Just Another Allusion
And I briefly mentioned Brenda Spencer in KOER also. Here's why:
Brenda Spencer, who has spent 25 years in prison for killing two people and wounding nine others in one of the nation's first schoolyard shootings, was denied parole again yesterday.
This was the fourth time Spencer, 43, has appeared before the state parole board asking to be considered for release. She was convicted of first-degree murder and assault for the 1979 shootings at Cleveland Elementary School in San Carlos. She will not be eligible for a new parole hearing for four years.
Spencer was 16 on Jan. 29, 1979, when she used a .22-caliber rifle, a Christmas gift from her father, to shoot at children from a window of her home across the street. Principal Burton Wragg, 53, and custodian Michael Suchar, 56, were killed.
Police Officer Robert Robb was shot in the neck as he, like Wragg and Suchar, tried to help the children. Eight students ranging in age from 7 to 10 were wounded.
During a hearing at the California Institution for Women, where she has been incarcerated since 1980, Spencer told two parole board commissioners that she was "deeply sorry" for the harm she caused her victims and their families. She said she remembered little about the day of the shootings, only "bits and pieces."...
At the time of the incident, Spencer told a reporter: "I just started shooting for the fun of it. I don't like Mondays. It livens up the day."
Bob Geldof said a lot about this in his autobiography, but I don't feel like typing. I'd rather cut and paste.
Brenda started practicing with a .22 semi-automatic rifle that her Dad, Wallace bought her for Christmas. Along with 500 rounds of ammunition.
Her house was across the street from the Grover Cleveland Elementary School. It was 8:30 in the morning, and the kids were just arriving. At first no one could tell what was going on, the .22 was quiet, you couldn't hear her gunshots. Students were just falling down....
Barely twenty minutes later she was done. She went inside her house and waited for the authorities. They placed a trash truck between her house and the school and negotiated with her for seven hours before she turned herself over to them.
Meanwhile the lead singer of The Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof, was doing a radio interview in Los Angeles. During a break he saw the story coming in on the telex machine (the one that was kept so clean as it types to a waiting world). Upon returning to his hotel he quickly wrote the song, which he thought would make an interesting B-side for the band. Their label thought otherwise.
Wallace Spencer, Brenda's Dad, the guy who bought her the gun for Christmas, threatened to sue any record store in the San Diego area that carried the hit single. He would later marry and have a child with Brenda's former cellmate from the juvenile holding facility. As of 1993, but perhaps even today, he was still living at the corner house on Lake Atlin Avenue, across from the Cleveland Elementary School which was closed and opened later as a hebrew school. He doesn't talk to reporters....
Bob Geldof claims that he once received a letter from Brenda. In it she expressed appreciation for his having written the song, and that he (and the song) had helped to make her famous. She expressed an interest in meeting him upon her release. Geldof has specifically expressed no desire or intent to ever meeting Brenda Spencer....
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