Valery Fabrikant

Valery Iosifovich Fabrikant (Валерий Иосифович Фабрикант, Валеры Іосіфавіч Фабрыкант, ; born 28 January 1940) is a former associate professor of mechanical engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Born in Belarus (then in the Soviet Union), Fabrikant emigrated to Canada in 1979.

Although he claimed to be a political dissident, journalists from the Montreal Gazette later found that he had been dismissed from numerous positions in the USSR because of disruptive behaviour.

Fabrikant was hired at Concordia University in 1980, where he worked first as a research assistant under limited grant money.

After several years, he was promoted to academic positions included in departmental funding.

He taught students and conducted independent research, despite students, staff and faculty having reported behavioural problems ranging from "undesirable to intolerable".

Fabrikant attempted to collect information to blackmail officials into promoting him, threatened officials and colleagues and blamed others for all of his problems.

He blamed his peers for his being denied tenure and for seeking to have his employment terminated.

Over several months of escalating charges from late 1991 into 1992, he accused the university of tolerating the practice of academics being listed as co-authors on papers to which they had not contributed.

On 24 August 1992, after years of increasingly disruptive behaviour at the university, he shot and killed four colleagues and wounded one staff member.

His case stimulated much research and debate about gun control, and how universities should manage difficult employees.

In 1992, in the midst of an email campaign against numerous university officials, Fabrikant went to court to try to have the names of several colleagues removed from research papers he had written in the 1980s.

By August 1992, Fabrikant faced a contempt of court charge due to his behaviour during his suit.

In addition, he had been conducting an email campaign against numerous members of the university.

He claimed fears of being killed in jail.

On 24 August 1992, Fabrikant took concealed weapons and ammunition with him to the Engineering Department of the university, where he went on a shooting spree on the ninth floor of the Henry F. Hall Building.

He killed Department Chair Phoivos Ziogas and professors Matthew Douglass, Michael Hogben and Jaan Saber.

He wounded Elizabeth Horwood, a departmental staff secretary.

Phoivos Ziogas lived for a month in a coma before he died of massive internal injuries from the bullet ricocheting within his body.

Fabrikant represented himself at his five-month-long trial, after firing ten lawyers in the process.

His claim was that the murders were done in "self-defence" because members of the faculty were "trying to give [him] a heart attack".

During the trial, he compared himself to the abused orphans in the Mount Cashel Orphanage.

After several weeks of observing his eccentric behaviour, the judge suspended the proceedings to conduct a hearing into Fabrikant's mental fitness to stand trial.

After a month's review, the two court-appointed psychiatrists found him fit to stand trial, although "severely paranoid and hostile".

The judge ended Fabrikant's performances in the courtroom and sent the case to the jury.

With the essential facts not in doubt, they found Fabrikant guilty of first-degree murder, and the court sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Despite two psychiatrists ruling in his favour, Fabrikant thought that he was insulted by them.

According to Louis Morissette, Fabrikant asked to meet with him.

Morissette worked at the Institut Philippe-Pinel de Montréal, an institution for the mentally disturbed, and specialized in legal psychiatry.

Fabrikant spent several days there during his trial.

Morissette spent several hours over a few days with Fabrikant.

"Fabrikant wanted my help to counter-argue the two psychiatrists' opinion on him in court, and to help him argue that psychology has no scientific basis and proves nothing."

Morissette disagreed with the conclusions of the two psychiatrists appointed by the court.

"Mr. Fabrikant suffers, in my opinion, from more than a simple personality disorder, […] he could be treated by pharmaceutical products, a treatment he always refused."

By 1994, the university gathered over 200,000 signatures with the Coalition for Gun Control on a petition to ban the private ownership of handguns in Canada.

After the Cowan Report criticized the university for being too "vague" and "slow" in dealing with Fabrikant, in 1995 they appointed an advisor to implement a "Code of Rights & Responsibilities", and later a "Code of Ethics", adopted in 1997, and created civil behaviour and conflict resolution initiatives like the Peace and Conflict Resolution Series in 2003.

After he filed numerous court proceedings, the Quebec Superior Court declared him a vexatious litigant, in 2000.

That case would not be concluded until November 2007, when Quebec Superior Court Judge Nicole Morneau dismissed it under a provision of the Quebec Code of Civil Procedure designed to treat cases found to be frivolous or unfounded.

It was later reopened, and eventually dismissed for good in March 2011.

He was sentenced to life in prison and was denied parole or temporary leave in 2015 and again in 2022.