Two decades ago, James Santos saw his friend die in a shooting at a Montreal college. Now, he is a Montreal police officer, working for the force he says saved his life that day.
Sunday marks the 20th anniversary of the shooting. On Sept. 13, 2006, a gunman entered Dawson college and opened fire on students in the hall. He killed 18-year-old Anastasia De Sousa and injured 16 others, according to a coroner’s report from 2008.
Santos, then a 17-year-old student, was having lunch with De Sousa that day. The cafeteria was packed and the two found a free table close to the entrance, he recalled in an interview with The Canadian Press.
“We were talking about our weekend and what we did and we had laughs — and then, all of a sudden, I see the shooter walk in,” he said.
When he realized the man had a real weapon, Santos dove behind some chairs. De Sousa, who couldn’t see the shooter, stood up.
“She turned around facing the shooter and basically one of the first shots was directed to my friend,” recalled Santos.
Thinking De Sousa fainted, Santos crawled over to drag her to cover.
“That’s when I realized she got hit by one of the rounds near the abdomen. So I tried to console her, tell her that I was next to her and that everything will be alright,” he said.
Soon, the shooter turned his attention back to Santos. He told Santos to get up and get in front of him, essentially acting as a human shield. Santos obeyed.
“I didn’t want to anger him because I believed that Anastasia was still there, and I also had other friends that were trapped,” he said.
He tried to talk the shooter down. At that moment, Santos recalled, he accepted that he would die.
“I just didn’t want to take other students with me,” he said.
He fed the shooter white lies about the layout of the school, telling him one corridor led to a janitor’s closet or that another led nowhere.
When the shooter asked Santos how De Sousa was doing, Santos didn’t know what to say. At that point, he still hoped his friend was alive. So he told the shooter that he wasn’t sure and asked him to let him get her help.
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“He didn’t say anything — he just loaded his magazine into a semi automatic and walked over to her, he unloaded all his 12 rounds on her, and then he came back and he told me, ‘Well, now you have nothing to worry about,’” said Santos.
Santos froze. Later, when the shooter held another student at gunpoint, Santos snapped, yelling at the shooter to leave the student be.
“I think I had enough with everything. Enough with the gunshots, the blood, the screaming of the students, just all of it,” said Santos.
“The shooter didn’t say anything, he just laughed.”
The shooter spared that other student. Moments later, police shot him in the leg. Santos was sure the angered gunman would shoot him. Instead, the shooter killed himself.
Santos ran off. He thought it had been hours since De Sousa was killed and the ordeal began.
“I found out a little later on that it was a dozen minutes that passed by,” he said.
In 2008, then-Governor General of Canada Michaelle Jean awarded Santos the Star of Courage for his actions that day.
Dawson College commemorated the shooting on Friday in a ceremony that brought De Sousa’s family, survivors and students together in the school’s Peace Garden. Loved ones remembered De Sousa’s cheerful and resilient character.
During the ceremony, De Sousa’s mother, Louise De Sousa, called on the federal government to tighten gun control laws.
Santos said the journey to becoming an officer was a challenging one, as he worked over years to overcome the trauma.
Talking about the events of that day two decades later, Santos seems calm, his voice never wavering.
“I have all the details in my mind. I recall everything, but I don’t put myself into it. I’m looking at it as a third person,” he said.
That wasn’t always the case, he said.
“Initially, saying it the first couple of times was extremely, extremely, extremely hard. There’s really no words to place it, just because you pretty much relive every second of it,” he said.
Nonetheless, as he tells the story, little details come up. The way De Sousa had wanted to go out for lunch, but Santos instead opted to eat at the cafeteria. The fact that she sat with her back to the door and couldn’t see the shooter coming in.
Santos said he fixated on some of these details after graduating from Dawson, filled with survivor’s guilt.
“What if I had given her the (other) chair?” he asked.
“It just goes down that spiral that it’s extremely hard to get out because you could think of anything, but it’ll never change what actually happened.”
He had considered a career in law enforcement before the event of 2006, and he said his experience during the shooting pushed him to want to join the Montreal police.
“I wanted to give back to the community that gave me another chance, right? The police (officers) gave me another chance at life.”
The path to get there wasn’t easy. Santos had vivid nightmares and panic attacks, and he knew he would have to address his trauma if he wanted to work as a police officer. He turned to therapy and set small goals, like watching an action movie, or one with a lot of shooting, until he could get through it calmly.
Then he joined the army. Training was a challenge, he said.
“The smell of gunpowder would bring me right back to the event of Dawson,” he said.
After about a decade in the military, Santos got into the police academy. He then worked for a year in a town outside of Montreal before joining the Montreal force in 2018.
“As a police officer, you never know what calls you’re getting. (If) I get a call, I’m not going to be having anxiety or sweating or anything, because of all the little things I did prior to get myself to where I am today,” he said.
