Shooting set her up for a chaotic life
Wendy Flanagan was working the cash register at McDonald’s. The 17-year-old honors student had just made the varsity cheer squad and gotten her first summer job. James Huberty lived a block away. He had recently lost his job and spent the morning at the San Diego Zoo with his wife and two daughters. When they returned home, he told them he was heading back out — “going hunting for humans,” he said.
At 3:56 p.m., Huberty walked into the McDonald’s. Flanagan was bringing ice from the kitchen to the counter when shots rang out. Her manager fell to the ground.
Flanagan ran down a flight of stairs into the basement and crammed into a janitor’s closet with five others. For the next hour and 20 minutes, they listened to the massacre above. More than 240 shots were fired. Huberty hunted people down in the parking lot and under tables. He shot babies and grandparents, husbands and wives.
Finally, a police sniper from a nearby roof got a bead on him, and put a bullet through the killer’s aorta and spine, killing him instantly.
When police led Flanagan and others out of the restaurant, they told them to hold the shoulder of the person in front of them, and not look down. Flanagan couldn’t help herself. What she saw seared its way into the limbic depths of her brain.
She tried to act like she was OK. Her parents tried to act like all was well. She was their smart, happy little girl.
She changed schools because she didn’t want anyone asking her about it, and did just enough work to graduate.
While many other victims of the San Ysidro shooting would move on in their lives, she would never recover.
“I’m a very emotional person as it is, and to put me in a situation like that so young set the course for how disastrous the rest of my life was going to be,” she said.
She is 49 now. She’s been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which she believes was triggered by the trauma. She takes medication for anxiety. She has lived with her mother most of her life; never got a job, never got married or had children.
She took a few community college courses, but didn’t get a degree. She used drugs — still does, mostly marijuana — to “self-medicate.” She has made a suicide attempt and is sticking with a boyfriend who’s in prison for stealing cars.
She does not have flashbacks and is not even sure if the memory she has of her manager being shot is real or was conjured in therapy.
She was homeless for a while, but now is renting a bedroom in an apartment in San Diego. She gets most of her joy from her tea-cup Chihuahuas.
She can’t watch the television about Orlando. And since it happened, she’s stayed off Facebook.
“I see what they’re going through, and I think, oh, God, I know what’s ahead for them. It’s not good. I wish I could give hope for victims for this or future tragedies. I can’t. I’d like to say it gets better. But it doesn’t. It never goes away.”