The event occurred in 1979. Because most major news services don't have
archives online for 1979, it might be best for you to go to the library.
This is one of the best articles I have found for complete information:
In 1979, a teenage girl opened fire on a suburban San Diego elementary
school. Today, as the nation reels from a rash of similar tragedies, the
survivors still struggle to understand why it happened.
THE SMALL BRONZE PLAQUE CAN BE FOUND at the foot of the flagpole, where it
stands in mute and largely forgotten testimony to two men who died, it
says, "in the service of helping others." There is no mention of the nine
survivors who fell wounded on that violent morning nearly 20 years ago, and
the incident has no name. There was no sense, at the time, that a certain
history was being made, that what happened here would prove to be a
harbinger of a nation's anguish and horror. It seems an incongruous place
to find such a memorial, near sandboxes and a jungle gym, for this
bloodsoaked ground was not a battlefield at all, but an elementary school.
The headlines and news bulletins have become numbingly familiar by now:
Pearl, MS; Paducah, KY; Jonesboro, AR; Springfield, OIL School shootings
around the United States have killed at least 14 people and wounded more
than 40 in the last 12 months alone. Hit lists of teachers and classmates
are circulated at middle schools, and deadly weapons are confiscated from
book bags and lockers. What was once unimaginable-that a school, society's
ultimate sanctuary, could become a killing field-is now a grim reality.
That wasn't the case on January 29, 1979, when Grover Cleveland Elementary
became the target in the country's first high-profile school shooting,
ground zero in an undeclared war in which children shoot children. The
morning school bell had just rung in the quiet San Diego suburb, and
children were trickling into their classrooms when a 16- year-old girl
named Brenda Spencer took aim through the telescopic sight of her
.22-caliber rifle from her house across the street.
Principal Burton Wragg was in the front office having a last cup of coffee
with sixth-grade teacher Daryl Barnes when they heard what sounded like
firecrackers going off outside. "Pop, pop, pop" is how Barnes remembers it.
Wragg charged out the front door while Barnes headed for a side door to
investigate. As Barnes looked toward the front of the school, he saw Wragg
stooping over a crying child on the ground. Suddenly, the principal spun
around and fell backwards into some bushes, a red stain spreading across
his chest. Barnes grabbed a couple of children and herded them into the
office, shouting at the secretary to call the police. He rushed back
outside to pick up another fallen child and heard three more shots ring
out, realizing as he scrambled back to safety that he was now in the
sniper's sights. As Barnes tried to calm the panicky children, he spotted
custodian Mike Suchar with a blanket in his hand, running toward Wragg.
"Before I could scream a warning, he spun. I heard him say, `My God, I've
been hit,' before he fell. Then a whole carload of children came up, and I
was screaming, Get the car out of here, get out!" The car screeched away.
Several miles away, in the intensive care unit of Alvarado Hospital, the
young charge nurse, Joyce Warren, heard the alarm go off for a "Code
Blue"--an external disaster. She called dispatch and was stunned to hear
the news: There had been a shooting at an elementary school, and casualties
were expected. As police barricaded the neighborhood and deployed the SWAT
team, reporters from the local newspaper began calling residences nearby.
By chance, they reached Brenda Spencer, who readily admitted she was the
one firing at the school; the rifle, they would later learn, had been a
Christmas gift from her father. When asked why she was doing it, Brenda
replied matter-of-factly: "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day."
By the time it was all over, Wragg and Suchar were dead, and a policeman
and eight children were wounded.
The smallest victims are grown now, their lives changed irrevocably.
Dwindling enrollment forced the school to close years ago, and the district
currently uses it for workshops. Brenda Spencer has reached adulthood
behind bars and is next eligible for parole in 2001. Each time another
school comes under siege, the unanswered questions are asked yet again: Why
is this happening? How can it be stopped?
On that January day, DeLois Miller was dropping off her 9-year- old son,
Cam, on her way to work. Normally, she let the fourth grader out at
Cleveland's side gate, on the upper playground, but it was unusually cold
that morning, so she drove Cam around to the front. She vaguely heard what
sounded like a car backfiring as she pulled away. Christy Buell, another
9-year-old, had walked the couple of blocks to school. Her widowed father
had toyed with the idea of letting Christy and her siblings play hookey
that day so the family could drive to the snow-covered mountains, but had
thought better of it. Now Christy was playing slip-and-slide on the frosty
grass with a friend before the final bell. She heard a popping noise. "All
of a sudden, it felt like my whole body was falling asleep," she remembers,
"like pinpricks all over. We just heard someone shouting, `Run! Run! ' I
crawled up the pathway to the speech room. The teacher heard me crying and
opened the door and pulled me in, and two more bullets whizzed by overhead
into the door. I don't remember her name, but she saved my life."
Cam Miller was bewildered. Right after his mother dropped him off, he felt
something like an electric shock next to his heart. He blacked out briefly.
A 7-year-old gift ,saw him stumble and led him around the comer to a
teacher. Cam saw Wragg and Suchar lying on the ground and thought, with
childlike logic, that if he could just make it out of that square of
sidewalk, "it will all go away."
It never did.
Today, Cam Miller is a handsome 29-year-old, a strapping man with scant
resemblance to the chubby-cheeked boy with a bowl haircut whose class
picture appeared in the newspapers above the word victim. Wearing jeans
with a white sweatshirt that covers the fading scar a mere inch from his
heart, he sits in the pristine living room of the house he and his wife
bought recently, about a half-hour's drive from his childhood home. "I
moved up here and I know, well, I think she wouldn't be able to find me,"
Cam explains. Brenda Spencer's father still lives across the street from
the old school, and if Brenda were ever paroled, Cam figures, that is where
she would return.
The bullet struck Cam in the back and exited his chest, missing any
internal organs. Because he never had a chance to defend himself, however
futilely, Cam grew up with an overwhelming fear of leaving his back
exposed. "If I go somewhere like a restaurant, I have to sit where I can
avoid having my back to the window," he says. As a child, he suffered
terrifying nightmares of Brenda Spencer "popping out of the bathtub to
finish me off." For a couple of months, he would wake up his mother once a
night and have her walk him around the house to the back, where there was a
wall of windows. Cam would insist on touching each pane of glass to assure
himself that none was broken, that "she" hadn't slipped inside. "The fear I
had was that I never saw her," he says. He was wearing a brand-new blue
down vest and a matching shirt the day he was shot. Blue was Brenda
Spencer's favorite color, he later heard. Blue made him a target. Even now,
Cam Miller does not wear blue shirts.
He has seen Brenda Spencer a few times: first, from his hospital bed, as he
watched the television news which showed police leading away a petite,
freckled girl with long red hair and aviator glasses. Later, Cam went with
his parents to court. The judge and marshals took Cam aside beforehand and
told the little boy what to expect: She would be handcuffed, they assured
him; he would be safe. "When I saw her, the look she gave me-her whole
appearance was very evil and scary. She looked like the devil. Blank, empty
stare. She just sat there and glared at me."
Brenda pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder, eight counts of
assault with a deadly weapon, and one count of assault on a peace officer.
She was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Because there was no
trial, few details about her family or her past came to light. The Spencers
were divorced; Brenda and her older brother lived with their father. Kids
in the neighborhood would later say Brenda had a reputation for torturing
cats and had dug a series of tunnels in her backyard; adults would describe
her as quiet and a loner. The year before the shooting, Brenda and a friend
were caught vandalizing Cleveland Elementary--throwing paint in classrooms,
overturning desks--but the incident was treated as a typical juvenile prank.
The San Diego County district attorney's (DA) office, whose investigation
of Brenda Spencer eventually filled dozens of boxes, privately concluded
that she was a sociopath. "We interviewed a friend of hers who admitted the
two of them had been planning to kill someone for some time," says Andrea
Crisanti, the deputy DA currently assigned to monitor the case in the event
Brenda requests parole. "They decided they wanted to kill a cop, to see
what that would feel like. Their first plan was to go up to a policeman
sitting in a patrol car, and Brenda would go to the passenger window and
distract him, and the friend would take Brenda's .22 and shoot him from the
driver's side. Then they thought maybe they'd handcuff him to the steering
wheel and shoot him with his own service revolver. Then they decided they
would lure him into a public rest room--throw eggs at the car or
something--and swing an ax and kill him there. This is the mind-set of
Brenda Spencer."
Brenda has come up for parole twice, most recently last January. The
district attorney's office contacted the victims it was able to locate and
told them they could write impact statements. Cam decided to deliver his in
person. He and his wife drove the hour and a half to the women's prison in
the California desert, arriving much too early. "I was psyching myself up,"
Cam says. Once there, Brenda, on the advice of her attorney, decided to
withdraw her bid for parole. "My wife saw her through the window and said,
`There she is.'" By the time Cam looked, he saw only her retreating back
and a glimpse of her red hair. He felt cheated. He had wanted to confront
her, finally. There were questions he meant to ask: How could you do
something like that? Why do you think you deserve a second chance when the
principal and custodian can't have a second chance? Why didn't you just
pull the gun on yourself?
Cam is a probation officer now. He conducts jailhouse interviews and
prepares presentencing reports that help determine punishment for
criminals. When another school shooting is on the evening news, he finds
himself watching for the fearful faces of young survivors. "I think it's
really sad all those kids are going to have to go through what I've gone
through all my life," he says. Although the school offered counseling to
the children at the time, Cam never went, and the shooting was a subject
his parents couldn't bear to discuss, relying on time and their faith to
heal the wounds.
But even now, DeLois Miller chokes up retelling the story. When two heavily
armed boys in Jonesboro, AR, ambushed their classmates, when a teenage boy
in Springfield, OR, raked his high school cafeteria with gunfire, whenever
it happens again, Miller suffers flashbacks, "and I can feel what those
other parents are going through." She returns to the old neighborhood
occasionally and walks back up the pathway where she dropped Cam off that
morning. Two small trees were planted in memory, of the principal and
custodian, she notes, and over the years, they have grown, like her son,
tall and strong.
In Kathe Wragg's backyard, there are trees heavy with unplucked fruit.
Loquat, persimmon, tangerine, apple, orange, plum, apricot, peach. The yard
was Burt's pride and joy. He could make anything grow. A frustrated farmer,
he even kept hens so the family would have fresh eggs for breakfast. Kathe
and Butt met when both were young teachers in San Diego. They'd known each
other only a few months when he proposed on New Year's Eve. Kathe said
she'd have to think about it for a day. "He had such an upset stomach, he
told me, he couldn' t sleep that night, not knowing what would happen. But
of course I did say yes." When the babies came along, two sons and a
daughter, Kathe stopped working. The family loved to go camping, and Butt
had built a dune buggy with a Flintstones top so they could all race across
the Anza-Borrego desert and count the stars at night.
In the fall of 1978, Butt took the job as principal at Cleveland
Elementary. The school was just a short drive from his hilltop home. On the
morning of January 29, 1979, he left, as usual, around 7:00 A.M. "I
remember he was wearing a new shirt," Kathe says. Their oldest child,
Penny, was in college and living on her own; Penny and Butt had spent the
weekend painting her old room. Now Kathe began tidying up the mess. She had
the Phil Donahue Show on in the background. A news flash came across the
screen. "I can still see it: Sniper attack at Cleveland Elementary School,"
Kathe says. It didn't fully register. "I thought, Oh no, gosh, that's
Burt's school. Burt'll take care of it." Minutes later, a neighbor whose
husband was on the SWAT team came by. Butt had been shot, she told Kathe.
The Wraggs' sons, both in high school, were being taken to Alvarado
Hospital by their principal, and Penny was on her way too. At the hospital,
Kathe was ushered into a quiet room.
"When I first talked to the nurse, I could see it in her face. I wanted to
know if he suffered." Butt had been shot once through the aorta and died in
the operating room. Tom, the middle child and older son, had "the worst
time of it, I know, because he cried every night for three months," Kathe
recalls. His father was killed just a few days before his seventeenth
birthday; what was supposed to be a party became a wake. Kathe knew she had
to steel herself. "I told myself, l just have to get a handle on this fast.
I'm not going to be an emotional cripple. I'm going to accept this, because
there's nothing I can do."
Two weeks before he died, Butt got up early on a Saturday morning, as he
usually did, to put on the coffee and feed his hens. He and Kathe sat in
the kitchen of the slumbering house, enjoying their private time. Kathe
felt tremendous peace. "If I would die tomorrow, I would think it had all
been just wonderful," she told her husband. Butt agreed.
It took Kathe six months to face the task of clearing out Burt' s
belongings. She kept his wedding stilt, a pen holder, and a painting some
teachers had given him, an acrylic that reminds her of their trip to
Newfoundland. "It took years to cut down on the groceries, " she says. She
wrapped herself in the protective cocoon of their many friends, "because I
didn't want to be alone, ever." She hired a gardener to tend to the trees
but let Burt's vegetable garden go barren. She keeps busy with volunteer
work and travel. She dates, but she's never found anyone to love the way
she did Butt.
When strangers meet her, they sometimes recognize her name and feel
compelled to tell her where they were, what they were doing, on the morning
of the shooting, as if time had stood still. Kathe herself wonders what
ever became of Cleveland's children, the ones she still thinks of as
"Burt's kids." Widowed barely two weeks, she took Valentine's Day candy and
cards to those who were hospitalized, and visited the school, to try to
assure the children that everything would be all right. She has seen the
spot where Butt was gunned down, "because I needed to see it." It made her
feel empty.
There are six grandchildren now, and they sometimes ask what happened to
Grandpa. Kathe tells them the truth. The first time Brenda Spencer came up
for parole, Kathe was never officially notified; she heard the news from a
reporter who called for comment. She has since made it a point to track the
case; when the hearing date was scheduled earlier this year, Kathe and her
brother wrote impact statements. In hers, Kathe called Brenda "a pathetic,
self-absorbed, bored, and uncaring thrill seeker" whose cowardly act left
innocent families devastated. Life in prison, Kathe feels, is too lenient.
"Isn't it funny? I don't feel anger as such," she insists, her blue eyes
bright and piercing. "I dissociate myself. I can't control her. I can only
control myself."
Kathe lives by herself in the old house, but she is not afraid. "I feel so
safe. I kind of feel somebody watching over me." She vividly remembers
hearing soft footfalls in the hall one night. "And I was thinking, Oh,
you're back." In the sunroom, she is working on a jigsaw puzzle, which she
finds soothing, the way all the pieces fit so predictably together.
CHILDREN SHOT. THE WORDS STILL MAKE JOYCE WARREN SHAKE her head. She is 56
now, the mother of three sons, still a charge nurse in the ICU at Alvarado
Hospital, which in 1979 was little more than a community hospital and today
is a large medical center.
The scene at the hospital that day was bedlam. Children were crying; others
were too traumatized to even whimper. Hysterical parents began filling the
hallway, shouting out names, demanding to know if their children were
there. Warren tried to keep everyone calm. As soon as his mother arrived,
Cam Miller wanted to know about the custodian, Mike Suchar. "Mom, he's
dead, isn't he?" Cam asked; his mother didn' t know. "Mom, I know he's
dead," Cam insisted. "I was in the same ambulance." Suchar's body had
rolled onto Cam when the ambulance raced around a curve. Cam thought that
meant he might die too.
Of the injured, Cam was one of the luckier ones. At least three children
had abdominal wounds, and a young policeman who had tried to get to Burton
Wragg was shot in the neck and narrowly missed being paralyzed. After
police arrived at the school, Brenda Spencer barricaded herself inside the
house for more than six hours; when she finally surrendered, police found
more than 200 rounds of ammunition in the house, which investigators
described as filthy. During the siege, police commandeered a garbage truck
and parked it in front of the Spencer house, trying to block the school
from Brenda's line of fire. While buses evacuated the school from the back,
police carried injured children to ambulances in the front. Christy Buell
was the most seriously hurt, shot through the abdomen and in the buttocks.
At Alvarado, she was whisked off to surgery, Doctors removed the bullet and
repaired her intestine.
Christy's father paced the hallway with one of her dolls. "I knew the
hospital routine," Norm Buell, now 63, says. He had lost his wife to
leukemia when Christy was 3. The teacher who had dragged Christy inside to
safety that morning would later tell investigators how the little girl had
kept sobbing out the same words, over and over: "I want my daddy, I want my
daddy."
In the ICU, Joyce Warren surveyed the tiny bodies on stretchers and had to
fight to maintain her professional detachment: That could be my child, she
thought. "Today, every time I read one of those articles about another
shooting, it takes me back to that day. At the time, I didn't think it
would happen again." Joyce is taking a quick break on the hospital's patio,
dressed in a lilac top with a cheery daisy- covered smock over slacks.
"Violence seems to be escalating in young children," she observes. "There
seems to be this terrible anger, almost a hopelessness. We need to be
trying to teach people to teach their children the value of a life."
Daryl Barnes agrees. Now 57, he teaches at another elementary school. "I
remember a boy came to school with a .22 pistol. Had the gun in a
backpack," Barnes says. "He was ten or eleven. They suspended him, slapped
his hand a bit. I'm kind of old-school, and I believe we have rules and
standards and there have to be consequences. If young people start making
adult-type decisions, there should be adult-type consequences. People make
choices." Still, Barnes adds, "a gun in the hands of a child is a poor
choice by an adult."
The Brenda Spencers have lost their shock value for him now; he views
violent children as the inevitable result of larger societal problems.
"Everybody has their agenda, but I'm not sure the children are the most
important thing anymore. We had an open house recently at my school. There
are thirty-five kids in my class. Only twelve parents showed up." Strict
regulations and fear of lawsuits have made disciplining troublemakers
nearly impossible, Barnes adds, "and teachers tend to be afraid to take a
strong stand."
The father of four children who are now grown, Barnes remembers coming home
late the evening off the Cleveland shooting and finding them all waiting
for him in front of the TV in the living room. "We talked about it as a
family," he says, "and we just went on with our lives. That's what we tried
to do at the school too. They brought in counselors from everywhere and
encouraged the kids and teachers to talk about it." Barnes did not seek
counseling after the Cleveland shooting but says, "Looking back, I see I
should have." The Jonesboro incident in particular brought back sharp
memories. "It's going to keep happening, till somebody takes
responsibility. Because they're children and people revere children, it's
hard to bring heavy consequences."
He forgives Brenda Spencer, he says, but believes "she's where she belongs
for the rest of her life." Barnes's classroom was one of the rooms Brenda
had vandalized the year before the shooting. Suddenly he remembers
something about that episode: "I never told anyone about this before; I
forgot about it completely until now. There was a picture of me in the
room--a class picture, I guess it was--and evidently they had a BB gun,
because someone had shot a hole straight through my forehead."
Even when red flags are apparent, acting on them can be problematic. At the
San Diego DA's office, Andrea Crisanti and her colleagues sometimes find
themselves debating: If DNA testing could tell you which child was going to
be a sociopath, even with that certainty, what would you do? Crisanti cites
a recent case involving a brutal 24-year-old killer whose troubled
childhood was carefully documented by teachers and
counselors--uncontrollable rage, repeated fights, lack of empathy for
others. "When this kid was eight years old, his teacher wrote in his file:
`If looks could kill, I'd be dead a thousand times.' This was when he was
eight! He was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off."
The prosecutor, herself the mother of three young children, can quote from
memory the words of one of Brenda Spencer's victims: "I felt a sting in my
tummy and then I got sort of dizzy and I got tired so I laid down and then
Mr. Wragg came up and he was talking to me and then Mr. Wragg jumped back
into the bushes and then he laid down there and just kind of died." Her
dusty files also contain the words of Brenda Spencer at the time, boasting
about how easy it was to shoot children, that she liked to watch them
squirm, and especially liked shooting the ones wearing down jackets so she
could watch the feathers fly. "I don't know that she's ever expressed true
remorse," Crisanti says. "I just look at her picture and I see empty. You
think: I can' t see a soul. There's nothing in there."
Nor does she have any answers. "You just constantly have to be aware of
what your kids are listening to and watching--they pick up on incredible
violence that we all know is in records and videos. You have to pay
attention to who they associate with. Now it's not a question of whether it
will happen again, but where."
When another school shooting is in the news, Daryl Barnes shares the story
of what happened at Cleveland with his fifth graders, hoping the horror
will make an impression on their young minds. He went back to the old
school not long ago, for a teachers' workshop. "At the break, I found
myself out by the flagpole," he recalls, "just looking at the plaque."
Christy Buell never left the neighborhood. Now 29, she is a sunny preschool
teacher with lovely, startling green eyes and the kind of determination
that helped her lose more than 100 pounds a year ago by walking up and down
a mountain near her home. She lives with her father and brother in the
house she grew up in and is reluctant, at first, to talk about the
shooting, because she considers it just something that happened, "part of
my life," and she has moved on. She keeps a scrapbook of newspaper articles
and photos, and still has the jacket she wore that day stashed away
somewhere. "Six months after I got my jacket back, I found a hole in the
hood," she recalls, surmising that a third bullet passed through it without
hitting her. Her memories form a terrible collage: the principal moaning in
the sticker bush; doctors cutting off her bloody Winnie-the-Pooh shirt;
being unable to open her eyes until she heard her father's voice.
Christy had a colostomy for two months and was unable to return to school
that year. Nerve damage left her leg paralyzed for a while, and she wore a
brace: there was one to walk in ("I called that one the clicker because of
the sound it made"), one to sleep in, and one that fit around her calf so
she could wear shoes. She was in the hospital for 42 days and underwent two
operations. When she came home, the living room was filled with mounds of
toys and games from well-wishers around the world. The police chief visited
and gave her a pin in the shape of handcuffs. The jeweler whose store was a
few doors down from the Buells' restaurant sent Christy a diamond-chip
ring. Her father insisted Christy choose three or four favorite toys and
donate the rest to a home for abused and neglected children.
"We just kind of went on with life," Christy remembers. "Dad didn' t want
me to see a psychologist. He just said we'd deal with it as a family. Dad
set the direction, and I took the path. We talk about it all the time. It's
an incident that will never leave my mind. I' m not traumatized for life or
anything. If I hear a loud bang or a car backfire, it gets my heart
beating, but that's about it."
Still, she finds herself thinking about it in the abstract at the preschool
where she teaches, especially when she's outside with the children. "I have
often had visions of it happening there, and I think about what I'd be
doing if it did happen." Mentally she plots an escape mute, how she will
get the children to safety. The sandbox, she thinks; she will push them in
the ground in the sandbox and shield them. Not long after Brenda Spencer
went to jail, Wallace Spencer, her father, married her 17-year-old
cellmate. They had a child together, and the little girl attended Christy's
preschool. She resembled Brenda, Christy noticed. Christy would see Wallace
Spencer occasionally when he came to pick up the child. Sometimes he would
say hello, and Christy would politely answer, uncertain whether he realized
who she was. One day, the little girl announced to Christy, "My sister's in
jail." Christy mustered a benign response: "Oh, really?"
It bothers her that Brenda Spencer never has accepted responsibility; she
has at various times alleged that police SWAT team members actually shot
the children, or that she was on hallucinogenic drags at the time and
prosecutors faked a clean toxicology report, or that she didn't understand
the guilty plea when she signed it. Christy herself grew up in a home with
guns, "but they were always locked up, and we couldn't get to them." Her
father taught her to shoot when she was around 12 or 13, but "he taught us
right and wrong. People should talk to their kids more, find out what's
going on in their lives, and if you hear anything remotely strange, don't
pass it up just because your life is busy. Talk to them about the safety of
guns."
Norm Buell took Christy out target shooting a couple of months after she
got home from the hospital. "I didn't want her to fear weapons, " he says
now. "I wanted her to understand that they're to be respected." He believes
that when Brenda Spencer pulled the trigger "it was a frustrated cry for
help .... She still probably can't tell you why she did it."
For almost 20 years now, Wallace Spencer has maintained a public silence
about his daughter's crime. He and his ex-wife have attended Brenda's
parole hearings, and prison authorities say Brenda receives occasional
visits from members of her family. A couple of months after the shooting,
Norm Buell found himself on Wallace Spencer's front doorstep. "I went over
there father-to-father, hoping to talk to him. I wanted to tell him that I
was a single father, too, raising four kids alone, and I know it's a hard
job and a thankless job, and that I know he probably did the best he could,
and that Christy was going to be okay." He could see Spencer through the
screen door, sitting in front of the TV. "He wouldn't talk to me," Buell
remembers. "He said to go away, and l respected that." He has long since
lost his sympathy for the man. When another neighborhood is on the evening
news, and he sees the stunned faces of parents in Jonesboro or Springfield
or Pearl or Paducah, Norm Buell finds himself hungry for any scrap of
information about the families of the children who kill, hoping, as he
still does with Brenda Spencer, to make some sense of it.
Down the familiar street, the flag in front of Cleveland Elementary stirs
just slightly in the breeze, and the sun glints off the tiny bronze plaque
commemorating the bloodshed that was never supposed to happen again. The
school itself seems bleak and forgotten, the laughter of its children long
silent.
Jones, Tamara, Look back in sorrow: in 1979, a teenage girl opened fire on
a suburban San Diego elementary school; today, as the nation reels from a
rashof similar tragedies, the survivors still struggle to understa. Vol.
227, Good Housekeeping, 11-01-1998, pp 118(9).
At 04:52 PM 3/12/01 -0600, you wrote:
> >>"I don't like Mondays" was the reply Brenda Spencer gave when asked why
>she
>opened fire on Cleveland Elementary school in San Diego, California. The
>school has since changed names, but the incident has been mentioned
>frequently this week because of the shooting at Santana High School in
>Santee, California. Santee is a growing community east of San Diego.<<
>
>
>hey guys...I'm interested in articles concerning this shooting. I don't
>remember
>this one so I'm guessing that it's not one of the more recent ones...
>
>Anyone have any links?
Mayan Avitable
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
