various reasons after his conviction. In 2020, the Parole Board of Canada denied his release.
In its 10-page decision, the commission had stressed that Fabrikant did not consider himself a risk to society – an assessment with which the team handling his case disagreed.
The commission ruled that his release would pose an undue risk to society, noting that after 28 years behind bars, Fabrikant still did not admit that he had attacked innocent people.
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews
