Valery Fabrikant

He was sentenced to life in prison and was denied parole or temporary leave in 2015. After he filed numerous court proceedings, the Quebec Superior Court declared him a vexatious litigant, in 2000.

Fabrikant is a usenet user known for posting in newsgroups, particularly can.general and can.politics, as well as on his website. All contain trial transcripts and his version of events. He has claimed to be the innocent victim of a conspiracy. From prison, he has managed to circumvent restrictions on his communications to argue his case through a website and other media. He filed numerous legal proceedings with the court system until 2000, when the Quebec Superior Court declared him a vexatious litigant. The court dismissed his bid to clear that status in 2007.

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

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.

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. 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. 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 Procedures designed to treat cases found to be frivolous or unfounded. It was later reopened, and eventually dismissed for good in March 2011.

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".

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.

Valery Iosifovich Fabrikant (Russian: Валерий Иосифович Фабрикант, Belarusian: Валеры Іосіфавіч Фабрыкант, romanized: Valery Iosifavič Fabrykant, [vɐˈɫɛrɪj ˈjosifəvɪt͡ɕ fɐbrʲɪˈkant]; born 28 January 1940) is a former associate professor of mechanical engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. On 24 August 1992, after years of increasingly disruptive behaviour at the university, he shot and killed four colleagues and wounded one staff member.