I hate Mondays

I don’t really hate Mondays, but I do tend to hit the snooze bar more often than on other days of the week.

I woke up this morning thinking about Brenda Ann Spencer, who in 1979 opened fire at Grover Cleveland Elementary School across the street from her house near San Diego. She was 16.

A friend who had worked with me at the Daily Aztec at San Diego State University was then a reporter with the San Diego Union-Tribune. He had her address and looked up her phone number in a reverse telephone directory — a useful tool in the days before the Internet.

He asked her why she was shooting.

“I just did it for the fun of it,” she told him. “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day. I have to go now. I shot a pig. I think and I want to shoot more.”

She killed the principal, who was trying to protect the students, and a police officer who went to help him after he was shot. She injured nine others and kept the police at bay for seven hours before she surrendered.

The story inspired the song “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats, an Australian band.

There was some debate over whether the reporter stepped over an ethical line by calling a suspect during the shooting. I thought it was just good reporting.

Spencer was tried as an adult as it still serving her sentence at the California Institution for Women in Chino. She has been denied parole four times.

It was such a sad, creepy story — one of the worst I remember in my home town. Twenty-three years later, it still haunts me. Especially on Mondays.