There are certain songs that we keep on homemade tapes of the mind. Our all-time favorites, or even the ones where we know all the words.
One song I’ve always liked is “I Don’t Like Mondays,” especially when I worked full-time. It was just this morning that I found out the narrative behind the song. Now, it has an entirely different meaning for me.
The story happened on this date, January 29, 1978. A Monday. A young girl, Brenda Spencer, lived across the street from Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego. On that morning, she sat in a window of her home and began shooting at children who were waiting for their principal to open the school gate.
Brenda Spencer killed Principal Burton Wragg and also a custodian name Mike Suchar, who were trying to help the kids. She injured eight children and also shot a police officer in the neck. She would have continued to fire out of that window, but the police obstructed her line of view by moving a garbage truck into the street, between the school and her house, avoiding further casualties.
In all, she fired thirty times, becoming the first female school shooter in the United States. From that point on, Spencer barricaded herself inside her home for several hours. She acted completely alone in this crime.
Reporters will get the story any way they can. That’s what happened when a reporter from The San Diego Union-Tribune randomly called telephone numbers in the neighborhood. As luck would have it, he got Brenda Spencer on the phone. He asked her several questions, and one was, “Tell me why.” To which she responded, “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.” She also told him the people at the school were easy targets.
Ultimately, she surrendered and came out of the house without further incident. The negotiators promised her a Burger King meal, and that sealed the deal for her.
But this story started long before January 29.
Brenda Spencer was born on April 3, 1962. I’m not sure if she lived in that same house her whole life, but that is where she and her father were living at the time of the shooting. She hadn’t been going to school herself. She wasn’t interested in it.
Her parents had long ago separated, and she was living with her father, in poverty, in that house. They slept together on a single mattress on the living room floor. The house was littered with empty bottles of alcohol. She was a kid, 5’2″, with bright red hair.
She had shown some promise, some ability as a photographer, as she had won the first prize in a Humane Society competition. But she had little ambition for anything, probably, but surviving. When she did attend school, it was at Patrick Henry High School. One teacher recounted that she frequently had to ask Brenda if she was awake in class. I’m guessing the bulk of her diet consisted of alcohol. Not only that, they later did tests on her while she was in custody. They found Spencer had an injury to the temporal lobe of her brain. Supposedly, it was caused by an accident on her bicycle.
In the years before, in trouble constantly for truancy, it came out in a report for troubled students that Spencer was suicidal. It was recommended that she be admitted into a mental hospital for depression. Her father would not give permission. Instead, though — and I stress, instead — for Christmas of 1978, he gave her a Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic .22 caliber rifle with a telescopic sight and 500 rounds of ammunition.
Brenda Spencer later told authorities, “I asked for a radio, and he bought me a gun.” Asked why he had done that, she answered, “I felt like he wanted me to kill myself.”
She remains in prison, to this day, for those murders.
The father, Wallace Spencer, carried on, free and clear. He denied the allegations his daughter had made of sexual abuse and physical beatings.
Bob Geldof, then the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, read about the incident and wrote the song, “I Don’t Like Mondays.”
I will never hear the song again in the same way.
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“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
― Aristotle
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“It strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
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“A society gets the criminals it deserves.”
― Val MacDermid, Killing the Shadows
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