Cleveland Elementary School shooting (San Diego)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Cleveland Elementary School shooting began on the morning of Monday the 29th of January 1979, outside Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California. Children were gathered at the school gates, waiting for the principal to come and unlock them. Across the street stood the house where a 16-year-old girl lived, and she had a rifle. This documentary asks who she was and what the adults around her had seen coming. It asks what she said to a stranger on the telephone while police surrounded her home. And it asks how a few words spoken that day ended up inside a pop song that reached radio far beyond California.

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• 2. Thirty-Six Shots

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  Nine-year-old Cam Miller was the first child hit. He later said he believed he was chosen because he wore blue, which he had learned was the shooter's favorite color.

  Brenda Spencer was firing from her house at children who stood waiting for 53-year-old Principal Burton Wragg to open the gates. Eight children were wounded in all.

  Wragg was killed while he and teacher Daryl Barnes were trying to help the children. Custodian Mike Suchar, aged 56, was shot dead as he tried to pull a student to safety.

  Police officer Robert Robb, aged 28, had answered a call for assistance. Spencer shot him in the neck as he arrived. Robb then moved a garbage truck in front of the school entrance to block her line of fire, and that prevented further casualties.

  By the time she stopped, Spencer had fired thirty-six times.

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• 3. The Telephone Call

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  A reporter from The Evening Tribune was dialing random numbers in the neighborhood when he ended up speaking with Spencer. She had barricaded herself inside her home, and she would stay there for several hours. She told him why she had shot at the children and adults: "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day."

  To the police negotiators, she said something colder. The people she had shot, she told them, were easy targets, and she was going to "come out shooting".

  In the end, a fast-food promise ended the standoff. Negotiators offered her a Burger King meal, and she surrendered and left the house.

  The line she gave the reporter would outlive the standoff by a long way.

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• 4. The Girl Across the Street

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  Brenda Ann Spencer was born on the 3rd of April 1962 to Dorothy Nadine, née Hobel, and Wallace Edward Spencer. They had married in Chula Vista on the 12th of December 1954 and had three children. Brenda was the youngest.

  In January 1972, Dorothy learned that her husband had been cheating on her with multiple women, and she filed for divorce. Brenda was said to have lived in poverty with her father afterward. Reports describe the two of them sleeping on one mattress on the living room floor, among empty liquor bottles.

  At later parole hearings, Spencer claimed "total neglect" from her mother and sexual abuse from her father. Both parents disputed the accusations.

  At 16, Spencer stood 5 feet 2 inches tall, or 157 centimeters, with a very thin frame and bright red hair. Acquaintances said she was hostile toward police officers, had talked about shooting one, and had spoken of doing something big to get on television.

  She called herself a "radical" and referred to officers as "pigs." When news came on TV that police had been killed, she would exclaim "All right!" Some classmates called her "crazy" and said they were scared of her.

  There was another side to her. Spencer showed real talent as a photographer and won first place in a Humane Society competition. But she was generally uninterested in school, and at Patrick Henry High School one teacher recalled often asking whether she was awake in class.

  Only after her arrest did tests reveal an injury to one of her temporal lobes, which was attributed to a bicycle accident.

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• 5. Warning Signs

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  In early 1978, staff at a facility for problem students told Spencer's parents that their daughter was suicidal. She had been referred there for truancy.

  That summer, Spencer was arrested for shooting out the windows of Grover Cleveland Elementary and for burglary. She was known to hunt birds in the neighborhood, and the account of a BB gun comes with a catch. Police reports and eyewitnesses do not mention one being used in the vandalism.

  In December 1978, Spencer was still on probation for breaking into the school. Her probation officer arranged a psychiatric evaluation, and it recommended that she be admitted to a mental hospital for depression. Her father refused to give permission.

  For Christmas 1978, Wallace Spencer gave his daughter a Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic .22 caliber rifle. It came with a telescopic sight and 500 rounds of ammunition.

  Spencer later said, "I asked for a radio and got a rifle." Asked why her father had done it, she answered, "He bought the rifle so I would kill myself."

  Within weeks, that rifle was aimed across the street.

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• 6. Prison and Parole

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  On the 4th of April 1980, a day after her 18th birthday, Spencer was sentenced to concurrent terms of 25 years to life. She had been charged as an adult and had pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and to assault with a deadly weapon. Nine counts of attempted murder were dismissed.

  Inside prison, doctors diagnosed epilepsy and treated it, along with depression, with medication. At the California Institution for Women in Chino, she worked repairing electronic equipment.

  Her father's household changed in the months after the shooting. One of Spencer's first cellmates at the juvenile facility, a 17-year-old girl, was released and moved in with Wallace Spencer, whom she had met through his visits to Brenda. They married on the 26th of March 1980 in Yuma, Arizona, and had a daughter together. The young woman later fled the household and divorced him, leaving him to raise the girl alone. Wallace Spencer died in February 2016.

  Spencer became eligible for parole hearings in 1993. At that first hearing, she said she had hoped the police would shoot her. She also said she had been using alcohol and drugs at the time, but drug tests taken when she was taken into custody were negative.

  At her 2001 hearing, Spencer claimed her father had beaten and sexually abused her, and he said the allegations were untrue. The parole board chairman doubted them because she had never told anyone before.

  In 2005, a San Diego deputy district attorney cited an incident of self-harm from four years earlier, when Spencer's girlfriend was released from jail. He argued it showed she was psychotic and unfit for release. Early reports said she had scratched the words "courage" and "pride" into her skin. At the hearing, Spencer corrected this and said the words were "unforgiven" and "alone."

  The board refused her again in 2009 and ruled that she would wait ten years for another review. In August 2022, she and the Board of Parole Hearings agreed she was not suitable for release, with a further three-year wait. She was denied again in February 2025, and her next chance at a hearing comes in 2028.

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• 7. A Song and a Screen

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  At WRAS-FM, the campus radio station at Georgia State University in Atlanta, a news story about the shooting came off the telex. Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, read it there. He was struck by Spencer's explanation that she did not like Mondays, and he began writing a song about it.

  The song, "I Don't Like Mondays," came out in July 1979. It spent four weeks at number one in the United Kingdom and became the band's biggest hit in their native Ireland. It never reached the Top 40 in the United States, yet it still got extensive radio airplay outside the San Diego area, despite the Spencer family's efforts to prevent it.

  Geldof later made a claim about Spencer: "Spencer wrote to me saying 'she was glad she'd done it because I'd made her famous,' which is not a good thing to live with." Spencer denies ever contacting him.

  The case also reached the screen. A 1981 Japanese-American documentary, The Killing of America, includes the incident, and a 2006 British documentary took the title I Don't Like Mondays.

  In October 2008, the Investigation Discovery network covered her crimes in the season 2 premiere of Deadly Women, in an episode called "Thrill Killers" that presented three cases. In September 2014, an episode of the Lifetime series Killer Kids, titled "Deadly Compulsion," depicted them again.

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• 8. A Lasting Shadow

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  A 2013 article in the New York Daily News called Spencer's actions a significant turning point in American history. Several accounts written in the 21st century describe the Cleveland Elementary School shooting as the earliest recorded elementary school shooting in the United States. Spencer herself has been called the first modern high-profile school shooter.

  Some have gone further and called her "the mother" of later school shootings, including those at Columbine, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut. The number of school shootings has risen markedly since 1979.

  San Diego County Deputy District Attorney Richard Sachs said Spencer "hurt so many people and had so much to do with starting a deadly trend in America." In a 2001 statement, Spencer acknowledged the possibility herself: "With every school shooting, I feel I'm partially responsible. What if they got the idea from what I did?"

  Survivors often thought back to that morning in the decades since. On the 17th of January 1989, almost ten years later, a shooting at a school in Stockton, California, killed five students and injured thirty. By coincidence, it was also called Grover Cleveland Elementary. Christy Buell, a survivor of the 1979 shooting, was "shocked, saddened, horrified" by those headlines.

  Meanwhile, the San Diego school itself had closed in 1983 because of declining enrollment, along with a dozen other public schools in the city. In later decades it was leased to several charter and private schools, and from 2005 to 2017 it housed the Magnolia Science Academy, a public charter middle school for grades 6-8. The school board then sold the property because of budget issues.

  A plaque and a flagpole had been put up there in memory of the victims. In 2018, the new owner demolished the building, and the site was redeveloped for housing. The memorial plaque was moved to the southern edge of the former school grounds, at the corner of Lake Atlin Avenue and Lake Angela Drive.

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