MONTREAL – One of the speakers at the upcoming youth and violence conference hosted by Dawson College has an all-too intimate knowledge of the subject.
Jerzy Nowak lost his wife in the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech. A gunman fatally shot Jocelyne Couture-Nowak in a classroom where she was teaching French. In all, 32 people died in the massacre, many of them her students.
In the wake of the tragedy, Nowak, who has three daughters, became the founding director of the university’s Centre for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention.
Taking on that role meant going to work in the same building where his wife was killed. “It was very hard at the beginning. I would come, as I say, on soft knees to my office, particularly on the weekend,” said Nowak, who recently retired. “But this was my professional life. I had to try to keep it separate from my private (life).”
Nowak is scheduled to talk about the centre’s creation and its efforts to promote non-violence through education at the conference being staged by Dawson with the Association of Canadian Community Colleges titled Youth and Violence: The Role of Education/Inspiring Solutions. The centre’s main focus is on violence prevention and working with youth who are at-risk – “going as early as possible into the school system to have children and youth engaged in the process of learning,” Nowak said.
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In an interview, he highlighted the importance of anti-bullying programs and teaching tolerance. He also lamented the easy access to guns in the United States.
Born in Montreal, Couture-Nowak had lived in Quebec and Nova Scotia and played a key role in the creation in 1997 of the École acadienne de Truro. On the day of the shooting at Virginia Tech, Nowak said he didn’t realize she was teaching in Norris Hall because she usually taught in a different building. When he received a call from their daughter’s school saying his wife hadn’t picked her up after school, Nowak said: “As you can imagine, my world fell apart.”
While news of her death wasn’t official until late that night, “subconsciously I already knew.”
His wife was “paranoid” about guns in the U.S., he said. “To travel to major cities, we always went to Canada. She would not go anywhere. She was so afraid of guns and violence,” Nowak said.
Ironically, that fear didn’t extend to the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va. “She was not worried on campus. She always thought that Blacksburg was like a bubble,” Nowak said.
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