A Montreal Teenager Was Sentenced To 2 Years For Stabbing His High School Teacher

The 16-year-old arrested for stabbing a teacher at a Saint-Michel high school last year has pled guilty. A Montreal judge sentenced the teen, now aged 17, to two years in a youth facility — the strongest possible sentence for the crime.

The teen attacked his art teacher, Maxime Canuel, at John F. Kennedy High School on December 10, 2021, pulling out a knife and stabbing the man twice before fleeing.

"The student stabbed the teacher in his upper body," SPVM spokesperson Jean-Pierre Brabant said at the time. The 42-year-old teacher suffered injuries to the chest and shoulder.

"He just walked up to me from my right side while I was looking in the completely opposite direction and stabbed me twice. He was not even in the group that I was teaching within the next few minutes. It happened just outside the doorway of my classroom," Canuel told MTL Blog.

"The stab to the chest hit my heart, and I could have died had the blade gone deeper or had I bled out."

Canuel said emergency physicians sliced through his sternum to get to his heart.

"They fixed the wound and sucked the blood out of my chest and put me back together with metal wire holding my ribcage together," he said.

Several students who were on their way out of class witnessed the brutal attack. Montreal police were able to locate the teen near the school within an hour of the crime being committed.

Both defense and prosecution lawyers in the case were in favour of a severe youth sentencing, instead of trying the teen as an adult. The teen has been diagnosed as on the autism spectrum and his lawyer has said that he didn't receive the support services he needed at school.

This article has been updated for clarity.