Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
40 YRS ON: GIRL
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 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