San Ysidro McDonald's massacre

• 1. Introduction

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  The San Ysidro McDonald's massacre began at about 3:56 on the afternoon of the 18th of July 1984. A black Mercury Marquis sedan pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant on San Ysidro Boulevard in San Diego, California. Forty-five customers were inside, along with the staff. The driver was a 41-year-old man named James Huberty. By the time a police sniper shot him, 22 people were dead, including an unborn baby, and 19 more were wounded. At that point, no lone gunman in United States history had killed so many. Seven years later the Luby's shooting surpassed that toll, yet this remains the deadliest mass shooting in California history. Who was Huberty, and what happened in the days before he drove to that parking lot? How did customers and workers try to protect one another? Why did it take police so long to end it, and what did the neighborhood build in the place where the restaurant stood?

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• 2. An Ohio Life

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  James Oliver Huberty was born on the 11th of October 1942 in Canton, Ohio, the second of two children. His father, Earl, worked as a quality inspector, and his mother, Icle, kept house. Both parents were devoutly religious, and the family attended local United Methodist churches.

  At the age of three, Huberty contracted polio and had to wear steel-and-leather braces on both legs. He recovered gradually but kept a mild limp for the rest of his life.

  In 1950, Earl bought a 155 acre farm in Mount Eaton. Icle refused to live in the countryside and would not even look at the property. Soon afterward she left her family to preach on the sidewalks of Tucson, Arizona, as a Pentecostal missionary. Her son was devastated. Earl later remembered finding the boy slumped against the family chicken coop, sobbing.

  Huberty grew into a sullen child with few friends, and his main interest was target practice. A family acquaintance later called him a "queer little boy who practiced incessantly with a target pistol." By his teens he was something of an amateur gunsmith. Bullies at Waynedale High School picked on him because of his limp, his family's strict beliefs and his reluctance to socialize. He graduated in 1960, ranked 51st in a class of 77.

  In 1962 he enrolled at Malone College, where he first studied sociology and met a fellow student named Etna Markland. He then switched to the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science and graduated with honors in 1964. A funeral director's license followed, and an embalmer's license came the year after.

  In early 1965 Huberty married Etna. He found work at a funeral home in Canton, where he proved skilled at embalming. His introverted nature made dealing with the public difficult, and it caused small conflicts with his superiors. After two years he became a welder for a firm in Louisville. Two years later, in June 1969, he joined Babcock & Wilcox. His employers regarded him as reliable, even though he was reclusive and quiet. He took overtime, earned promotions, and by the mid-1970s was making between $25,000 and $30,000 a year.

  The couple moved into a three-story house in an affluent part of Massillon, Ohio. A fire destroyed it in the winter of 1971. They bought another house on the same street and built a six-unit apartment building on the burned lot, which they managed themselves. Their daughters, Zelia and Cassandra, were born in 1972 and 1974.

  Behind that steady record, the household lived with violence. A report Etna once filed with the Canton Department of Children and Family Services said her husband had "messed up" her jaw. He frequently slapped or punched his daughters, held knives to their throats and beat his wife. Etna later insisted that on most occasions he had struck her only once.

  From 1976 she repeatedly urged him to seek counseling for his stress, and he always refused. She did everything she could to avoid setting him off. She also began claiming that she could read his future in playing cards and tarot cards. Huberty believed her, and her readings calmed him enough that he usually followed the advice they contained.

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• 3. Debts and Collapse

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  Jim Aslanes, an acquaintance of the family, once observed that wherever Huberty sat or stood inside his home, he "could just reach over and get a gun." Every firearm was loaded, with its safety catch disabled.

  Neighbors and co-workers saw a sullen, ill-tempered and somewhat paranoid man. He kept a mental tally of every slight and setback, real or imagined, against himself or his family. He called these grievances "my debts" and sometimes tried to settle them. Conflicts with neighbors once led to his detention on a charge of disorderly conduct. After a quarrel between children, he told the father of two girls that he had urged his own daughters to fight, adding: "I believe in paying my debts. Both good and bad."

  Huberty was also a conspiracy theorist and self-proclaimed survivalist. He was convinced that the Cold War would escalate, and he believed that President Jimmy Carter, and later Ronald Reagan, were conspiring against him. He expected society to collapse through economic ruin or nuclear war. To prepare, he filled his house with stores of non-perishable food and many guns, some bought from co-workers, which he meant to use to defend his home.

  In November 1982 he was laid off from Babcock & Wilcox, and he sank into despair over his inability to provide for his family. A co-worker remembered him saying that if he could not provide, he would kill himself and "take everyone with him." According to Etna, he soon began hearing voices. In early 1983 he pressed a loaded pistol to his temple, and she talked him out of pulling the trigger. Afterward he told her: "You should have let me shoot myself."

  In the spring of 1983 the couple sold their apartment building for $115,000. A welding job with Union Metal Manufacturing Company lasted five weeks before the plant closed. Weeks later, Huberty and one of his daughters were hurt in a traffic accident. His childhood neck pains grew worse, and he noticed an occasional nerve tremor in his hands and arms.

  That summer the family applied for residency in Mexico, reasoning that the money from the building would last longer there. In September they sold their house for only $12,000 in cash, with the buyer taking over a $48,000 mortgage. Huberty told acquaintances he was moving the family to Tijuana to look for work. "We're going to show them who's boss," he said.

  The family made the move in October 1983. Huberty left most of their belongings in storage in Ohio but took his huge collection of guns, ammunition and survival supplies. Etna and the girls befriended their neighbors in Tijuana. Huberty, who spoke little Spanish, stayed sullen and found no work, and he quickly regretted the decision.

  Within three months the family moved north to San Ysidro, a largely poor district of San Diego just across the border, home to 13,000 people in 1984. They rented a unit in the Cottonwood Apartments. Huberty resented being the only Anglo-American family in the complex and was rude to his neighbors.

  He answered a newspaper advertisement for security guard training in a federally funded program and finished the course on the 12th of April. A security firm in Chula Vista hired him to guard a condominium complex. With that income the family had its furniture shipped from Ohio and moved into a two-bedroom apartment on Averil Road, which cost $450 a month. On the 10th of July he was dismissed, and his employers cited poor work performance and a noted general physical instability.

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• 4. The Last Days

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  On the 15th of July 1984, James Huberty told his wife that he suspected he had a mental health problem. Two days later, on the morning of the 17th, he phoned a San Diego mental health clinic and asked for an appointment. He left his contact details and was assured that someone would call back within hours.

  According to Etna, he sat quietly by the telephone for several hours. Then he abruptly walked out and rode off on his motorcycle. The call never came. The receptionist had misspelled his name as "Shouberty." Huberty was polite, showed no urgency and said he had never been hospitalized for mental health reasons. The inquiry was therefore logged as non-crisis, to be handled within 48 hours.

  About an hour after leaving, Huberty came home in a contented mood. After dinner he, Etna and their daughters cycled to a nearby park. That evening he and Etna watched a movie together.

  The next morning, Wednesday the 18th, the family visited the San Diego Zoo. As they walked, Huberty told Etna that he believed his life was effectively over. He blamed the clinic's silence the day before: "Well, society had their chance." The family ate lunch at a McDonald's in the Clairemont neighborhood and then went home.

  Soon afterward, Etna was resting on the bed when Huberty came into the bedroom in a maroon T-shirt and green camouflage slacks. He leaned over and said, "I want to kiss you goodbye." She kissed him and asked where he was going, since she planned to start dinner soon. He answered calmly that he was "going hunting... hunting for humans."

  He walked to the front door with a gun across his shoulder, a box of ammunition and a bundle wrapped in a checkered blanket. Looking at his 12-year-old daughter, he said: "Goodbye. I won't be back."

  Eyewitnesses saw him drive down San Ysidro Boulevard, first toward a Big Bear supermarket and then toward a post office. He finally turned into the lot of a McDonald's about 200 yards from his apartment.

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• 5. Inside the Restaurant

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  Huberty arrived with three weapons: a 9mm Browning pistol, a 9mm Uzi carbine and a Winchester 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. He had hundreds of rounds of ammunition for each.

  A 16-year-old employee named John Arnold was the first person he aimed at, from about fifteen feet away. Assistant manager Guillermo Flores shouted a warning. When Huberty pulled the trigger, Arnold later said, "nothing happened." The shotgun had jammed. Arnold took the whole thing for a distasteful joke and began to walk away.

  Neva Caine, the 22-year-old manager, walked toward the counter. Huberty fired the shotgun at the ceiling and then shot her once with the Uzi. She died minutes later. He turned the shotgun on Arnold and wounded him in the chest and arm.

  Huberty ordered everyone onto the floor. He shouted that he had killed a thousand people and meant to kill a thousand more. He also claimed to be a Vietnam War veteran, though he had never served in any branch of the military. Victor Rivera, a 25-year-old customer, tried to talk him out of hurting anyone else. Huberty shot him repeatedly while shouting at him to be quiet.

  Staff and customers dove beneath tables and booths. Huberty turned to six women and children huddled together. He killed 19-year-old María Colmenero-Silva and nine-year-old Claudia Pérez, and he wounded Claudia's 15-year-old sister, Imelda. Eleven-year-old Aurora Peña was wounded in the leg but shielded by her pregnant aunt, 18-year-old Jackie Reyes, who was killed. Jackie's eight-month-old son, Carlos, died as well. A 62-year-old trucker named Laurence Versluis was killed soon after.

  Blythe Regan Herrera, 31, covered her 11-year-old son, Matao, beneath one booth. Directly across from them, her husband, Ronald, covered Matao's 12-year-old friend, Keith Thomas, and urged the boy not to move. Keith was wounded but not seriously. Ronald was shot six times and survived. Blythe and Matao were killed.

  At a nearby booth, three women hid together. Twenty-four-year-old Guadalupe del Río lay against the wall while her friends Gloria Ramírez, 25, and Arisdelsi Vuelvas Vargas, 31, shielded her. Del Río was hit but not seriously hurt, and Ramírez was unharmed. Vargas was shot in the back of the head and died the next day. She was the only fatally wounded person who lived long enough to reach a hospital. At another booth, a 45-year-old banker named Hugo Velázquez Vasquez was killed.

  Outside, Lydia Flores drove up to the food-pickup window shortly after 4:00 p.m. and saw shattered glass. She heard gunfire and then, as she put it, looked up and saw him "just shooting." She reversed until she crashed into a fence, then hid in the bushes with her two-year-old daughter, Melissa, until the shooting stopped.

  At about 4:05, a Mexican couple, Astolfo and Maricela Félix, drove toward a service area with their four-month-old daughter, Karlita. Astolfo saw the broken glass, assumed renovations were underway and took the man striding toward them for a repairman. Huberty fired on the car. Maricela lost the sight in one eye and the use of one hand. Karlita was critically wounded, and Astolfo was hit in the chest and head. Maricela handed the baby to her husband, who passed her to a young woman named Lucía Velasco. Velasco rushed Karlita to a nearby hospital, and all three members of the Félix family survived.

  Three 11-year-old boys on BMX bikes rode into the west parking lot. Someone across the street yelled something they could not make out, and all three hesitated as they dismounted. Huberty shot them. Joshua Coleman was critically wounded and survived. Omarr Alonso Hernandez and David Flores Delgado died at the scene.

  Miguel Victoria Ulloa, 74, and his wife, Aída Velázquez Victoria, 69, walked toward the entrance. Miguel reached to open the door for her, and Huberty fired. Aída was killed and Miguel was wounded. Two uninjured survivors, Oscar Mondragón and María Sevilla, later said that Miguel cradled his wife and wiped the blood from her face. He cursed at Huberty, who approached the doorway and killed him.

  Huberty then searched the kitchen and found six employees. One woman screamed in Spanish, "Don't kill me!" He opened fire, killing Paulina López, 21, Elsa Borboa-Fierro, 19, and Margarita Padilla, 18, and critically wounding 17-year-old Albert Leos. Just before the shots, Padilla had grabbed the hand of her friend Wendy Flanagan, 17, and the two began to run. Flanagan, four other employees, and a female customer with her infant hid in a basement utility room. Leos, shot five times, crawled in to join them.

  Survivors later said that Huberty stopped at the service counter, adjusted a portable radio and settled on a music station, then kept shooting as he danced. When a fire truck drove within range, he pierced it with bullets and slightly wounded one of its occupants. He shot 19-year-old Jose Pérez in the head after hearing him moan. Pérez died alongside his friend and neighbor Gloria González, 22, and a young woman named Michelle Carncross.

  During a lull, Aurora Peña opened her eyes and saw Huberty staring at her. He swore, threw a bag of french fries at her, then fetched his shotgun and shot her again. She survived and was hospitalized longer than any other survivor.

  Huberty fired at least 257 rounds. Seventeen of the dead were killed inside the restaurant and four close by. Only ten people inside were unhurt, and six of them had hidden in the basement. Some victims tried to stop their own bleeding, or their companions' bleeding, with napkins. The dead included an eight-month-old and a 74-year-old. Most were of Mexican or Mexican-American ancestry, which reflected the neighborhood's population.

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• 6. The Police Response

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  Shortly after 4:00 p.m., the first of many calls to emergency services reported that a child had been shot and taken to a post office on San Ysidro Boulevard. The dispatcher mistakenly sent officers to a different McDonald's, two miles from the real one. That error delayed the lockdown by several minutes. For a time, the only warnings to people near the restaurant came from passers-by.

  About ten minutes after the first call, Officer Miguel Rosario reached the correct restaurant. Huberty fired at his patrol car. Rosario worked out where the trouble was and radioed the San Diego Police Department. Police locked down an area six blocks across and set up a command post two blocks from the restaurant. They placed 175 officers around it, and within the hour several SWAT team members took up positions.

  The officers faced real obstacles. Huberty fired rapidly and switched between weapons, so police could not tell how many people were inside. Most of the windows had been shattered, and reflections from the glass made it hard to see in. Early on, police worried that one or more gunmen might be holding hostages. A person who escaped told them there was a single gunman, no hostages, and that he was shooting everyone he saw. At 5:05 p.m., all responding officers were authorized to kill the gunman if they got a clear shot.

  At 5:17 p.m., Huberty walked from the service counter toward a doorway near the drive-in window. A 27-year-old SWAT sniper named Charles Foster lay on the roof of the post office across the street. Through the scope of his .308-caliber rifle he now had a clear view of Huberty's body from the neck down. From about 35 yards, Foster fired one round. It severed Huberty's aorta, and Huberty fell backward onto the floor in front of the counter and died almost at once.

  Foster radioed that the gunman was down and kept his sights on the motionless figure. So many rounds had been fired from different guns that police were not sure there was only one shooter. About a minute later a sergeant entered with his gun trained on Huberty and noticed a wounded girl moving. He asked her whether the man on the floor was the gunman, and she nodded. As a precaution, an officer rolled Huberty onto his face and handcuffed his wrists behind his back.

  The police account of the day was soon contested. Initial department reports said everyone hurt or killed inside had been shot in the first minutes after Huberty entered. Survivors disputed this hotly. They said he had shot both wounded and unwounded people more than 40 minutes after the shooting began.

  On the 2nd of August, Police Chief William Kolendar held a press conference on the department's internal inquiry. It found that rush-hour traffic had delayed the SWAT team's arrival but that officers had acted appropriately. Kolendar called any suggestion that police should have stormed the restaurant "ludicrous." He said bullet holes had left the windows "spider-webbed," and with the sun shining directly on them, officers could not see the gunman clearly. He added that the eight minutes between the kill authorization and Huberty's death had not changed the final toll. "I believe the operation was handled the way it should have been handled," he said.

  Asked about a motive, Kolendar rejected the idea that the killings were racially motivated. "He didn't like anybody," he told reporters.

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• 7. Aftermath and Accountability

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  The day after the massacre, reporters traveled to Mount Eaton, Ohio, to talk to Huberty's father, Earl. After describing his son's childhood and the family's faith, Earl pointed to a painting of a lost sheep by the Jordan River and began to weep. "Yesterday was the worst day of my life," he said. "I feel so sorry for those people."

  McDonald's temporarily pulled all of its television and radio advertising. Its biggest rival, Burger King, did the same as a gesture of solidarity. Huberty's body was cremated on the 23rd of July with no religious service. His ashes went to his widow and were later buried in Ohio.

  In the following weeks, Etna and her daughters received many death threats and stayed with a family friend. All three attended counseling for more than nine months. They moved to Chula Vista, where Zelia and Cassandra enrolled in school under assumed names. A year later they settled in Spring Valley, in San Diego County.

  The number of dead overwhelmed the neighborhood. Local funeral homes held wakes at the San Ysidro Civic Center because no single chapel could hold them. The parish of Mount Carmel Church held funeral masses back to back so that each victim could be buried promptly.

  Several officers who answered the call suffered sleep loss, memory problems and guilt in the months that followed. In 1985 a study commissioned by the National Institute of Mental Health, run by the San Diego Police Department's chief psychologist, concluded that several of them had post-traumatic stress disorder.

  The city also reexamined how it responded to such attacks and what weapons its officers carried. The department expanded training for special units and bought more powerful firearms. One officer who had carried only a .38-caliber revolver that day admitted feeling "inadequate." He said the time had come for a full-time, dedicated and highly trained team able to respond rapidly anywhere in the city.

  McDonald's committed $1 million to a survivors' fund. Joan Kroc, the widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, added $100,000 of her own for burial costs, financial help for victims' relatives and counseling for survivors. Donations eventually passed $1.4 million. Some San Ysidro residents and donors protested impromptu when the first payout went to Etna Huberty.

  Family members of the dead and survivors sued McDonald's and the San Diego Police Department in San Diego County Superior Court. The cases were consolidated and dismissed before trial on a defense motion for summary judgment. On the 25th of July 1987, the California Court of Appeal upheld that ruling. It held that McDonald's, like any business, had no duty to protect patrons from an unforeseeable assault by a murderous madman. Guards and security cameras could not have deterred a man who did not care whether he lived. The court also cleared the police, writing that given the sheer horror of the ordeal it was difficult to imagine anything officers could have done or failed to do that would have increased the risk. The last of the lawsuits were dismissed in August 1991.

  In July 1986, Etna Huberty filed her own suit against McDonald's and her husband's longtime employer, Babcock & Wilcox, seeking $5 million. It argued that years of working near poisonous metals without enough protection, combined with a poor diet, had triggered his rage. It pointed out that his autopsy found no drugs or alcohol but did find high levels of lead and cadmium. It blamed the metals' buildup on 13 years of welding fumes, and it suggested that heavy intake of monosodium glutamate in McDonald's food had added to his delusions. The suit was dismissed in 1987. Etna Huberty died of breast cancer in 2003.

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• 8. Memory and Memorial

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  Within two days of the massacre, the restaurant had been refurbished and renovated. One employee said the hope was that it would become "just another McDonald's." After talks between community leaders and McDonald's executives, the company decided on the 24th of July that it would not reopen. The renovated building was demolished at midnight on the 26th of September.

  McDonald's donated the land to the city on the condition that no restaurant ever be built there. For more than four years, officials weighed turning the site into a memorial park or a shrine. In February 1988 the land was sold to Southwestern College for $136,000. The college agreed to set aside a 300 square foot area in front of its planned campus extension as a permanent memorial to the 21 victims. McDonald's later opened a new restaurant two blocks away on West San Ysidro Boulevard.

  The memorial was formally unveiled in 1990. It consists of 21 hexagonal white marble pillars, each carrying the name of one victim. Roberto Valdes, a former Southwestern College student, designed it. He explained that the pillars stand at different heights to reflect the range of ages and backgrounds of those who died. They are "bonded together," he said, in the hope that the community would "stick together, like they did."

  The monument stands at 460 West San Ysidro Boulevard. Every anniversary of the massacre, people decorate it with flowers. During the three days when people of Mexican heritage observe the Day of the Dead, visitors bring candles and offerings for the victims.

  The massacre has also reached the screen. The 1988 film Bloody Wednesday, directed by Mark Gilhuis and starring Raymond Elmendorf, was loosely inspired by it. In 2016, director Charlie Minn released the documentary 77 Minutes: The 1984 San Diego McDonald's Massacre. It includes interviews with many people who were in the restaurant and with the SWAT sniper who ended the shooting.

  Albert Leos, one of the workers wounded in the kitchen, went on to become a police officer. He served in several departments in the South Bay region of San Diego County before joining the San Diego Police Department.

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