The mother of the man who killed 14 women in a Montreal college shooting back in 1989 has finally broken her silence.

Monique Lepine, the mother of Marc Lepine, says she decided to speak out following this month's shooting at Montreal's Dawson College. 

Lepine, who has remained in the shadows since her son's shooting rampage at the Ecole Polytechnique 17 years ago, says her heart began to pound when she saw the bloody TV images of the carnage at Dawson.

In an interview with French news network TVA, Lepine said she has been thinking about the mother of 25-year-old Dawson shooter Kimveer Gill, who killed one and wounded 20 on Sept. 13.

Like her own son Marc, Gill followed his murderous outburst by taking his own life.

"I thought of the suffering she endured. I thought of the pain she endured," Lepine said of Gill's mother Parvinder Sandhu. "She isn't a victim in the eyes of the law. She's the mother of a criminal."

Lepine, 67, recalled how on the night of the Polytechnique shooting, when the gunman's identity was not yet known, she went to a prayer meeting.

"I asked to pray for the mother of that young man, without knowing it was me," the retired nurse told TVA.

Suicide note

Lepine would later learn, from her 25-year-old son's hate-filled suicide note, that he was consumed by a hatred of "feminists," whom he blamed for all his problems.

The retired nurse admitted to interviewer Harold Gagné that she still wonders whether she was the real target of his rage.

"I asked myself if it wasn't directed at me. In the view of some people, maybe I'd be considered a feminist -- I earned a living, I had a paying job."

The Dawson College shooting also struck a chord because Lépine's daughter Nadia, who died of a drug overdose in 1996 at the age of 29, had studied photography there.

Nadia went by her father's surname Gharbi, but was continuously exposed to classroom discussions about the Polytechnique massacre, Lépine told TVA in an interview aired Sunday night.

"She witnessed all these things that were being said about her brother."

Both Lepine and Gill's mother say they had no idea of their sons bloody plans. Both men shared a fascination with guns and computers and were rejects from the Canadian Forces.

Lépine, who said she loved her son but condemned his "insane act," described him as a shy and secretive boy who didn't discuss his problems.

But she also revealed that her husband, who she separated from when her son was five years old, was a violent man.

"He was verbally and physically violent with me. And when he hit my son in the face, the marks lasted for a week. So he hit him very hard, and for something that didn't deserve it."

His father also barred the child from receiving any tenderness from his mother.

"From the time the kids were very young, he had this mentality that you shouldn't spoil the children," she told TVA.

"So when I held my children to console them, he perceived it as spoiling them."

Culture of violence

Lepine also expressed her concern about the growing culture of violence in which her son was immersed.

"We call these isolated acts," she said. "But I wonder how isolated they are, when you see all the marginal people, all the drugs in circulation, all the acts of terrorism that are more and more present in our world."

Lépine last saw her son alive four days before the shooting when he nervously brought her a birthday present, even though it was weeks before her birthday.

"I said to myself, 'Why don't you wait?' But it's only afterward that I realized something was going on. I didn't see it at the time."

Lépine, who asked for the forgiveness of the families of her son's 14 victims, said her faith has helped her through the past 17 years, as did the numerous letters of support from strangers in the weeks after the shooting.

The letters came not just from within Quebec but from Ontario and further afield, she said.

"A lot of people prayed for me," she told TVA. "And I think that's why I'm still here today."