Students on the University of Waterloo campus gather for a vigil on campus in Waterloo, Ont. on June 29, 2023.Nicole Osborne/The Canadian Press
A former University of Waterloo student who stabbed a gender-studies professor and slashed two of her students in their classroom in 2023 has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for a hate crime aimed at stoking fear on campus.
But Ontario Court Justice Frances Brennan found that Crown prosecutors did not prove the attack by Geovanny Villalba-Aleman constituted terrorism because they failed to show he held a coherent ideology that inspired his rampage.
In the Waterloo Region court on Monday, Justice Brennan said Mr. Villalba-Aleman did have homophobic and transphobic views. “He chose the gender studies class to send a very public message – that people who took gender studies were not safe,” she said.
Justice Brennan said the June, 2023, attack at the University of Waterloo’s Hagey Hall of the Humanities was “anathema” to the fundamental rights of Canadians to express ideas and pursue knowledge.
“He chose this class because it taught views about gender identity that he clearly abhored,” she said.
At the time of the attack, Mr. Villalba-Aleman, a 25-year-old Ecuadorean, had recently graduated from the University of Waterloo after studying physics.
In her ruling, Justice Brennan described him as a friendless, indebted loner who had gravitated to conspiracy theories during Canada’s COVID-19 lockdowns.
He began plotting his attack after a deadly April, 2023, school shooting in Nashville, Tenn., that killed six people, including children. Two months later, he knocked on the door of the gender studies class.
When Professor Katy Fulfer invited him into the classroom, Mr. Villalba-Aleman struck her with two large kitchen knives. He hit her nose and her glasses.
Then he went after several students, including a female student he stabbed in the back after she fell. Other students fled, some threw laptops at him, and one filmed him on a cellphone.
In the aftermath, Mr. Villalba-Aleman surrendered and confessed to police.
Last year, he pleaded guilty to three counts of assault and one count of aggravated assault. In a victim-impact statement, one attacked student said she can no longer look at kitchen knives. Others in the classroom said they are afraid they will continue to be targeted for having taken a gender studies course.
The 11-year sentence against Mr. Villalba-Aleman flows from his aggravated assault on Prof. Fulfer. She said in her own victim-impact statement the attack left her feeling traumatized with lingering nightmares. She needed surgery to repair the damage to her nose.
After Monday’s sentencing, Prof. Fulfer urged colleagues and her students to continue their work. “Every day you strive to make visible the urgency of teaching and research on gender equity and justice across campus,” she said in a statement.
In an essay about her experience published in The Globe and Mail in January, Prof. Fulfer said that “anti-gender ideology is not a singular thing, but it exclaims that thinking about gender is something to fear.”
Defence lawyers had argued that Mr. Villalba-Aleman should get only eight years in prison.
Crown prosecutors sought up to 16 years in prison, arguing that the stabbing rampage was an act of terrorism under the Criminal Code.
In their arguments last fall, prosecutors compared Mr. Villalba-Aleman’s crimes to those of a Toronto teenager who used a sword to kill a woman in a massage parlour, as well as those of a white supremacist in London, Ont., who ran over a Muslim family with a pickup truck. In both of these cases the perpetrators were sentenced to life in prison after judges ruled they were driven by ideologies that elevated their attacks to terrorism.
On Monday, Justice Brennan found that a profane, two-paragraph statement Mr. Villalba-Aleman posted online prior to the attack was not a manifesto but rather a “disorganized rant” that parroted a variety of extreme views and was “about as much a statement of a comprehensive world view as a broken plate is a mosaic.”
She ruled that the Crown never provided her with sufficient evidence to conclude that Mr. Villalba-Aleman had a terrorist’s mindset.
For that reason, the allegations that he had violated Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act could not be considered as an aggravating factor at sentencing.
Outside court, Howard Piafsky of the Public Prosecution Service of Canada said his organization will be reviewing the ruling.
“We have to look at the decision and decide what the next steps are and decide whether or not to go ahead with an appeal,” he said.