Polytechnique massacre: A police photographer recounts the day

Content warning: This story contains graphic imagery and descriptions. Reader discretion is advised.

Montreal crime scene photographer Harold Rosenberg witnessed a lot of horror over his thirty years on the job, though nothing of the magnitude of what he captured with his lens at the Polytechnique on December 6, 1989. He described the day of the Montreal massacre to CTV Quebec Bureau Chief Genevieve Beauchemin.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Genevieve Beauchemin: Why were you at the Polytechnique on this day, thirty-five years ago?

Harold Rosenberg: I was working the evening shift. I heard a short news bulletin saying there had been some sort of incident at the Ecole Polytechnique and I mentioned to my wife that it was probably a hostage-taking. I drove an unmarked police car at the time with a radio in it, and equipment and off I went to scene.

As I was driving up, I remember it was snowing very lightly. I could hear the chatter on the police radio, and when I got there, I saw dozens of vehicles, and a big crowd and I went directly in, and I was directed to this room where I could see fifty people that I knew, detectives from homicide, armed robbery … what we used to call the heavyweight squads you know.

I asked the person closest to the door, a detective that I knew, what was going on. He answered, “there are fourteen people dead”. I couldn’t believe it. And that is how it started.

Photographs of the 14 women shot and killed in the 1989 Polytechnique massacre are shown prior a ceremony in their honour in Montreal, Friday, December 6, 2024. (Graham Hughes / The Canadian Press)

G.B.: What were you assigned to do?

H.R.: First, I was told to go with a homicide detective and to photograph areas where people had escaped to, as they ran away from the gunman. In other words, people who had been injured, who had left traces of what happened.

Then, I was asked to take a video. We had never done that before. I didn’t have an actual camera to use. But an older man, probably a coroner, told us he had a camera in the trunk of his car. He ran through the cassette forwarding past the images he had filmed before, and he told me to start recording here. I had never done videos on a crime scene before. I took images in classrooms, the cafeteria and the office area.

G.B.: Did you realize what you were capturing?

H.R.: I was just going through getting the images and documenting the scene. I couldn’t really see if the victims were male or female. I just realized later as more information was coming through that they were all women. I was in the room when the note was found. I had finished videotaping and as I was leaving, they turned the gunman over and they found this note, these documents in this pocket and that is when they realized that he had some sort of manifesto.

(Note: The documents were a suicide note, in which the gunman spoke of feminists ruining his life and a list of other women he wanted to kill.)

G.B.: How did that impact you?

H.R.: It is only later on I realized the magnitude of it and how terrible it really was, and it hit me. A lot of people have asked me how I could do this work for thirty years. Well, in the moment, there is a job to do. We are professionals, and you have a sort of invisible shield, you don’t get emotional. Polytechnique happened about halfway through my career. After that, I never saw anything that matched that it terms of how bad and awful it was.