Brenda Spencer Doesn't Like Mondays

Tell me why?

I don’t like Mondays.

I want to shoot

The whole day down.

- The Boomtown Rats
“I Don’t Like Mondays”

People always joke at the beginning of the week about having a “case of the Mondays.” On January 29, 1979, San Diego teenager Brenda Ann Spencer took her Monday morning angst way too far.

Right as classes were about to begin at Grover Cleveland Elementary in the San Diego suburbs, the crack of a rifle shot overpowered the school bell ringing and the chatter of the kids preparing to enter the school.

Chaos ensued.

Children were falling to the ground, bleeding and screaming. Bullets were seemingly coming from nowhere. It wasn't immediately apparent that a sniper was deliberately aiming at the kids from one of the houses across the street.

The school’s principal, Burton Wragg, rushed outside to help the injured children and get the others inside to safety and was shot in the chest. When the janitor attempted to aid the dying man, he too was shot. Faculty and students barricaded themselves within the building, while nurses did what they could to tend the wounded.

When the first police officer arrived on the scene, he was shot in the neck. The carnage didn’t abate until another police officer and a security guard procured a garbage truck and parked it in front of the school, blocking the…