Disaster-loving storm-chasing probably ADHD club!

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I'm the first member... here we talk about our love for disasters and our daydreams about them, and our experiences in disasters in real life. Here's a good one of my experiences. I was down at Dawson College during the shooting. Here is what happened during the shooting, though I didn't witness any of it:


Wednesday, September 13th 2006, 8:50 am. Kimveer Gill starts his morning drinking Jack Daniels mixed with coke, a Whiskey Morning as he came to call it on his online blog. He has a breakfast of eggs and toast. Just under 2 hours later he makes a final post talking about his drinks, then packs up his CX4 Semi-Automatic Assault Rifle, 9mm hand gun, and modified sawed off shot gun into his car and drives off.
On a street a block away from Dawson College, at or near the school, Kimveer Gill gets out of his black Pontiac Sunfire. He is tall and thin and about 19 (he's actually 25). He is wearing a black trench coat, a black shirt, black pants with metal studs, black socks and combat boots. His hair, which looks blond to some people that day, is cut into a Mohawk. He has a few piercings.
He gets out his weapons. In his car he also has plans of his attack, but he leaves them in there. He has a pistol on him but it isn't visible; it's in his pocket or under his clothes or something. He holds a Beretta Storm. He also has a third gun under his trench coat. He takes a lawyer hostage and makes him carry his bag into the building. The bag contains a fourth gun and hundreds of bullets. A student notices he has a big gun and wonders why, but decides it's just a prop for the drama class or club. On the steps in front of the Dawson main entrance he starts shooting. Shattered glass falls down near people who have run for cover and are hiding in the bushes (including a hysterical blonde girl in a pink jacket whom we later see on TV talking about his ret*d haircut and how a nice lady let her into her apartment). Gill, still shooting, enters the atrium, where 22-year-old Leslie Markofsky (a graduate of Dawson who had come back that day to visit friends) is standing with his back to the entrance. Gill gets Leslie in the back of the head, twice. 18-year-old Megan Something is also in the atrium with her mother. Megan gets shot in the arm and I think somewhere else. Others also might have gotten wounded on the lower floor of the atrium. (Somewhere in the atrium there was reportedly a pool of blood and a girl reportedly got shot in the underside of the wrist while another girl got shot between the forehead and temple; but that was just rumors from students evacuating the building.). I never heard exactly when the lawyer Gill took hostage was able to run away and hide Gill's bag and run away again, but Wikipedia says he did. Gill gets to the second-floor, goes through a hallway. Joel Kornek sees Kimveer Gill with the guns, looking happy to have them in the school. He wonders why this person is so happy to have guns in the school. Gill arrives in the bistro in the atrium, with a snack bar selling pizza and stuff, and a microwave and vending machines and chairs and tables. Joel Kornek is also now in the atrium. As he stands waiting for his girlfriend Jessica Albert at a microwave, he sees Gill put down his duffel bag and begin to pull out guns.
Joel watches in shock as he pulls a Glock 9mm handgun from the bag and loads it calmly. Joel thinks it's a joke, and before Joel can react Gill is holding an assault rifle in his other hand.
At some time during the beginning when he just got up there Gill fires a warning shot into the floor, then another into Joel Kornek and a third into Jessica Albert. Joel turns and runs for his life, but it is too late. A shock throughout him makes him aware that he's been shot. Lifting his shirt to see gunshot holes from his chest bleeding profusely, he realizes that this is the end. The one bullet that hit Joel left six holes in him. As Joel ran, he saw his future in front of him, the future he would never have. He thought he was going to die.
Gill then ordered everyone to get down on the floor. 18-year-old international business student Anastasia De Sousa is sitting at a table talking with friends. Gill shoots. Anastasia jumps up to see what's going on, startling Gill, who then shoots her, wounding her. I never heard how serious, but a Montreal Gazette article says she was "slumped over in the bistro". Another article states that Anastasia's male friend got between her and Gill and begged Gill not to shoot her any more. Anastasia was shot a total of 9 times, most markedly in the abdomen. She at some point falls into the arms of the male friend. By now she's on the floor facedown, moaning and writhing while a male student pats her on the head and a male student and others talk to her to try and keep her conscious. Gill forced the same male friend to carry his box of tools. He asks that student if she is dead. I forget whether he said yes or no, or if he said anything, but Gill shot her more. She is said to have died in the male student's arms. Another article says that Gill took two male students as hostages and used them as human shields.
So along come the cops, who were in the area making a drug bust. Gill, who has wedged himself between a wall near the vending machines, looks furious that they ruined his grand finale. They tell him to drop his weapon, he refuses, they shoot him in the right arm, he takes out his pistol and shoots himself under the chin (leaving such a small hole that his mother didn't even notice it during the cleansing ceremony). The bullet goes through his brain and comes out, leaving a much bigger hole in the top of his head. For some stupid reason the cops try to resuscitate him; they drag him outside into the drizzle (on the news it was reported he was dragged outside "for medical treatment"). But he's dead. They cover him with a yellow bag. He and Anastasia are both pronounced dead at the crime scene. 19 other people are wounded; several almost die. Leslie Markofsky is rushed to the hospital unconscious with two bullets in his head. They put him into a medically induced coma, remove one bullet and decide that they can't risk removing the other one. He wakes up at least a month later, after his 23rd birthday. He is released from hospital soon after with his full cognitive ability and no known disabilities, and the bullet still in his brain. Hayder Kadhim was also shot twice in the head and still has a bullet in his brain. He was on the news saying he wanted to debate the prime minister about gun control laws. Jessica Albert was shot in several of her organs but survived. She and her boyfriend took refuge in a classroom where another girl joined them and said that God didn't want her to die, and someone later threw in a first aid kit. Jessica and her boyfriend were able to talk to Jessica's parents on a cell phone while waiting in the classroom for the coast to be cleared. A security guard helped get Jessica to safety.
Joel Kornek later founded Kill Off This Thinking, aka Kill Thinking, with a discussion board, designed for people to post their problems and help themselves and help others, and gave a speech at at least one high school.


Now here's my account of what *I* witnessed on that day:


I was still trying to get my last high school credit for grade 12, but
it's hard to in Quebec (I was in Ontario for awhile but then went back).
On Wednesday, September 13, 2006, I went up to Dawson College to ask about that.
I was coming off the subway; I had just come through the turnstyles,
when a group of about 10 foreign students came out from the tunnel to the school, babbling excitedly in their native Middle Eastern tongue. I thought they were just excited about their classes, about studying in
Canada.
It was eerily deserted. The people seemed to all be walking fast in
the same direction. That was when I saw the security guard pointing
through the Alexis Nihon Plaza. Confused, I followed where he was pointing, just like everyone else. We got to another security guard, who pointed down a hallway to the stairs leading to an exit. I asked loudly, "What's going on?" I thought there had been another subway bombing. No one paid attention. I asked the guard, "What's going on?" He said, "I don't know, just--," and gestured down the hall to the door before resuming pointing.
I thought that if there was a bomb in the subway I ought to be
running, but no one else was, and the other part of me thought, "Don't make a fool of yourself... it's probably nothing." So I compromised and started to jog, passing most of the crowd. Most of them were talking and didn't know what was going on, but then I drew level with two girls who seemed to know.
I asked them. One of them said there was someone with a gun in the school. I asked where. She said on the second floor. Someone else said he was shooting. An Asian guy said someone had been shot.
We came out in a small park in the middle of an intersection called
Atwater Park, which was getting more and more crowded, forcing us, the first ones out, to the edge along the street. I stood and exchanged gossip with the girls (one of them said the shooter was in the atrium [and if I hadn't missed the first subway train I would have been in the atrium with the shooter]) while the Asian guy kept going and then coming back to us with more news: he had actually been shooting, someone had been shot, several people had been shot. A girl said there was blood all over the atrium. There was a helicopter up in the sky and a guy said it was CTV. I asked if CNN was there too and the response was "Probably."
A girl said that there were three killers... one had been shot down by
the police, one had killed himself, and one was believed to be hiding
in the school.
The helicopter sounded like a burst of gunshots and for a moment I
thought it was a military helicopter about to shoot down on us... after
all, there was a rumor about the third shooter being on the loose. If one of us looked like him it was the end of us. Only then did I hear it was
CTV.
A male gym teacher came over to us and started talking about a previous, bloody shooting that I'd also heard about. We told a lot of people who
didn't know what was going on and they didn't believe it! Then someone told us to go to this other school, where all the students were gathering to await further instruction.
We all moved off down the street. We stopped at a coffee shop where a crowd was watching the news in French. Everyone was talking so loud I couldn't hear anything. It showed people being loaded into ambulances.
One girl told me that a girl was shot in the underside of the wrist.
I say, "Oh my God, her hand--"
"Must have come off, yeah."
"That was probably her blood all over the floor," another girl said.
"Someone else was shot here," the first girl said, pointing to a
point between her temple and face.
"Do you know--?"
"I don't know if they're dead, but they were shot here, so they're
probably dead."
"Yeah, probably. Who would survive that?" We both laughed. I was embarrassed about laughing about something like that, so I covered my face with my hand, but was relieved to see that she didn't bother to hide her interest and excitement. She wasn't ashamed. That made me ashamed of being ashamed.
Everyone was wandering all over the place, this way, that way. No one
knew where the shooter was. Someone said that the whole Westmount
square area and all around where we were was being blocked off so that they could catch the gunman who was on the loose. The subways were stopped to prevent him from leaving or going in there to shoot people. Yet they overlooked an obvious security hole. They didn't stop the buses. I wondered why. Were they posting police in the buses and that was why they let them run? Finally, I give up trying to listen to the news and wander off down the street in search of a news scoop, for lack of a better word. But all the conversations I heard were confused. Every third person was talking on a cell phone. I found the pub called the Cock and Bull, where the news was on in English and there were hardly any people, so I could actually hear it. When I entered the people at the bar all swivelled around on their stools and asked, "Were you there? Were you there? Do you go to Dawson?" They seemed a bit disappointed when I said that I
wasn't. One of them said that four were dead and 16 wounded. No one knew if the four included the gunmen. Upon hearing that the suspect had been "neutralized" and thus not shooting any more, one student scoffed, "He ain't shooting any more because he's dead!" His friends had the same attitude, scoffing at what they suspected was a premature shooting of a suspect. Their empathy for him made me feel relieved in a wierd way, not that they were right or anything. There were so many rumors flying around; you'd fall asleep if I mentioned them all. You probably are already. I'll never be able to compete with the people who were in the atrium, so why am I writing this? I got into friendly debates with teachers, people argued and almost got into physical fights, and when people joked about it and the barmaid protested, saying it was disrespectful, one guy said, "You're in the wrong pub if you takeeverything that serious. Get out." Hardly anything was open, and I felt like a fraud trying to pretend I was one of the traumatized students and going to the gathering at Concordia, where people were given food, counseling, and access to a phone, teachers stood up and made announcements about classes being cancelled until Monday, and friends greeted friends with screams. The subway was closed and a cop said it would be for several hours. No buses went near where I lived, so I was kind of a prisoner downtown for several hours. People always wandered around, many
of them saying "I thought this only happened in America" and "It could happen to us, too!" When a guy in black with a guitar case slung over his shoulder walked in, I was ready to bolt. Everyone was in a state of enhanced awareness that one might call extremely paranoid. It got quite hostile.
Me and my aunt thought that my parents were at the hospital looking for me, but it turns out they were gone because they were at work! LOL!
It wasn't much of an experience, but it was more excitement than I'd
had in a long time! All the people I talked to were excited, smiling
even. Their disaster-happiness-- and my nosy aunt's, when I talked to her later-- restored my sanity; I thought I was the only person around who was as disaster happy as me!

What really disappoints me is the fact that in that shooting and the one at Vtec no one decided to just rush him.... Seriously, if 20-30 people just rushed the shooter his plans would be ruined. Too bad everyone just ran around like mindless idiots...

"OMG GUY WITH GUN WE CAN'T DO ANYTHING!"

I really doubt he could prevent 30 students running at him about to dropkick his face.

You get happy at the suffering of others?
That is what I can ascertain from some of your posts.
You get your little kicks and excitement out of other peoples' misery?

I'm gonna be honest Ana54, you kinda scare me
this whole loveing disasters thing is just, bad
people die in these things, I mean does that make you feel bad at all
when I hear of disasters I am sad and stuff
not excited and happy
I mean I have suffered in my life-as well as a great deal many here
its not a good thing-to suffer and be in those situations
beleive me...
When you live threw a natural disaster your whole additude will change
they aren't exciting, or fun or anything
its a bad go especially if its in the winter...
But thats my opinion...

If you want to know my opinion, I think the majority of people are hypocrites. I don’t think it’s uncommon at all for people to find violence, tragedies, disasters, etc. exciting and entertaining. If this wasn’t the case I don’t see how television shows, movies, and documentaries involving these things would be so popular and make so much money. I don’t think we’re really much (if at all) different than the Romans who got a kick out of watching brutal gladiator contests. They didn’t have the opportunity to watch Godfather or War of the Worlds to get their violence fix.

Our culture has all sorts of denial and tries to impart this idea that we are supposed to feel saddened by tragedy. I think the majority of people are merely transfixed by it and pretend to be saddened lest they be seen as cruel or insensitive. If they were truly saddened by disasters they wouldn’t be glued to television news shows or documentaries depicting them. It’s strange that it’s somehow okay to be entertained by tragedy if it’s something you witness on the tube which happened far away or long ago, but it’s considered bad to be excited by something more close at hand.

I would say for the majority it would more likely be a mixture of excitement, incredulity at the vastness of the disaster along with some element of sadness for the loss of so much life. It is for me anyway. I have little doubt it is human nature to find drama on such a vast scale exciting in their otherwise mundane lives, but I prefer to have hope that the majority have some thought or ability to put themselves in the shoes, with effort, of those who lost families, or lost homes and the like.

Some people are just addicted to adreneline and endorphines. That could be the high Ana writes about. Makes you feel very "alive" and "ready", even though it's just chemically-induced.

This is the part I don’t really understand. The idea of trying to put yourself “in others shoes” for something that happened far away and doesn’t affect you in any way unless you turn on the TV or read the news.

I don’t understand the idea of trying to “mourn” for people you have no connection to. I guess to me it seems kind of cheap and trite. It would be impossible to truly understand what they are going through. I can imagine what it would be like, but to me that isn’t the same as feeling sad for them.

I don’t feel sad about something for a day or two than just go on with what I’m doing and forget about it. That’s what the media must think if the reason people watch disaster coverage on TV is to “mourn” for the loss of life. Seriously, I’m sure there are a ton of people still suffering horribly from Katrina, or the tsunami in Indonesia. It isn’t like it just goes away once the majority of the world stops paying attention. Also just by statistics, something horrible probably happens to someone in the world every few minutes (after all there are 10 billion of us). Most of these things go unnoticed by the majority because they aren’t as “notable” to people as a major disaster that kills a whole bunch of people at once.

I think it is important to show sympathy and respect for loss of life. Actually feeling sad about such things seems kind of cheap to me though. True mourning/sadness isn’t something I can turn on and off at my convenience.

I went through Hurricane Katrina at my house and yeah it was exciting since I love storms and weather -but oh my god... the suffering of those around me and the damage that occurred during and after the storm made all the excitement turn into despair and frustration.

I used to get off to my own suffering but Im way past that now. If its someone I hate, then thinking about their misery would bring a smile to my face. If its someone I care about then I would be terribly upset. However when it happens to groups of random people Im able to shrug it off pretty easily. Thats my view on it..

i'd like to be a storm chaser exept most of the time you chase nothing. i cant be all hyped up only to be dissapointed!!

I love storms...especially electric storms. So much energy to them.
And I have always been fascinated by earthquakes, space shuttle disasters and the like, as well as serial killers, but if I see footage of these things, then I do feel a degree of... horror, I suppose. I especially always get a horrible feeling when I see footage of the moment when the Challenger exploded as I saw her before she launched.

Can any of you identify with those sad characters in that book Galveston, who were storm chasers?

This is Ana's job. When you say that, it means she's doing it well.

My favorite disaster fantasies involve planet-wide catastrophy and ~99% of the human population on this planet being wiped out. I don't really care how.

For some odd reason, I've always loved storms. I lived in FL for several years, and was actually quite annoyed a major hurricane never hit Pinellas county when I lived there. I've always wanted to drive into a tornado. Maybe someday I will.

Good fortune,

- Icarus the 4th Horseman

We are trained, nearly from birth, to be sheep. Few are able to break of shake of this training. But some do.

I shoot back.

Good fortune,

- Icarus the Pistolero

I made a promise to myself when I flew for the first time-- on a school trip, after 9/11-- that if anyone tried to kill us on the plane, I'd get everyone else to jump them, and if I was the only one I'd still do it. I'd rather die doing that than die a sheep!