Polytechnique shooting: CBC journalist Loreen Pindera remembers

I had moved to Montreal just three months earlier. I had never before been on the University of Montreal campus. I thought I was being sent to cover a fire.

A young male engineering student standing outside the building told me, in French, that a man had burst into his classroom.

"He separated the men from the women," the young man told me. I shook my head, asked again. I thought I wasn't understanding his French.

It took a few minutes to grasp what he'd actually said.

It's taken a lifetime to digest what actually happened.

On mobile? Listen to Loreen'sWorld Report piece from Dec. 7, 1989

CBC Radio News3:50World Report Dec. 6, 1989

Loreen Pindera and Victor Steinberg reporting on the Polytechnique massacre.