Cleveland Elementary School shooting (San Diego)
Brenda Ann Spencer was a school shooter who was infamous during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
She wounded eight children and one police officer and killed two adults in a shooting spree at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, on January 29, 1979. The school was across the street from her house. She used a rifle she had recently been given for Christmas. When the six-hour incident ended Spencer, who was sixteen at the time, shrugged, "I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day." She also noted that There was no reason for it, and it was just a lot of fun; It was just like shooting ducks in a pond; and [The children] looked like a herd of cows standing around, it was really easy pickings.
She pled guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon, and was sentenced to prison for 25 years to life. She is one of the few known female mass murderers in United States history. Since then, she has been up for parole three times and has been turned down each time, the last in 2001. She has claimed that she was drunk and under the influence of PCP.
Spencer's crime, lack of remorse, and inability to provide any non-trivial explanation for her actions when captured inspired the song I Don't Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats, which was played incessantly on Monday mornings by album-oriented rock format radio stations in the United States throughout the 1980s. It got to No.1 in the UK charts in July 1979.