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.
The memorial in San Ysidro for those killed at a local McDonald’s on July 18, 1984, in a mass shooting that at the time was the nation’s deadliest. Thursday marked its 40th anniversary. 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.
The cacophony is just “constant,” she said, just like the onslaught of bullets fizzing through the air that day. Director Charlie Minn took what he calls a “victim-driven” narrative approach, with the shooter’s name deliberately unmentioned. A day after the San Ysidro shooting, Flanagan had only one wish, one shared by many other survivors: to forget and move on.
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.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.
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.
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