I Was Present at the First School Shooting in North America
Everything was normal until it wasn’t.
On May 28, 1975, I was a student in grade nine at Brampton Centennial School in Brampton, Ontario. It was a warm, sunny day that looked ahead to the coming summer vacation. It would be my family’s first summer in our house and my brothers and sister and I couldn’t wait to take our first swim in our new pool.
I went to my morning classes as usual. The school was overcrowded, so there were two lunch periods. My lunch period was at 1:00, and I had French class just before. I remember being always hungry in that class, and this Wednesday was no exception.
Around the time the bell for lunch usually rang, there was an announcement. We were told to stay in our classrooms. Some students looked out the window and saw emergency vehicles in the school parking lot. The teacher looked distraught and told them to stay away from the window. A few minutes later there was another PA announcement that said there had been “a terrible accident” and we should walk single file down the hall to the nearest exit. I walked in silence down the three flights of stairs to a side door and started walking home, wondering what the accident had been.
No one who had been in that class during that fateful lunch hour knew what was going on, until a hysterical girl walking ahead of me on a dirt path in a vacant lot started screaming “You didn’t see him blow his head off!”
My innocence was shattered at that moment.
The details came in slowly as I got home to my empty suburban house and wandered around wondering what to do, listening to the local radio station.
A student at my school named Michael Slobodian, sixteen years old, who also lived on my street, had left for school that morning very angry at two of his teachers, one of whom, a 25-year-old English teacher, had phoned his home to report that he had skipped her class. He had donned military clothing, hidden two rifles in his guitar case and gone to school to get revenge on that art teacher and also on his science teacher. He had left a suicide note for his family.
He went to the boys’ washroom and loaded his rifles. Two boys came into the washroom and he shot one of them, a boy named John Slinger, who happened to live next door to him, killing him. Ironically, that victim’s mother, a registered nurse who was present in the school that day, helped numerous wounded students while her own son was bleeding out in the bathroom a few feet away. He continued shooting as he walked down the hall to his English classroom. He entered it and shot the teacher in the chest at point blank range, injuring a boy behind her. He walked towards the cafeteria, fired a few more rounds, and then committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
Three people died and fourteen were wounded that day.
This was the first mass shooting in a Canadian school. It seemed like an anomaly at the time. Although there had been shootings at schools and universities in North America since the eighteenth century, none could really be classed as mass shootings.
Until that day in May at my high school.
What had happened in North American society that led to this terrible incident and to many more in the years that followed? Obviously, the twentieth century was a violent time. When this massacre happened, the Vietnam War had not quite ended south of the border.
Both America and Canada were violent, racist societies. Both had relentlessly oppressed non-white peoples and the inequality of both countries was enshrined in law. Immigration had only recently opened to non-white, non-western immigrants, indigenous peoples were abused in residential schools, Japanese Americans and Canadians were imprisoned in internment camps during World War II, and millions of Canadian and American soldiers had participated in bloody battles and relentless civilian bombings in both world wars.
Corporal punishment of children in schools and at home was nearly universal. Women were commonly beaten by their husbands and law enforcement saw this as a private affair, not needing police intervention.
Codes of masculinity were strict and unforgiving. For a man to be “effeminate” or gay was unacceptable. Bullying was common and typically blamed on the victim.
According to Scott Thomson, a classmate of Michael’s, and a well-known Canadian actor, he was “a good-looking kid, but small.” He perhaps did not meet the standard for masculine acceptability at that time and place and needed to overcompensate with guns and military clothing.
Girls and women were just as strait-jacketed. It was not possible to express publicly a lesbian, bisexual, or nonbinary identity. Girls were supposed to concentrate on getting married and raising a family. Sexual abuse of girls and boys was unacknowledged and complaints were silenced. A friend of mine in high school had been sexually abused by her adoptive father and her mother refused to believe it. This same girl was told she would get no support if she decided to further her education after high school by that same abusive father because “Girls’ education is a waste because they just get married.” Her mother did not challenge this.
I don’t know if any of these trends affected Michael Slobodian, the shooter at my school, but it seems likely. There was just a general insensitivity to society at that time. A case in point: the evening of the same day of the shooting, a television news team showed up at the home of Michael’s grieving family and asked to speak to a family member. The parents sent out Michael’s younger sister and she numbly answered their questions, including the unbelievable “What do you think might have sparked Michael to do this?” “Nothing,” she said, smiling wanly. “Everything was perfectly normal.”
I wonder if Michael just could not express his unacceptable feelings of rage, shame, and powerlessness. If that is what led to his tragic decision, then he was really just acting out what many young men must have been feeling during that repressive, violent era.
Of course mass shootings, especially in the United States are more and more common as American society breaks down and political, social, and racial chaos take over a formerly somewhat reasonably stable semi-democracy.
The current world viral pandemic seems to be a stressor that could finally tear apart the fragile fabric of American society. As I publish this, it is two week after another tragic school shooting, this one in Detroit. Significantly, the shooter’s parents have been charged with providing a firearm to a minor.
Maybe if Michael Slobodian’s parents had locked up their hunting rifles and ammunition, four people (I’m including the art teacher’s unborn baby) might still be alive today.
People might just start taking out their feeling of rage, shame, and powerlessness on their neighbours. It has happened on a personal, local, and national scale already. Let’s hope that America is not entering a new phase of even more violent unrest.
What gives me comfort is that today there is a much greater understanding of mental illness than existed in the 1970s. There is more acceptance of non-typical sexual and gender identities. There is more empathy for people who cannot meet society’s arbitrary standards for appearances and disabilities. There is more racial tolerance and more sensitivity than there was when I was in high school. I think that, at the very least, a family would not be questioned the way Michael Slobodian’s sister was a few hours after that tragic event.
Let us hope that the twentieth century was not just a prelude to an even more destructive century. Let us hope that there is a future of peaceful co-existence for human communities.