‘Like it happened yesterday’: 40 years on, survivors reflect on California McDonald’s massacre
Four decades ago Thursday, a man carrying an arsenal of weapons walked into the restaurant and shot 40 people, killing 21, in what was then the nation's deadliest mass shooting.
It’s been 40 years since Wendy Flanagan and her coworkers sealed themselves in the basement utility room of a McDonald’s in San Ysidro.
On July 18, 1984, a gunman entered the restaurant and opened fire. In hiding, a 16-year-old Flanagan remembers reaching for her friend’s gold chains. Adorning them were a couple of crosses and the Virgen de Guadalupe. She grabbed on and started to pray.
Seventy-seven minutes later, and 21 lives lost, it was over.
Now, decades later, the sound of fireworks still unsettles her.
“To this day, I’m still bothered by the Fourth of July,” said Flanagan, a Chula Vista resident who often chooses to spend her time alone, quietly, with her two chihuahuas.
The cacophony is just “constant,” she said, just like the onslaught of bullets fizzing through the air that day.
Thursday marks the 40th anniversary of the massacre, when a man carrying an arsenal of weapons walked into a McDonald’s in San Ysidro and shot 40 people, in what’s now widely regarded as one of the country’s first modern-day mass shootings.
For Flanagan, it’s also a time when she feels the most hope.
“I believe the more people that know the minds and the details of what happened, maybe something, somewhere, someone might be quick to make some change,” she said.
That’s part of the aim behind her in-person appearance Thursday and Friday at local screenings of “77 Minutes,” a 2016 documentary about the massacre, so named for the time it took police to respond.
Director Charlie Minn took what he calls a “victim-driven” narrative approach, with the shooter’s name deliberately unmentioned.
“My goal is to give victims, family members and survivors a voice,” Minn said. “The goal should be again to inform, educate and raise awareness about the event.”
Yet nationwide, mass shootings continue unabated. So far this year, there have already been more than 280 shootings with four or more victims, with more than 400 children under 12 among those victims, according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.
A day after the San Ysidro shooting, Flanagan had only one wish, one shared by many other survivors: to forget and move on.
“I wanted to just move forward,” she said. “I wanted to be quiet and a normal girl, and just pretended like nothing happened and it snuck up on me like years later.”
So Flanagan tried to go back to work at another McDonald’s the next day but was sent home. She faced the trauma mostly alone. She later moved to a different high school.
But as hard as she tried to push that day from her mind, it would return and hit her “even harder,” and and she struggled to fend off thoughts of suicide.
“I was just trying to escape,” she said. “There were so many scars that built up.”
To her frustration, the trauma left with so many shooting survivors is frequently misconstrued as courage, Flanagan pointed out. Forty years later, she still sees herself as she did on July 18, 1984.
“I’m a victim, that’s exactly who I am,” she said. “There’s nothing courageous about that. I didn’t have a choice.”
Neither did Albert Leos, a 17-year-old high school football star and McDonald’s line cook who spent that day in the same confinement, sprawled on the ground.
Shots fired at point-blank range had punctured his arms, leg, stomach and chest, and he had crawled to the basement room where his coworkers had huddled.
He would live, and he would later enroll in three-year police cadet training while juggling physical therapy during the long recovery from his wounds. Just ahead of his 21st birthday, he would become a police officer full-time.
“The injuries that I still have — the aches and pains, the scars — every day I get up and look in the mirror, I see those scars. It’s just a constant reminder that I was spared,” Leos said.
His 37 years of working in the force have only brought him closer to his life goal of protecting his community, he said. Now a San Diego police captain, he has also had stints with National City and Chula Vista police, while carrying out routine patrols of San Ysidro.
When he hears of mass shootings in the news today, what keeps him grounded and performing his job is knowing that he’s been through the same.
But these tragedies, he says, must still be retold to pay homage to the victims.
“What needs to be remembered is that they were human beings who lost their lives. There are victims, humans, behind the names and photos,” he said. “They were living their lives, and there were babies who were going to live their lives but didn’t get the chance because it was snuffed away.”
“77 Minutes” will be screened daily through next Thursday at Reading Cinemas Town Square at 4665 Clairemont Drive in San Diego. More details and showtimes are available at readingcinemas.com/townsquare.