James Santos’ story

Monday Sept. 18 marked the re-opening of Dawson College, which had been closed since the tragic shooting that shook the community.

At 12:41 p.m., the exact time lone gunman Kimveer Gill began his shooting rampage, the students marched in symbolizing their solidarity and devotion to moving forward with their lives. A feat perhaps most difficult of all for James Santos.

“When we walked back into Dawson, this guy behind me yelled something out and I got scared,” said Santos, the Dawson student whom the gunman held captive on the day of the shooting.

“I jumped and I started sweating,” the 17-year-old said. The cry brought on flashbacks of when the gunman entered the Atrium and began yelling at students, right before opening fire on them.

“If I’m in crowded places, that are noisy, I get very nervous.”

Santos was sitting in the Atrium that day with his friend, 18-year-old Anastasia DeSousa. They had been chatting casually at a table together when the gunman first entered the room, rifle in hand.

At first, Santos thought the dark-clothed man standing before him was playing a practical joke. But then the gun slipped from his hands and hit the ground. The sound of metal hitting the tiled floor told Santos that this was no joke. “When it registered that it was real, I dove.”

When DeSousa saw him take cover, she turned around to see what was happening and the young woman came face to face with her soon-to-be killer. As she tried to move away from him, she was shot in the abdomen. That’s when DeSousa began drifting in and out of consciousness.

“I knew she was still alive then because I could hear her breathing next to me,” Santos said. “‘Stay with me,’ I told her. ‘Don’t sleep yet.'” He wanted desperately to help his friend, but the gunman made him stand up. “He pointed his gun straight in my face and told me to walk in front of him.”

Forced to leave his friend behind, Santos followed instructions and walked with his back to the gunman. He prepared himself to die.

“He told me not to look at him. I thought, for sure, he was going to kill me. I just thought to myself, ‘Please let it be quick and painless.'”

The gunman didn’t shoot Santos. Instead, he used him as a shield from the police. With Santos so close, the officers could not afford to attempt shooting at the gunman.

During the minutes that followed, the gunman made Santos act as a watchdog warning him to police officers’ positionning and made him carry bags filled with ammunition.

Santos tried to persuade the gunman to give himself up but his response was solemn. “‘Today I’m going to die,’ he said to me. He looked like he was in a trance or something.”

Santos asked to care for his friend DeSousa, who lay on the ground trembling.

“I told him I would take her outside to get help and then I’d come right back in and do whatever he wanted me to.”

The gunman then turned toward DeSousa and asked Santos if she was alright. He answered that he didn’t know, but that he knew she wasn’t well. That’s when the gunman walked toward the young woman and shot her eight more times. “Now she’s dead,” the killer said.

Santos was desperately hoping his friend was still alive, but logic told him no one could survive so many shots at such close range.

The deranged man was finally shot by police and soon after, pulled the trigger on himself. Santos’ fear had become so intense that he went into shock. “I went deaf… I didn’t even hear the gunshot. Until I saw him dead on the floor, I [still] thought he was going to kill me.”

Santos said life after the Dawson shooting has been trying for his family as well. “My parents took it badly, especially my mom. She could’ve lost me, I could’ve been killed.” Santos’ younger sister, Katherine, 13, was also devastated by the thought of losing her brother.

The grief really hit him when he attended DeSousa’s funeral, where he met with her family. Although they were consumed with grief over losing their first-born child, they greeted him with overwhelming gratitude. “They thanked me for being there with her when she died. [They said] She didn’t die alone because I was with her.”

While the death of his friend is something he knows he must learn to live with, Santos said the media has made his situation that much harder to deal with.

“I think they made Gill seem like a God to other psychos. Seeing him on T.V., he looks like a legend…[Other people are] going to want to do it also.”

He feels that the media went too far by publishing photographs of the killer with guns in his hands. “The picture where he’s pointing the gun straight at the camera, it looks just like when he pointed it at my face,” Santos said.

He said they also got most of it wrong and that some students went on TV and the radio merely looking for their 15 minutes of fame, and were citing facts that were untrue. The media, he feels, should never have aired such inaccurate reports.

“I only went to a radio station to clear things up,” Santos said, adding that he felt a duty to tell Montrealers and his fellow students what really happened.

Since their march back into Dawson, students have tried to go about their daily lives. The mood in the Atrium is different than it once was, but everyone is trying their best to be ordinary again.

“They’re trying to pretend nothing happened, but you can still sense in the air that it’s tense and people are a little shaky.” Santos has been attending school regularly and plans to continue to. He said that it hasn’t been easy but that his friends and family have been there for him every step of the way.

Now, two weeks after the shooting, Santos feels hopeful about the future. Surviving the tragedy has shown the young man, who has always entertained the idea of becoming a firefighter, that he is strong enough emotionally to handle difficult situations.

Santos also plans to have an angel, with the date Sept. 13, 2006 tattooed on his right shoulder, in commemoration of the day he could have died, but somehow survived. “There was a guardian angel over my shoulder that day,” he said.

And while he knows that nothing can ever change what happened he has decided he will no longer live in fear.

“He controlled 18 minutes of my life; he’s not going to control the rest.”