Back in 1996, massacre of city beach workers was shocking news

In 1996, the nation could still be shocked by a raging madman gunning down six innocents.

Clifton McCree burst into the city’s beach maintenance trailer, Glock in hand, trapping seven of his former co-workers in a depressingly familiar American tableau.

“I’m gonna kill all you motherf - - - - - s,” McCree shouted as he emptied one 10-round magazine, jammed another into his 9 mm semiautomatic pistol and fired off three more shots. Then one more bullet for himself.

Only one of the seven managed to escape his murderous barrage. In the predawn gray, Feb. 9, 1996, just across the Las Olas Boulevard bridge, Fort Lauderdale had become the setting of a shocking mass murder. Because, in 1996, the nation could still be shocked by a raging madman gunning down six innocents.

I’m not sure in 2017, a year that’s already seen — as of Thursday — 378 mass shootings, that a murder spree like Clifton McCree’s would get much notice outside South Florida. In blood-soaked 2017, national leaders would hardly bother, for such a piddling death toll, to offer us “their thoughts and prayers” and their other empty NRA-approved gestures.

Lately, gunmen armed with variations of the ubiquitous AR-15 assault rifles have been massacring victims with such horrifying efficiency that the death tolls seem more like dispatches from a war zone. Last Sunday, Devin Kelley interrupted the morning service in a smalltown Texas church and methodically murdered 26 and wounded 20. On Oct. 1, Stephen Paddock from his sniper’s post on the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel, killed 59 and wounded hundreds in a crowded country music festival.

One year earlier, to the very day, Christopher Harper Mercer carried his AR-15 onto the campus of Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, and, while laughing aloud, slaughtered nine student and teachers, wounded another seven. He left a note explaining that his methodology was based on the work of other mass murderers. A few months earlier, Omar Mateen opened fire inside a crowded Orlando nightclub with an AR-15, killing 59 and wounding 50. That December, Syed Rizwyan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik, with his and hers AR-15s, turned an office Christmas party in San Bernardino, Calif., into yet another war-like atrocity, killing 14 and wounding 21.

Kamikaze killers dream of widespread infamy, their names all over cable news. But they know nowadays that notoriety demands a spectacular horror show. Shooters like Christopher Harper Mercer longed for the postmortem attention garnered by utterly deranged predecessors like James Eagan Holmes, who killed 12 and wounded 58 in that movie theater in Aurora, Colo. in 2012. Or, that same year, Adam Lanza, whose ghastly killing spree in Newtown, Conn., left 27 dead, including 20 tiny elementary school kids. (This past January, Esteban Santiago deviated from the AR-15 template and managed to shoot 11 people, killing five, at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport with a 9 mm pistol.)

Who notices, anymore, a gun incident claiming four or five or six victims in a nation that, so far this year (according to the Gun Violence Archive), has suffered 13,258 gun deaths and 27,135 gun injuries?

I’m a news junkie who spends hours a day on news sites, yet I somehow overlooked that awful story out of Plano, Texas, in September when Spencer Hight, consumed with jealousy, invaded the suburban home of his ex-wife who was hosting a party. He came in firing a black AR-15 and killed nine people before a police officer shot him dead. “We’ve never had a shooting of this magnitude. We’ve never seen this many victims before. It’s just a terrible event,” Plano Police Chief Greg Rushin told reporters.

Nor did I notice, closer to home, the reports in June describing the killing spree of Army vet John Robert Neumann Jr. who returned to a small assembly plant northeast of Orlando where he had been fired two months earlier and killed five of his former colleagues. He was only armed with a pistol. Maybe that kept the body count down.

The Orlando shooting was reminiscent of the workplace killing in Fort Lauderdale. Except, 21 years ago, the horror wreaked by Clinton McCree was national news.

McCree had nursed his grudge for almost two years before charging into the beach maintenance headquarters with his pistol — in 1996 a now expired federal law restricted the sale of assault weapons. The ex-Marine killed Joe Belotto, Mark Bretz, Ken Brunjes, Tim Clifford and Don Moon Jr. A sixth worker, Lelan “Little Joe” Brookins, who was shot in the back and abdomen, managed to live another ten years, disabled and in chronic pain, before complications from gunshot wounds finally killed him.

Fort Lauderdale has erected a small memorial on the beach, a concrete pillar with a brass plaque embossed with the names of the six lost workers. The patch of sand just across A1A from the Bahia Mar Hotel has been christened Beach Crew Memorial Park, a reminder of a time when America was not yet inured to mass murder.