His mother is so heartbroken by the violent path her son took - a path that claimed the life of a young woman, injured 20 young people, and ended with his own death - that six months later she still sleeps in his queen-size bed most nights.
Parvinder Gill runs over her eldest son's life as if seeing a movie in her mind, trying to identify the point at which he went off track. There had to be other forces at work, she surmises, someone or something influencing him.
But try as she might, she's unable to come up with the answer to the question on everyone's mind since that rainy September day when the city was gripped with fear by a shooter at Dawson College: Why did he do it?
"We know what he did was a terrible, terrible thing, but in reality, he was not an evil person and that's where the pain comes from," she says. "If he'd been a trouble-maker, you'd understand it, but he wasn't that.
His character was completely opposite from what he did."
Her praise could very well be written off as that of a doting, naive mother, unwilling to see what was really going on in her son's life. But in extensive interviews with friends, teachers and former colleagues, the same portrait of a quiet, nice, sensitive and generous person emerges.
Unambitious, perhaps. Even lazy. But a killer?
As the six-month anniversary of the shooting approaches, Kimveer Gill's motivation remains an enigma; his actions out of character. Even his online rantings on the vampirefreaks.com website, written in the months before the shooting, suggest perhaps the onset of depression, but provide no hint of what he was plotting.
There are allusions that in retrospect could be taken as warnings, but at the time were no doubt seen as no more than the dark reflections of a young man.
If there was a plan, he kept it well hidden. His friends say that near the end, he had a fascination with 9/11 conspiracy theories, war in Iraq and the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.
He liked Jack Daniels whiskey and the odd hit of ecstasy. In the last few months of his life, he withdrew from the world, cutting off contact with friends and seemed sadder than his mother had ever seen him.
"I'd ask him if anything was wrong, and he said, 'No, nothing'," his mother recalls.
"He was 25, what was I supposed to do?
"I never even thought to take away the guns because he just wasn't like that. He never hurt anyone.
"
On Sept. 13, Parvinder Gill left her Murielle St. home in Laval while Kimveer slept in his room where he'd spent a wakeful night listening to heavy metal music and chatting online.
She returned home at about 6 p.m., oblivious to the chaos her eldest son had created in Montreal that day.
Her husband and 23-year-old twin sons were in the living room, watching the news about a horrible shooting at Dawson College when the phone rang. It was Kimveer's longtime friend, Rajiv Rajan, asking whether Kimveer was home yet.
"I said 'no,' then he asked if we'd heard about the shooting," Gill recalls.
Later, at about 10 p.m., Parvinder Gill was in the kitchen when she heard noises in the backyard and wondered whether the neighbour's dog had escaped.
She had no idea that a growing crowd of journalists was gathering outside and the family was about to be catapulted into the centre of the biggest news story of the year - and their lives were about to take a unimaginable, heart-wrenching turn.
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