‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ killer in bid for freedom
First U.S shooter set for parole hearing
Barricaded inside her ramshackle home waiting for the police, Brenda Ann Spencer calmly told the man on the end of the phone why she’d carried out America’s first high school shooting: “I don’t like Mondays.”
The teenager’s reply inspired the unforgettable piano ballad that brought the Boomtown Rats global fame – with its lyric: “The silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload.”
But while the band’s 1970s hit is now filed under nostalgia, events surrounding it are now more relevant than ever.
Today, 40 years on from gunning down principal Burton Wragg, 53, caretaker Mike Suchar, 56, and wounding nine others, Spencer is on the cusp of freedom.
In August, 10 years after her last parole hearing, she again becomes eligible to go before a parole board, a day she has been preparing for inside her cell at the California Institution for Women in Chino.
But while she may feel she has served her punishment, the victims and their families still dread her release.
And that first shooting has cast a dark shadow over America. By her own admission, Spencer feels her actions were the blueprint for the massacres at Columbine, Sandy Hook and Parkland’s
ON HER ACTIONS INSPIRING COPYCAT ATTACKS
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. Back in January 29, 1979, at 8.30am Spencer, then a geeky looking 16-year-old, took out the .22 rifle her father had bought her as a Christmas present and pointed it through her bedroom window.
Across from her home in San Diego, pupils were lining up outside Grover Cleveland Elementary School. Spencer squeezed the trigger, firing off 36 bullets.
There then followed a six-hour standoff, during which a reporter from the San Diego Evening Tribune, Gus Stevens, began calling houses in the neighbourhood trying to get information.
One was that of the Spencer residence and the teenager picked up the phone. When he asked her reason for the school massacre, she replied: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.”
After surrendering to police on the promise of a Burger King meal, as she walked out in shackles she told them: “It was a lot of fun seeing children shot. They looked like a herd of cows standing around. It was really easy pickings.”
Spencer pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon. On April 4, 1980, a day after her 18th birthday, she was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
It is only since the parole process started in 1993 that she has expressed remorse. Diagnosed with epilepsy and as a depressive, she said she was drinking alcohol and on phencyclidine – angel dust – which made her hallucinate when she opened fire.
Controversially, she also alleged her father had sexually abused her. “I had to share my dad’s bed til I was 14 years old,” she said during a 2009 hearing. Her father denied her claims.
She previously told the board: “I know saying sorry doesn’t make it all right. With every school shooting, I feel I’m partially responsible. What if
SINCE Brenda Spencer’s attack, at least 143 children, teachers and other people have been killed, and another 289 injured in assaults.
And the problem is getting worse. The most bloodshed in American schools was recorded last year with 35 people killed, 28 of whom were students, and 79 injured.
Although the US government does not track the attacks, research shows they got the idea from what I did?” And yet the model prisoner maintains she is no murderer, refusing to take full responsibility, instead blaming her upbringing. “I had asked for a radio but got a gun instead,” she said.
Estimates suggest that since Spencer’s killings more than 350,000 pupils across 400 schools have witnessed a gun attack in America. It is one of the reasons her bid for freedom is so bitterly opposed by many, including Mr Wragg’s family. His
there were 25 incidents resulting in death or injury. Another database recording school shootings says 2018 had the highest number of incidents recorded.
That database, from the US Center for Homeland Defense, uses a different way of identifying gun incidents in schools and says there were 94. Thirteen people, plus killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, died at Columbine granddaughter Haley, 26, says: “I know there was a lot of turmoil in the family every time Brenda was up for parole. I was so young I didn’t really understand it. I felt really scared – like she would come after me. I felt like letting this person out of her cage
Saying sorry doesn’t make it all right. With every shooting I’m responsible BRENDA SPENCER
High School in Colorado Gun used at in 1999. Columbine In 2002 the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Connecticut, claimed 26 lives and shooter Adam Lanza. Last year 17 people died at Florida’s Stoneman Douglas High. In 2007 Seung-hui Cho, 23, killed 32 students and faculty members at Virginia Tech.