518 - San Ysidro McDonald's Massacre

You go into a McDonald's thinking it's just going to be another quick, fast food dinner. The kind you probably had dozens of times before. This particular McDonald's on San Ysidro Boulevard you have entered back in the summer of 1984. It looks like pretty much every other McDonald's in America. Same golden arches rising above the building, same asphalt parking lot, same red and yellow color display. Inside, pretty much the same too. As soon as you enter, you begin to experience the familiar sounds, smells, other sensations that have become the hallmarks of fast food in the decades after McDonald's was first founded in 1940. The crackling of the deep fryers. Some little kids screaming as they launch themselves across the dining room. That tantalizing smell of freshly salted french fries and burgers sizzling on the grill. You hear the people in front of you ordering, maybe pausing to amend their initial selections. The clicking and glugging of the drink machines as they dispense ice-cold cola, lemonade, or iced tea. You hear the rumble of cars outside. Smell the lingering trace of car exhaust as they pull up past the drive-thru window. And you hear the sound of paper bags crinkling as they are handed out that window. You feel the firm, hopefully clean, tile floors under your shoes. And when you get your food, you slide into one of the plastic boots with your tray, ready to get some much-needed calories at a bargain price. You sit down, you start to eat. Maybe you daydream, maybe you chat with the other people at your booth. You look at the warm, sunny day outside. Not a cloud in the sky, a light breeze, mid-70s. It's perfect. Like it so often is in San Diego. Arguably, consistently the best weather on the continent. So peaceful. But then you hear a shot. At first, you wonder if it's fireworks, or a car backfiring, or something catastrophic happening to maybe some of the equipment behind the counter. Because this place, this McDonald's with its joyful children, young parents, grinning teenage workers. It can't be a place where something violent would happen. Your brain literally cannot comprehend that. Not only because of the cheerful setting, but because this is 1984. In America, the entire context of your world. A world that has, of course, been defined by violence in some ways, as it always is. Like the renegade political movements of the 1970s in this case. But that violence, it's always far away. That kind of violence, it's not happening here. And why wouldn't you think that? There's been practically no precedent for what is about to happen. A mass shooting. And an exceptionally violent one. One that will become the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history. You have to think about it. You have no idea what so many of us in America will come to know in the years that follow. That people like this shooter, James Oliver Huberty, cannot be reasoned with. You're not yet familiar with this archetype of a person. An angry, conspiracy-driven, paranoid, the world is out to get me. It's always everyone else's fault. Mind, someone who wants to cause as much harm as possible. And to anyone who happens to be in their path. You have no idea about recommended safety protocols, such as putting as much space between yourself and him. As possible. Hopefully with some concrete walls or buildings in the path of the bullets. Even law enforcement doesn't know the best way to neutralize this specific kind of threat. Not yet. All you have is your instinct to survive. Will that be enough? Will it even matter? The 1984 San Ysidro McDonald's Massacre. Right now, on another How the Hell Did This Happen and What Can We Do to Help Keep Things Like This from Happening Again edition of Time Suck. This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to. Time Suck. You're listening to Time Suck. Happy Monday. Welcome or welcome back to the Cult of the Curious. I'm Dan Cummins. The Suck Cuck. Wait, no. No, you're the Suck Cuck. Because you're the one listening. You're the one watching, in a way. Hail Nimrod. Hail Lucifina. Praise be to good boy Bojangles and Gloria. Praise be to Triple M. Really fun announcement. We are excited to share a very fun limited edition merch product in the store. We've never done something quite like this before. And we hope you love it. Drum roll, please, asks the guy of himself. Bad Magic Hot Sauce. Now in the store. You can get a variety pack of five Bad Magic themed hot sauces. Flavors include Layla's Elixir, GTFO, as in get the fuck out sauce, Bad Magic Dust. We worked with our friends at Elixir Sauce to bring you this truly. unique collaboration. There are less than a hundred of these babies available. So, uh, uh, be sure to grab yours quick over at badmagicproductions.com. If you want one, uh, because these are limited edition, uh, specialty item discount codes will not be valid. Uh, the Elixir Sauce guys are the Bit Elixir guys. Chris Pacquiao, the old Time Suck apt dude. His hot sauce company has been taken off lately and I have been loving watching it. Uh, very cool to see his hot sauce in stores all around here. Uh, we've kept in touch. We're buddies. And, uh, yeah, it's very cool. Uh, I also want to give a massive congratulations to this year's Cummins Family Scholarship recipients. Each of the following people will receive $5,000 towards their ongoing education. So way to fucking go. Uh, Ogeno Chuko, uh, Ija Ife, Kimberly Showalter, Austin Gregerson, and Marola Yukum. And a big thanks to Kara and the Scholarship America team for administering the scholarship again this year. Uh, it's so wonderful to have a team of professionals behind the scenes, making sure this process is smooth and fair for every applicant. Uh, we don't, we don't play favorites. Uh, finally, longtime friend and artist, Will XX. Guy who's tattooed a, a bunch of tattoos on me. Uh, is posting flash art for tattoos for this year's camp in the Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp Facebook group. And I believe, uh, the camp has pushed back the deadline to buy tickets a little bit. Uh, did not know that when I was recording a while back. Uh, yeah, the camp's decision. So, uh, they were nice. Check badmagicproductions.com. To find out if you're interested, we already got a good crew going. So we'd love to have you. If you don't, we're still gonna have fun without you. That's happening. But if you come, it's going to be a little better. And that's it for announcements. Yeah. Thanks to everybody who supports this show in so many ways after all these years. And now why do we like survival stories? Uh, whether it's the more reality TV oriented, uh, stuck on a desert island story, the story of somebody escaping a massive natural catastrophe, or the story of someone, uh, coming face to face with a murderer and making out a lot. Of course, we're going to talk about this in our next episode of survival. We're going to talk about this in our next episode of survival and how to survive. All these stories tingle our brains in a very specific way. And there's a pretty basic reason for that. We are, of course, hardwired to survive, to want to detect and prepare for danger, to avoid or overcome threats, 2023 study in memory and cognition found that when readers placed themselves in life threatening scenarios, they remembered story details far better, far more vividly than those people who read about everyday situations. When they read about everyday situations, they remember the story details far better, far more vividly than those people who read about everyday situations. When they read about everyday situations, they remember the stories they've read about everyday situations. When the participants read a story about a protagonist who was stranded in some grasslands, for example, uh, they could recall more objects and narrative threads, especially if they had imagined stepping into that character's shoes. On the other hand, if they were told to memorize a process like packing up a house to move, they couldn't remember nearly as many details. And I need to try and remember to share all of this with Lindsay. This has to be why I can remember random small details from a true crime episode I recorded, I don't know, eight years ago, but cannot remember what meaning or task she asked me to do, and I said I would around the house, I don't know, eight hours earlier, right? It's not my fault! I'm just trying to survive! I'm trying to stay alive! Uh, but really, this is interesting, right? While this phenomenon, sometimes called survival processing, tells us what we do, uh, not, or that we do not simply watch or read these stories, we simulate them. We walk ourselves through what we would do in these kinds of situations. I do that with these stories all the time. Oh my God, I'm constantly getting distracted, daydreaming, putting myself in the story, thinking, like, what would I, fucking do? Not even consciously, just my mind drifts there, and suddenly it's like a little movie in my head, and I'm in this situation, and I'm thinking about how I'm going to survive. Uh, the tendency to do this goes back a long way. For our ancestors, imagining threats clearly could, and often did, mean the difference between life and death. We have adapted, over time, evolved to appreciate these kind of stories on more than just a basic passing entertainment level. These type of stories have literally helped keep us alive. Consciously or not, our brains pay very close attention to what health, people survive these terrible scenarios, in the hopes that it may help us survive, if or when we face a similar threat. For our early ancestors, those threats were more likely to be, uh, you know, animal predators, starvation, rival groups. Today, however, the survival stories that dominate our media landscape are often, uh, too often, centered on, in the United States at least, mass shootings. There have been so many, it's hard to keep track of them all. Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit research group that tracks, and their characteristics in the U.S., defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people, excluding the perpetrator or perpetrators, are shot in one location at roughly the same time. Different organizations define mass shootings differently. As of this recording, on July, uh, 15th, there have been 215 mass shootings so far, according to Wikipedia. Uh, the latest being in Louisville, Kentucky, yesterday, July 14th, when five people were injured by gunfire in the Park Hill neighborhood, when a confrontation between the U.S. and in a park resulted in a shooting. According to another source, uh, the Mass Shooting Tracker, there have been 295 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2026 so far alone, and 7,265 mass shootings since 2013. That's fucking bonkers. Looking at that number, it comes as no surprise that most of us know on some level, or think we know, or have at least thought about what we would do if there was a mass shooting near us. In addition to hearing so many stories, thanks to decades of media coverage, we've also media coverage. There have also been a lot of trainings in places like schools. workplaces. Most of us know, for instance, that shootings can happen anywhere, not just in supposedly dangerous places. Indeed, shootings have happened in recent years at places of worship, medical offices, elementary schools, outdoor concerts, and on and on. Also, even if we haven't thought about it directly, we can probably identify that there are different kinds of mass shootings. Some of them are what we might call spontaneous, developing out of a conflict, an argument, a retaliation, some escalating conflict. In these cases, the gun violence isn't believed to have been planned long in advance, even if the perpetrator already had access to a firearm or to a fuckton of firearms for a very long time. Other mass shootings, the kind that are often far more devastating, are premeditated. The shooter might have planned for days, weeks, months, even years, carefully assembling their weapons and choosing a location in which to hunt down their targets. This was the case recently in Providence, Rhode Island. December 13th, 2025. On that day, 48-year-old gunman Claudio Neves Valente entered a study session in a Brown academic, Brown University academic building, and opened fire on students, killing 19-year-old sophomore Ella Cook and 18-year-old freshman Mukamed Aziz Umurzikov, and wounding nine others. Two days later, Neves Valente, who had been a graduate student at Brown University studying physics about 20 years earlier, also fatally shot Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dr. David Neves Valente, who had been a graduate student at Brown University studying physics about Nino Loureo at Loureo's home. Later, it would come out that Loureo and Neves Valente had been physics students at Portugal's Instituto Superior Técnico many, many years before. That engineering course was full of gifted students, recalled classmate Felipe Moura, but Neves Valente stood out for both good and bad reasons. According to a former classmate, quote, Claudio's attitude was unpleasant, and he often argued with colleagues he did not consider as brilliant as him and who probably weren't, the classmate added. They were totally unnecessary quarrels, which did not help the class at all. Nino Moraes, another classmate, told the news outlet Público that Neves Valente and Loureo were among the top students at the school, but their personalities were starkly different. Claudio was one of the students with the best grades in the course. He was much more theoretical. Nino was also a good student. He stood out less in terms of grades, but he was a more relaxed person and seemed to have had a knack for slightly more applied subjects. After graduating in Portugal, Neves Valente enrolled at Brown University in 2000 as a graduate student in physics, and there his problems continued. I exchanged many emails with him at the time and saw that he maintained the same attitude, as he told me of maintaining unnecessary conflicts with PhD colleagues in class, which he again considered far less capable than he was, wrote former classmate Felipe Moura on Facebook. I could tell that he wasn't enjoying being at Brown University. Scott Watson, a classmate at Brown, said Neves Valente was, quote, socially awkward and struggled in the U.S., complaining bitterly that classes were not challenging, the food was terrible. Quote, he often became frustrated, sometimes angry about courses, professors, and living conditions. So a fucking malcontent, right? So smart, but also so fucking stupid. Too stupid to stop sweating the small stuff. Such a powerfully unlikable personality type. Based on this information, Northeastern University criminologist James Allen Fox would come to believe that Brown University and Nuno Lorero were targeted because they represented Neves Valente's failure to become the exact kind of prominent physicist he felt he should have been recognized as, right? The world owed him that. And Neves Valente's warped mind to teenagers who did not know him, who played no part in any situation in his life. Well, they had to die because they were part of an institution that had failed him, had wronged him, just because they had to happen to be admitted to Brown and happened to take the courses that led them to the study hall this fateful day. This is part of what makes mass gun violence in the U.S. particularly terrifying. At any given moment, any one of us could unknowingly walk into the private drama that a would-be mass shooter has constructed in their fucked up mind and intends to bring to the world. And given that unpredictability, it helps to be prepared. For starters, the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress recommends learning emergency response procedures at your place of or for those with children, learn emergency response plans at your child or for your child school. All of that is because a little bit of hesitation can mean the difference between life and death. When entering theaters, schools, offices, or malls, casually noting the nearest and second nearest exits can make decision-making much faster during an emergency. If you're involved in a mass shooting, experts say, try to remember, run, hide, fight. That's the three most important words. Run, hide, fight, in that order. First and foremost, you should run from the scene of a mass shooting if it is safe to do so. Don't freeze because you're waiting for confirmation. A common response in emergencies is to spend precious seconds wondering something along the lines of, wait, what? Was that fireworks? Was that, wait, was that a car backfiring? Instead, if you hear what might be repeated gunfire, screaming, or see people running, it's usually better just to start moving towards safety than to wait until you're certain, right? Go as fast as you can. Better to be right that it wasn't anything serious if you did kind of and then be embarrassed for, I don't know, for running, then to be wrong and to be dead. And for the love of God, don't stop to record video. People can lose valuable time trying to film events or get documentation for social media when they are still in the so-called danger zone. Getting away from the danger, that's the priority. Once you've identified a safe route, again, don't dilly-dally, keep going unless new information makes it unsafe. As you go, keep your hands visible in case you come across authorities who may not have reliable information or any info at Salem is, and you don't want them to think that you are the threat that needs to be taken down. But what if the gunfire is really close? A common suggestion is running in a zigzag pattern, meaning your path is presumably harder for someone to track with the gun, but there is no good evidence that zigzagging meaningfully improves your chances of not being shot in real life, like it does in Fortnite. Also, probably don't want to try just fucking jumping back and forth over and over and over. Sometimes works in Fortnite. I don't think that'll work in real life. Your top priority should be to put solid barriers like brick walls, concrete, large buildings between yourself and the shooter as quick as you can, rather than staying in the open while making unpredictable movements or looking for a chug jug or something similar. Do not look for a chug jug. There is no chug jug in real life, only in Fortnite. If you can choose between a shorter route to a more open space and a slightly longer route that puts you behind substantial cover, the latter is often the better option. One way to think of this is the difference between cover and concealment. Cover, like concrete walls, barriers, thick barriers, etc. Things that stop bullets. Concealment is stuff like drywall, bushes, things that might hide you but won't stop bullets. Bush suits do stop some bullets and take damage in Fortnite. Not in real life. Cover always wins over concealment if you have the opportunity to choose, but there's also another aspect to think about because most of us aren't alone when we're in public on a day-to-day basis. If you're with children or someone who needs assistance, give simple, direct instructions. Under extreme stress, short commands like, follow me, stay low, hold my hand. Easier to process than complex explanations. Don't over-explain. Boss. But what about other scenarios? Scenarios where it's not safe to run. In these scenarios, it is best to try to hide. If, for instance, the shooter is outside the building that you are currently in, the best thing to do is hide from the objects, like soda machines, copy machines, etc. that can provide cover, stop or slow the bullets, maybe even be tipped over to block a door, help keep the shooter out of the room, barricade doors, stay out of sight, silence your phone, silence anything else you have on you that could make noise. If you can do so safely, get on the floor and out of the line of fire. In reality, a room isn't automatically safe because a door is closed. Think about windows, sight lines, anything that would alert someone outside the room to the presence of someone inside the room. Define yourself in the ultimate nightmare scenario where the shooter is in the room with you. There's no one procedure authorities can recommend in that situation. This is worst case scenario. However, they do say that inaction serves to fuel an active shooter's need for power and control. So try your best not to freeze. Easier said than done, obviously. But if it comes down to it, engage or fight the assailant or assailants as a very last resort and do not think about fighting fair for a fucking second. Use anything and everything at your disposal. Chairs, makeshift weapons, go for soft tissue, balls, throat, dick, eyes, nose. Fight like you're fighting for your life and trying to live by any means necessary because you are. Don't worry about killing that motherfucker at all. Killing them actually the best option in moments like these because it ensures they won't keep shooting. Another tip experts recommend is to turn the element of surprise back on the active shooter. Scream, scatter in different directions, throw items, throw books, throw backpacks, desks, you know, whatever you have at your disposal again. Cause chaos, you know, sensory overload, potentially saving your life and the lives of others. Go full fucking demon banshee on that pile of shit. Make that crazy asshole think you're the fucking devil himself. If you get them down on the ground, if you get them to drop their weapon, don't give them a chance to pick it back up again and keep firing. Smash in their fucking face with a desk. Kick them in the balls until their balls are fucking shattered. Put a knee on their throat and push down with everything you have and hope that it crushes their windpipe forever. If you're familiar with firearms, grab their gun. Let them know if they move a muscle, you will empty it in them. And if they do as much as twitch. Turn their torso into Swiss fucking cheese. You owe them nothing. They forfeited their right to fucking live when they became a mass shooter. Ideally, the police will arrive, and when they do, you should avoid sudden movements or sounds and follow their directions as quickly as possible. So, what do we take away from these protocols? Other than clearly I've been fantasizing a lot about just fucking ending these motherfuckers. The main takeaway from, you know, after-action analysis is that the basics tend to matter more than clever tactics. Recognizing danger quickly, moving away from it, using substantial cover when available, avoiding bottlenecks, making simple decisions under stress. In short, don't overthink it. Act fast. I worry about myself in these situations because I am an overthinker. So, oof, I hope, I hope, you know, if it happens to me, that I just go on instinct. Full lizard brain. Those factors have much stronger support than internet tips, again, like zigzagging, other techniques, and they get to another core truth that the shooter will likely not be reasoned with. Not be convinced to stop. The only solution is to put as much space between you and them as possible in most circumstances. But this being 2026 in America, people have now started turning surviving a mass shooting into a thriving economy and there is all kinds of advice out there. This actually started way back in the early 2000s when security companies spent years pushing schools to buy more of their products from ballistic attack resistant doors to smoke cannons that spew haze from ceilings to confuse a potential shooter. But sales were slow and the industry's campaign to free up taxpayer money for upgrades stalled. But then on Valentine's Day, February 14th, 2018, 19-year-old Nicholas Cruz opened fire on students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people, injuring 18 others. Public at the rampage reignited the U.S. gun control debate. Privately, it propelled industry efforts to sell school fortification as the answer to the mass killing of American kids. But all of that is, of course, expensive. I mean, there's other, but a big one is, it's expensive. According to a nonprofit group formed by a major lock manufacturer, for example, upgrading an elementary school with basic security equipment costs at least $94,000 and a high school at least $170,000. Bare minimum. If all the nation's public schools were to follow these guidelines, the cost would be a bare minimum total of $11 billion. And so a cottage industry of cheaper fixes sprung up. The SwiftShield barricade device invented by a roofer offers schools, quote, unparalleled safety, the company claims. Sells for 1 20th the cost of some bullet-resistant doors or high-tech locking systems. Other products would come on the market at even cheaper rates, spurring more and more innovation. And how fucking sad that school shootings have become so disgustingly common that a literal fucking niche cottage industry has sprung up around them, placing the burden on teachers and students to protect themselves from armed madmen, as opposed to having the government step in and attack them. To address the blatantly obvious problem of gun access. This new industry was recently portrayed in the 2025 HBO documentary, Thoughts and Prayers. The three to four billion dollar a year school shooting preparedness economy features, as the documentary shows, bulletproof desks that can double as shields, blackout shutters to block visibility into classrooms, video game simulations that test how teachers respond to school shooters. Wow. Just what every person who wants to teach children should have to sign up for, right? Some equivalent of, uh, fucking training to deal with armed enemy combatants. I'm picturing some of my grade school and high school teachers right now, some good ones. And I'm going to say, no fucking way in hell would strong classroom defense be something that they would have been capable of. Mrs. Williamson, back in third grade, you know, she was nasty. She had a nasty attitude sometimes. She was not a nice lady in many instances. She fucking pelted kids with chalk. She threw a strong piece of chalk across that room once in a while. Had a decent arm. But not overall that athletic. Not fast acting. She had to have been in her late 60s, early 70s at least. Good 80 pounds plus overweight, if not more. Her nerves were clearly fried by too many years of teaching too many fucking bratty kids. I cannot imagine her having done a lot to defend us, training or not. I don't care how many simulations she would have seen. And I had other teachers that we were able to break down emotionally and make cries, kids. They would 100% have fucking folded immediately in a crisis, without question. And I understand the logic behind running teachers, behind active shooter simulations, but also, right? They got hired to teach. To teach history, writing, math, science, whatever. Shouldn't that be enough? This all reminds me of a conversation I recently had with a barista about unruly customers hanging out, being disruptive at the coffee shop, how they're supposed to deal with it. You know, about how she was hired to make fucking lattes and be friendly and memorize, you know, regulars' drinks. Not be a fucking bouncer. You know, how it was unreasonable to expect her to be the one to keep big, unstable-looking dudes in check. You know, she's a small woman, maybe 100 pounds, maybe 5 foot 2. She's not a security guard. Another company, Campus Guardian Angel, that offers an active threat suppression service that pre-positions tactical drones on school campuses to intercept active shooters. Remote elite pilots launch the drones in seconds to distract, disorient, incapacitate attackers using less lethal methods until local law enforcement arrives. Smart, but fucking wild that this is even being entertained. Right? And who should pay for it? Meanwhile, Sam Medical designs, manufactures, and sells innovative emergency medical and trauma equipment used by first responders, military personnel, and wilderness rescue teams, and stuff like tourniquets, clotting agents, chest seals. Their customers primarily used to be EMTs, fire departments, military medics, that sort of thing. Now, increasingly, they are selling to school districts. This new industry also encompasses some smaller, weirder local businesses, such as makeup artists who mass-produce gunshot wound prosthetics, even, not joking, bullet-riddled dicks and balls to desensitize kids and teachers to the visual reality of violence so they can act quickly. Some people, understandably, see some of this industry as opportunistic fear-mongering, a little predatory, preying on parents and teachers' worst fears to make a quick and dirty buck. Other people figure that if you had the chance to prepare your teacher, student, or child, and you didn't, and then the unthinkable happened, would you regret your choice not to equip them with something that could potentially save their lives? Even if that something was a bullet-riddled dick and ball fucking thing, I guess. This debate is all predicated on, of course, an ugly truth, one of the biggest elephants in America's living room that so many don't want to talk about, have a rational conversation about, the reality of, the knowledge of, continuous mass gun violence. If there weren't as many mass shootings as there are, there would be no industry around preventing them. And there would be no need for us to know the way to respond to an active shooter. It's hard for most of us now to imagine not living in this reality, to imagine an era when almost nobody was aware of the potential for mass violence to break out almost anywhere at any time. When a guy with a gun, or several guns, wasn't a walking red flag, but rather was just seen as a gun enthusiast, a hunter, somebody who thought guns were really cool, and that was fine. A time when nobody knew that running, then hiding, then fighting was the best course of action. A time when our societal understanding of PTSD was far less developed than it is today. A time when people's understanding of what to do after experiencing horrifying trauma was basically to walk it off. That kind of reality seems so far away now, right? And that this was exactly the world Americans lived in just, I don't know, 40, 50 years ago. In the mid-1980s, even though there was certainly enough sex, drugs, and rock and roll to go around in many ways, uh, hello, so much cocaine, we lived in a much more innocent society. A society that was much less capable of imagining these events. Innocent in some ways. Right? When it comes to these kind of events. A society where, you know, the templates for surviving these events didn't exist yet. Now, to be fair, there were mass shootings before the San Ysidro McDonald's massacre, which occurred on July 18th, 1984. Just, just not as many. They weren't as frequent. Again, the definition of a mass shooting varies from foundation to foundation, source to source, but on average, mass shooting incidents have grown dramatically in the past half century, rising from single digits in the 1970s to over 100 incidents in the first half of the 2010s alone. And, and when did it start? One source traces mass shootings all the way back to the 19th century in America. On March 28th, 1891, a man with a double-barreled shotgun fired on a crowd of students and faculty attending a school concert, an exhibition in Parson Hall School House in Liberty, Mississippi. The identity of the shooter, their motives, never discovered. Motives, probably racist. It was mostly black students. The perpetrator wounded over 14 people, most of them kids. Luckily, he didn't kill anybody. Just a few days later, April 9th, 1891, 70-year-old shit-for-brains James Foster went inside St. Mary's Parochial School in New York and opened fire. Several were injured again, but nobody was killed. There were more shootings as the decades wore on, but then something changed around the middle of the 20th century. And before I share an example of this shift, this change, time for today's first of two Midshow Sponsor Breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads ever again, please sign up to be a space lizard on Patreon. Help us make monthly charitable contributions. Get the catalog ad-free episodes three days early and more. Thanks for listening to our sponsors. Now let's head to 1948 for an example of a new kind of mass shooter emerging in America. In 1948, 38-year-old Melvin Collins opened fire from a boarding house in Chester, Pennsylvania, killing eight before he took his own life. The Market Street Massacre. The motive for the shooting remains unknown, and his story was quickly forgotten. But the next year, someone else's story story will not be. on labor day 1949 28 year old howard unruh decided to go to the movies he left his camden new jersey apartment and headed to the family theater in downtown philadelphia there were two movies on the bill that night but unruh wasn't interested in which movie he was going to see he was interested in the interested in the man he was meeting there unfortunately traffic held him up and by the time he reached the theater his date was gone unruh sat in the dark until 2 20 a.m stewing bitterly stewing through multiple on-screen loops of the movies at 3 a.m he arrived home in new jersey to find that the newly constructed fence at the rear end of his backyard one he had erected to stop an ongoing feud with the cohen's neighbors who lived next door and owned the drug store below the apartment he shared with his mother had been tampered with more than tampered with the gate was gone and that was fucking it the final straw unruh had already been contemplating killing several of his kramer hill neighbors for years all over petty squabbles perceived slights and name calling finally though he felt he had proof in his mind at least that the world was against him so he went into his apartment uncased his german luger p08 a nine millimeter pistol secured it with two clips and 33 loose cartridges then he made his list of targets the druggist a shoemaker a tailor a restaurant owner they had all pissed him off too many fucking times the next morning september 6 unruh would go on a rampage that would later be darkly referred to as the walk of death and it was indeed a walk of death in a 20 minute rampage approximately unruh murdered 13 people and wounded three others before just returning to his apartment where mama was nowhere to be found she had actually fled before the shooting when he had threatened her with a wrench uh everyone had seen him on his way home and unruh had gone to his apartment and he had seen him on his way home and unruh had gone to his apartment and unruh had gone to his apartment and his walk of death everyone knew that he was responsible and now knew where he was but this sort of thing was so unheard of there was no official police protocol for what came next as neighbors milled about anxiously more than 50 officers surrounded the two-story stucco building and began blasting away at the apartment with machine guns shotguns and pistols even though some in the crowd estimated to be around a thousand people were in the line of fire before they did anything howard took a phone call journalist philip buck buxton of the camden courier post having heard unruh's identity reported over police radio unruh's identity was reported over police radio and unruh's identity was reported over police radio retrieved unruh's number from a local telephone directory dialed it and he answered and what buxton later described as a strong clear voice unruh answered the phone and then he and buxton had the following brief weird conversation hello is this howard yes what's the last name of the party you want unruh who are you what do you want unruh i'm a friend and i want to know what they're doing to you well they haven't done anything to me yet but i'm doing plenty to them then in a soothing reassuring voice the journalist asked how many have you killed i don't know yet i haven't counted them but it looks like a pretty good score why are you killing people i don't know i can't answer that yet i'm too busy i'll have to talk to you later and then he just hung up what a fucking crazy life moment for that journalist how weird that he just took the phone uh who is this sorry i'm in the middle of shooting a bunch of people i'll have to call you back uh in the ensuing chaos couple of police officers climbed onto the roof lobbed a tear gas canister into unruh's apartment the first was a dud but the second worked as expected five minutes after the gas canister went off unruh called out he was surrendering he then shouted he was leaving his gun on the desk walked out the back door with his hands held high local police were so unprepared for a mass shooting threat that detective ron conley uh simply brought home uh unruh's luger would not be returned to the camden county authorities until the 1990s uh unruh was patted down cuffed as gawkers screamed for the mass murder to be lynched and killed right then and there understanding how this had happened was so difficult that a furious cop demanded of unruh what's the matter with you you a psycho and unruh flatly replied i am no psycho i have a good mind uh well he was kind of a psycho actually he would be declared legally insane would spend over 60 years in a psychiatric hospital uh dying in the hospital and he would be declared legally insane the age of 88 there a search of his apartment revealed an extensive collection of firearms and other military paraphernalia over 700 rounds of ammunition of varying calibers a bible opened to chapter 24 of matthew 24 which includes jesus telling disciples uh the times are coming when the nation will rise against nation kingdom against kingdom and there will be famines and earthquakes and false prophets and so much wickedness and on and on and also several books relating to sexual hygiene he was not well but enough about howard we could do a whole episode about howard uh how do we jump for an atmosphere from an atmosphere excuse me which mass shootings were uh highly unlikely and also seemingly pretty ineffective in the early days not frequently killing large numbers of people to a time and place where they were not only possible but perhaps even likely to occur pretty frequently uh well for starters two world wars changed americans relationships with weapons by the mid-20th century military conflicts had normalized semi-automatic and automatic weapons for the military large numbers of young men and post-war civilian markets made increasingly lethal firearms much more accessible than in previous eras today's guns were a whole lot different than yesterday's guns while the core ballistic energy of most standard hunting and defensive rounds you know didn't dramatically increase uh you know these recent firearms generally more lethal something driven by significant improvements uh significant improvements in accuracy bullet technology fire rates magazine capacity primarily uh at the same time guns became more culturally embedded in american identity they weren't just tools for hunting or defense but also uh you know they've been used in war experience uh they were seen in a lot of law enforcement imagery a lot of media portrayals of them in film and tv on old television shows like dragnet adam 12 later shows like chips routinely depicted armed officers confronting crime while westerns like high noon and gun smoke watch those a ton as a kid portrayed guns as symbols of courage manliness self-reliance the kind of thing that man could use that the thing a man needed to take proper control of his life indeed unruh had learned how to use weaponry in world war ii serving in the 342nd armored field artillery taking part in the relief of uh bastone in the battle of the bulge he'd occasionally served as a tank gunner and received uh commendations although he never rose above the rank of private first class but his commander said he followed orders well however while in combat he also kept meticulous one might say super fucking creepy notes of every german he'd killed marking down the day hour and place and when circumstances allowed he described the corpses in disturbing bloody detail another early mass shooter charles joseph whitman would have a similar background uh we actually spoke about him i think pretty recently in our episode and they uh are on the austin yogurt shop murders in 1966 whitman killed 15 people and wounded 31 others from the observation deck of the university of texas's clock tower in austin like unruh whitman had a military background he was a former u.s marine who had enlisted to escape his abusive father and ultimately earned a sharpshooter's badge and a military scholarship to study engineering this doesn't mean that modern gun culture alone explains mass shootings especially not today when there are a bunch of other factors social isolation the media the internet to deal with but it does show that beginning in the mid 20th century firearms became more lethal and more reliable while large segments of the population especially through military service and later through civilian ownership became more familiar and comfortable with handling these weapons and simultaneously contemporary media the new medium of color tv which showed violence in you know new detail uh offered a different view of gun ownership the guns were not just tools to be used but shit that turned men into heroes or into anti-heroes so what does all this mean uh as it specifically relates to today's topic it means that the san ysidro mcdonald's massacre happened at a very unique time while the capacity for mass violence was already present thanks to shooters like unruh and whitman these events were still relatively rare and not yet fully consolidated into a recurring social category in the way they would become later as a result the systems that interpret and respond to such violence law enforcement protocols academic research media framing public policy they were still developing their shared language and models for understanding it all nobody really knew what to look out for the signs that a man was being attacked and the signs that a man was being attacked or a woman but statistically almost always a man was progressing slowly towards violence in these days the assumption was still largely that having a stockpile of weapons made you an enthusiast not a fucking psycho not an imminent threat and nobody knew how to respond in the moment all of that anger would be unleashed on the world let's see how this went down in today's time suck timeline strap on those boots soldier we're marching down a time suck timeline james oliver huberty born on october 11 1942 in canton ohio canton the seat of stark county in northeastern ohio about 60 miles southeast of cleveland population over 70 000 for the 2020 census uh the metro area right around 400 000 founded in 1805 by 1942 when james huberty was born the city's population was uh quite a bit bigger than the 70 000 in 2020 actually uh there was around 110 000 people a population uh still getting bigger thanks to steel baby so much manufacturing the city was an industrial powerhouse Powered primarily by steel production, heavy-duty engine manufacturing, and oil refining. And the onset of World War II supercharged Canton's economy. The Hercules Engine Company would build approximately 750,000 engines for military vehicles. Timken opened the Timken Ordnance Company in 1941, manufactured roughly 80,000 gun tubes. The Diebold Safe and Lock Company used a plant to build M3 half-track armored vehicles, and on and on. James' father, Earl Huberty, worked in a steel mill in nearby Massillon, a big part of the metro area about 10 miles west of Canton. Earl was well-liked by his neighbors, respected at his Methodist church, where he took his family on Sunday. James' mother, Eichel Evalone Huberty, was a homemaker. Don't meet a lot of Eichels anymore. And both of his parents were said to be very religious, very strict, heavy on the spare the rod, spoil the child stuff. And despite his family seemingly being. solidly middle class, at least from what sources describe, early life was hard for little James in a way that life was simply harder for a lot of folks back then. For example, at the age of just three, he contracted polio. The polio virus? No picnic. Polio enters the body through the mouth, usually from contaminated food or water, or through close contact with an infected person. Within days to a few weeks, the immune system usually eliminates the virus from the body. For most people, that's the end of the story. They recover completely, become immune to that type of polio virus. But in some cases. Before the immune system can clear the virus, it can reach the nervous system, where it attacks motor neurons, the nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain stem that control voluntary muscle movement, which can lead to permanent paralysis or death, and/or death. Horribly, the disease does not usually damage sensation or one's perception. People with paralytic polio can still feel touch and pain. The problem is that the muscles no longer receive the essential commands to move. And so if the virus affects the nerves controlling, say, breathing or swallowing, the muscles no longer receive the essential commands to move. breathing, or swallowing, it can be life-threatening, a body literally losing its ability to keep itself alive. Like many diseases, polio has been around for a long time. Ancient Egyptian paintings and carvings depict otherwise healthy people with withered limbs as well as children walking with canes at a young age, both telltale signs of polio. Over millennia, polio survived as an endemic pathogen until the 1900s when major epidemics began to flare up in Europe. Soon after, widespread epidemics appeared in the rest of the world by 1910. Frequent epidemics became regular events throughout the developed world, primarily in cities during the summer months. At its peak in the 1940s and 50s, polio would paralyze or kill over half a million people worldwide every year. These epidemics usually occurred during the summer, meaning that many parents often dreaded the off-school months. Not only did they have to keep their kids supervised, but they might have to keep them indoors, away from friends, public pools, summer camps, libraries, even, etc. For kids who did get infected, those whose breathing muscles were paralyzed were placed sometimes in what is known as an old iron lung, this large metal cylinder that mechanically expands and contracts the chest to help people breathe. Some patients stayed in these machines for weeks, months, or in rare cases, many years. Comparatively, James was lucky. He only had to wear a brace, helping the polio weaken muscles in his legs so he could stand and walk safely. Still, it was uncomfortable. Braces were often made of steel or aluminum sidebars running along the leg, leather cuffs that wrapped around the thigh and calf, heavy leather shoes attached to the brace, bulky hinges at the knee or ankle. They didn't look very cool. And because there was no cure for polio, there still is not a medication that can eliminate the virus once it's infected someone. James had to wear these braces for years while the inflammation in his body subsided and surviving motor neurons took over for some of the muscle fibers that had lost their original nerve supply as best they could. Those years were both physically uncomfortable and emotionally painful, since he got pretty badly teased by other kids for his awkward behavior. However, he was still able to walk with a limp. And life was about to get worse. In 1950, when James was just seven years old, Earl Huberty purchased a 155-acre farm in Mount Eaton. A lot of land on a steel mill worker's salary. Earl apparently did not consult his wife before he made this huge, life-altering purchase, and she was not pleased to say the least. Mama Eichel refused to move to the farm. She did not want to live in a rural location. She refused to even look at the property. She may have also been losing her fucking mind right around this time. Shortly after Dad bought the farm, Mama Eichel abandoned her family and ended up in Arizona, where she became a Pentecostal doomsday loony tune carrying a bullhorn, carrying a sign, screaming to people on the sidewalk in Tucson that they were going to hell as they repented soon. The end times were coming fast. The world sold full of money. Blah, blah, blah. She would die in Tucson in 1998 at the age of 78. And the world is still here. Oh, you lost, dummy! James, following her departure, would now be alone with Dad, and Dad would never remarry, even though he would outlive Icky Eichel. James was crushed. Allegedly, in the months following Mama abandoning him, family members would often find him sobbing his little eyes out by the family's chicken coop. Yeah, he was fucking seven. Terrible. Maybe partially as a result of the abandonment and the polio, James was said to be a distant and quiet kid growing up. And he possibly started to harbor a lot of violent thoughts, because soon his primary interest became target practice. A family friend would later describe him as a queer little boy who practiced incessantly with a target pistol. He was always a shooting guy, Alta Miller, a nearby Amish farmer, would recall. He had a truck patch across the road for a while, and he'd shoot five heads of cabbage and pick, At night, he'd run out of the house and go shooting in the woods. So maybe not a good combo. Crushed by the abandonment of his religious nutjob mom, teased by kids at school for his polio limp, and now he becomes a quiet, distant loner obsessed with guns. By his teens, James was something of an amateur gunsmith. But that did not help him at school socially, where bullies continued to target him for his limp, his family's extreme religious beliefs, which were never fully laid out, but his dad might not have been all that different from mom came to religion and his reluctance to make friends. Bertha Eggemann, a neighbor who lived about 10 miles down the road, would recall a time when she and her husband took a teenage James to a barbecue in the nearby Swiss Mennonite and Amish community of Kidron. He just did not want to mix. He didn't want to talk to people, Bertha said. And before moving on, Bertha, Alta, and Eichel, who the fuck was naming these people? James thought about joining his basketball team at school. He was a respectable six feet tall by the time he's in high school, but he did not make the cut. And that had to sting because there wasn't, uh, wasn't that many kids at Waynesdale high school where he attended. Waynesdale high school in the Apple Creek, Ohio, town of less than 1200 people, only about 700 people at that time. And, uh, many of them old order Amish. And those kids, uh, stopped going to school in eighth grade. They didn't go to public school. Uh, they didn't play basketball. So by the time he was a senior, most of his public school classmates barely paid attention to him. Uh, even though his graduating class of 1960 had only 74, sometimes 77 students. He was not a great student. He graduated 51st out of the 77. Uh, so what did James plan to do with his life? His extended family, uh, they were so fervently religious that many of them hoped James was going to go into seminary and study to become a pastor, but he didn't want to delve that deeply into religion. He wanted to study sociology, the study of the development structure and function of human society, the study of social problems, maybe try and figure out why the fuck no one liked him. Uh, why did some people think that God wanted them to yell at people on a street corner in Tucson? That their souls were in peril? You know, what, what kind of, uh, uh, God was that, that they're, you know, worried about this? God's a real fucking monstrous motherfucker who has a real hankering for smite and the ever-loving shit out of, uh, his finest creations. What's going on there? 1962, he already enrolled in Ken's local Malone College, a private Christian university founded in 1892 by Walter and Emma Malone as a small co-educational Bible Institute called the Cleveland Bible College originally. Pretty fundamentalist, uh, to this day, incoming students required to sign a so-called community agreement, which stipulates amongst many other things, uh, the biblical expectations of members of the Malone community, which include not being gay. In 2021, a professor, Karen Colley, resigned after notifying the university that she intended to marry a woman. She resigned knowing that quote, the marriage would violate her employment contract. So it's, uh, it's, it's kind of a college, uh, one where the education maybe is not so grounded in science. I imagine back in 1962, the college was, you know, pretty fucking hardcore straight edge. Uh, so despite studying sociology, James did not really escape a culture of strict religious doctrine, but he would soon. He would leave Malone. He would opt to study at the Pittsburgh Institution of Mortuary Science in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, very small Institute with an undergrad population of about 200 people. Many of those people like James were going there to become morticians. So cool, cool, cool. So now we got, now we've got a guy who doesn't understand his peers. Peers don't like him. Quiet, withdrawn, fucking love shooting guns a lot. Mommy issues. Uh, a lot of anger. Maybe he's pushing down and now he wants to work around dead bodies cause he can't stand the living. Nothing to be concerned about. Uh, James came home to Kenton for his final internship at a local funeral parlor where he quickly proved to be far better with the dead than the living. Not surprised. Uh, he enjoyed embalming. He was very good at it actually, but funeral type situations require, you know, a bit of a delicate touch in many moments, interpersonally speaking. And he did not have that. Kenton's funeral director, Don Williams, Huberty's mentor would later say he was intelligent, but he just couldn't relate to others. He simply wasn't cut out for this profession. he acted like he just wanted to be left alone yeah yeah yeah i get it okay all right enough you're sad about your kid he died unexpectedly blah blah you want to look like you did before the accident well look i'm gonna do my best all right but i'm a mortician ma'am not a magician i know those words sound similar but they're very different idiot now get out of my way let me get back to slapping your kid's corpse around lady you know maybe he had that kind of fucking bedside manner uh despite don's concerns huberty finished his internship and the ohio embalming board can you fucking imagine by the way sorry it's a mortician talking to you that way uh that'd be a good way for them to die uh despite don's concerns huberty finished his internship and the ohio embalming board licensed him in 1966 also during that time james met a living person who didn't hate him or immediately find him terribly off-putting edna markland a woman from california who was a substitute teacher at a local grade school etna and james i found pictures of these two when they were young and i have to say visually they match up pretty well there's there's no nice way to say this but they both looked very socially awkward think of somebody cool from 1966 now think of someone that person would think was a complete square and that was these two no fashion sense terrible haircuts uh they looked uh boring to talk to these were not two people smoking joints right arguing over who was better buffalo springfield or the kinks they weren't cranking up cream on vinyl checking themselves out in the mirror seeing how sexy the new miniskirt looked or freaking out over how cool the swirling liquid like paisley patterned shirt they just got was no they look like two people who thought the counterculture was a surefire sign of america's imminent moral collapse they look like people who thought the devil was actually in the lettuce uh they married in a private religious ceremony and moved into a small tidy house in maryland and they were like two people who thought the devil was actually in the massillon ohio next to canton james worked in a funeral home for two years before opting to become a welder for a firm in the nearby akron area town of lewisville uh he worked for that firm for two years before securing a better paid job welding uh still it seems at babcock and wilcox in akron in june of 1969 although still reclusive still socially off fucking big time his employers considered him a reliable worker he showed up on time got his shit done uh he also took night courses back at malone college until he earned a bachelor's degree in sociology and then he graduated in 1976 would not help him understand the world uh the couple would eventually have two daughters z uh zelia born in 1972 and cassandra born in 1974 to support his growing family james to his credit took on a bunch of overtime earned promotions and by the mid 70s earned between 25 000 and 30 000 a year might not sound like a lot but in 1975 if you're bringing in 30 000 a year that's uh approximately uh the equivalent of 187 000 today in terms of overall purchasing power so he was killing it uh making that kind of money allowed him and his wife to buy a three-story home in an affluent section of massillon uh though that house would burn down 1971 don't know why uh soon after james and etna bought another house on the same street clearly they liked the neighborhood and they used the land from their first house to build a six-unit apartment building which they would then manage themselves so they're doing very well but james not happy even then something about him just never seemed right co-workers neighbors even after james and etna saw a man who seemed to always be battling inner demons even when things were going fine when things were going well when the bills were being paid savings was being uh built kids were happy uh you know he was at best morose and at worst he was furious he could not seem to keep his temper at bay a lot of anger he would snap from time to time mainly on etna and the children as the marriage went on hubert he started to become more and more verbally uh verbally and then physically abusive would start to slap and then punch his wife uh started to punch her more often also beat his daughters sometimes even did shit like hold knives to their throats apparently on one occasion etna filed a report with the canton department of children and family services stating that her husband had messed up her jaw as in it seems broken it uh she would then later say though that he had assaulted her many times but only hit her once beginning in 1976 etna began to attempt to persuade james to seek counseling but he refused instead his paranoia deepened and now he's got some snarling german shepherd guard dogs fun uh that he trained to be as mean as hell it seems and he would hoard food in the basement for the end times mama worried about perhaps not clearing sources uh sources uh he also started to have problems with some neighbors big problems neighbors began to grumble more and more often about this deep thumping sound for example they kept hearing from uh coming from the huberty house at night uh they would come to find out that james had built a large shooting range in the basement so that's a fun fucking neighbor weird angry wife and kid beater taking night classes at a christian fundamentalist college now has a gun range in the basement also uh james house now crawling with guns first was the one that captain paranoid kept on his lap a shotgun draped over his knee as he sat on a recliner by the front door and while this motherfucker was sitting there he was not watching tv or reading a book not having a pleasant conversation with his wife and or kids uh apparently frequently he would just sit in this quiet tense home hating his life staring off into the middle distance holding a gun across his lap that's terrifying don't be james be so much better than james if you have this much anger for the sake of everyone around you please go see a therapist uh other guns decorated the walls around james right this guy at this point in the story he was starting to remind me of william foster michael douglas's character in 1993's falling down great movie uh disgruntled unemployed defenseman he was a man who was a man who was a man who was a man who who abandons his car in a traffic jam he's having problems with baby mama he just fucking snaps uh supposedly james did not inspire foster's character but uh i wouldn't have been surprised if he had uh this is a clip of him snapping in a place called whammy burger that looks a lot like mcdonald's uh pulled out a nine millimeter semi-automatic weapon when they will not let him order off the breakfast menu since it is no longer breakfast time rick have you ever heard the expression the customer's always right yeah yeah well here i am the customer that's not our policy you have to order something from the lunch menu uh-oh i don't want lunch i want breakfast yeah well hey i'm really sorry yeah well hey i'm really sorry just calm down everybody sit down sit down over there hey hey hey hey this uh this is james this is james but uh actually actually james is much anger um angrier than michael douglas's character here but this is the kind of guy james is uh james apparently had so many guns all of them loaded with the safety off laying around his house according to one family acquaintance a guy named jim aslan huberty's home was so covered in loaded guns that from wherever he happened to be standing or sitting down he could quote just reach over and get a gun while this concerning shit is happening the cops were called multiple times to the huberty home uh sometimes because the hubertys were complaining about their neighbors other times because their neighbors were complaining about them those neighbors uh lucky huberty did not shoot them he kept a long list of people he's uh fucking writing down lists now who uh who would upset him in some way or another and he had an interesting way of referring to these people he would talk about my debts as in someday he would need to settle them uh he'd use his terminology when his daughters got into a squabble with some local girls for example encouraging his daughters to get out of the to fight these girls physically uh when these girls his dad intervened huberty told this dad i believe in paying my debts both good and bad i imagine that dad told his girls stay the fuck away from that guy forever uh stay away from his kids stay away from his kids uh on one occasion when one of these debts blew up into some kind of altercation huberty was detained by the police on charges of disorderly conduct another time in 1980 police charged james with disorderly conduct after dispute at a service station uh the reporting officer said a very belligerent james would not be able to get out of the house and he would not be able to get out of the house not calm down not sure over what even after police intervened he would plead guilty and would be fined only court costs etna was trying to figure out how to calm him down around this time she would find something to work for a while a method i was not expecting she started to claim that she could read his future and guide him by consulting tarot cards okay apparently uh he already believed her meanwhile etna kept the uh massillon house in pristine order and at least in the early years the marriage was generally considered a good woman raising two fine girls but she could be a menace in her own right in 1981 a year after james's disorderly conduct charge etna herself charged with four counts of aggravated menacing for waving a brownie nine millimeter semi-automatic pistol at some neighbors turn another argument these two are the neighbors from hell truly those charges were reduced to disorderly conduct uh in a plea agreement the next year in 1982 when james huberty had just turned 40 his already fragile mental state crumbled further let's find out how after our second or two mid-show sponsor breaks thanks listen those sponsors hope you heard some deals you liked okay now let's head to 1982 when james huberty has just turned 40 and is already very fragile mental state crumbles further that november he was laid off from his welding job of 13 years when his employer babcock and wilcox closed the plant he was employed at i got no job or anything he told etna after receiving the news i got nothing to live for a co-worker would later remember the violence or that violence was the only thing that he could do to save his life was now closer to james's mind more than it ever was uh he said that if this was the end of his making a living for his family this co-worker said later he was going to commit suicide and uh in brackets so he was going to he said some version of that alluded to committing suicide and quote take everyone with him man somebody tells you that if you can safely do this call the police make it anonymous maybe even wait a little bit you know when neither of you work at the same place anymore if possible do your best to avoid them but uh man i do get also being afraid to do this because what if that fucker knows where you live what if he hasn't said that to anybody else what if you have a family you know now you're putting him in danger because his unstable ass might come over and kill you all my god situations like this are so tricky uh etna will later claim that james had a nervous breakdown after the layoff he was in a dark place uh when life was going well now life is not going well uh james nervous breakdown looked a teensy bit different than your average anxiety or depression spiral while he had always been paranoid about some kind of attack or vague conspiracy theories these now stretch to include a very very odd belief system full of forces all pitted against him uh those forces included not limited to capitalism capitalism secret government initiatives america's rich former president jimmy carter it's like he was like the fucking nicest sweetest post president ever former president jimmy carter uh minorities just in general and the shadowy darling of 1980s conspiracy theorists the trilateral commission an invitation only international non-governmental discussion group founded in july of 1973 oh conspiracy lore when has believing in that dumb shit ever fucking improved anyone's position in life ever right who falls down that fucking rabbit hole and then their life is just so greatly improved you know the only people the conspiracy bullshit helps are the people pushing the conspiracies grifty turds like david ike and alex jones right people with all the integrity of dog shit and those weren't the only uh things you know james worried about uh he also had voices in his head urging him to kill himself he should have been involuntarily committed apparently these voices grew so loud that in early 1983 he placed himself in the same position as james apparently these voices grew so loud that in early 1983 he placed a loaded pistol against his temple presumably in front of his wife maybe even the entire family and threatened to commit suicide right then and there etna persuaded him not to shoot himself and then later uh he would tell her that she should have just let him do it and sadly in the grand scheme of things uh he was right she should have let him would have saved a lot of innocent lives uh but instead james decided to uh sell their six apartment building which brought them 115 000 a lot of money back then equivalent to almost 390k now james decided to sell their six apartment building which brought them but with a mortgage still to pay two growing kids obsessive need to buy every gun ever fucking put on the market uh enough ammo for a small army the money wouldn't last them long but then james got a new job welding for the union metal manufacturing company but that job only lasted five weeks before that plant closed and then to make things worse james and one of his daughters not specified in sources both are injured in a traffic accident exactly how seriously not specified either but apparently in the weeks that followed the accident huberty noted an aggravation to some kind of neck pains he'd endured since childhood uh old polio flare up maybe i don't know uh he also noted an occasional increasing nerve tremor in his hands and arms things are really not going well he again should have been committed he's having suicidal ideation he lives inside a gun factory of his own design uh he talked about taking others with him he's into all sorts of conspiracies and in other news he cannot find a new job the ohio manufacturing industry has fallen from its peak and fallen hard it's collapsed since finding a new job in ohio was looking impossible james started to wonder about other places the family could live maybe some place where the cost of living was uh far less you know where the money from the apartment complex whatever they had left of it could last them a lot longer and he ended up honing in on a place he'd vacationed to before tijuana mexico there james said his family would quote make a lot of money although he never really specified how they were going to do that but uh that didn't stop them from moving there in the summer of 1983 the hubertys applied for residency in mexico and they got it just like that they would then sell their home make another twelve thousand dollars cash and then they would be able to live in september uh with the buyer assuming the remaining forty eight thousand dollar mortgage uh james was confident that a better life was waiting in tijuana we're gonna show them who's boss he crowed to family friends that's a fucking weird thing to say to people regarding why you're moving someplace uh why are you moving to arizona i'm gonna show people who's boss that's why uh okay all right well i'm won't be visiting you uh the huberty family moved to the mexican border city of about two million living in the urban area now but uh only around a quarter of an october of 1983 uh they moved quick leaving all but their most essential uh possessions and storage in ohio james of course ensured he brought his huge collection of guns ammunition and survival supplies you know gotta be prepared for the big battle it's always around the corner uh down in tijuana james continued to hate his life and everybody else i guess he had never heard of that phrase wherever you go there you are he thought the city was polluted he hated that cops stopped him on his motorcycle all the time he distrusted mexican schools so much so that he and etna would drive the girls across the border every day to go to school in the san ysidro district of san diego despite etna and the girls apparently liking it down there and getting along great with their neighbors james soon told them that they had to leave within three months he uprooted the family again moved across the border now to a 610 a month two-bedroom apartment at the cottonwood apartment complex in san ysidro where the hubertys were the only anglos in a mostly latino building and that didn't make james happy because remember he was he was racist on top of everything else right he's worried about the minority minorities why the fuck did he move to tijuana he didn't care for living around latinos oh yeah because he's batshit insane and his mental health is getting ever worse because he is somehow already running out of cash must have just bought a ton more guns or something or something after being back in the states for just a few weeks in early 1984 james sees an ad for a program that trained low-income unemployed men to become security guards and he was intrigued obviously he is very well adjusted super well suited to become a security guard a lot of training with guns uh he's about as mentally stable as a rabid dog that's just taking a shot to the head with a shovel and he hates everybody uh james would rank in the top of his 27 student class although he made no real impression on his trainers in april of 1984 he got his license a few months later since he had no serious crimes on his record and a check of his fbi fingerprints to not raise any red flags he received a gun permit that let him carry a loaded 38 or 44 magnum pistol on duty and then shortly after that his behavior got more concerning approached a police cruiser on foot and surrendered himself quote as a war criminal an fbi check would show nothing and he was simply told to go home and we gotta not do shit like that right if we actually care about protecting kids and other people from mass shooters we do you know how about if you have a mental health episode where you surrender yourself as a war criminal you are placed immediately in an involuntary 72-hour psychiatric hold during those 72 hours the authorities are allowed to confiscate the gun and the police are allowed to all of your guns and you have to undergo mandatory mental health treatment until a therapist says you are well enough to possess them again and if they don't sign off within a year all their weapons are sold you're compensated at fair market value and you lose the right to own weapons for a period of time to be determined by lawmakers finally ready to get serious about this shit and stop acting like wildly unwell motherfuckers should still have access to home arsenals how about that how about that for a bare minimum uh if anyone has a logical objection to that i would love to hear it in june with the money james earned working security he felt comfortable having their furniture shipped from ohio and the huberties moved again this time to uh avril villas a dowdy stucco department building uh block off at cedro boulevard where they paid just 450 bucks in rent looking out the window you could see a mcdonald's down the street was the most glamorous building james still hated most of his neighbors because they were latino but it seemed like the family might be on their way to some stability again but then just a month later july 10th james gets fired some sources say it was because of poor work performance i can't imagine him being a good security guard uh other sources a general physical instability uh some say his bosses were troubled by his skittishness and odd behavior ding ding ding that one tracks he seemed like a real skittish odd motherfucker uh james was devastated perhaps all of uh all of this finally caused him to realize that he was struggling with something that went beyond the bounds of normal life stress and on july 15th 1984 to his credit james was killed by a police officer who was finally told edna that he suspected yes maybe i am experiencing some serious mental health problems and then after two days of convincing on edna's part james called a mental health clinic and requested an intake appointment the receptionist assured him that the clinic would call back in a couple hours and he sat down in his chair to wait and in a perfect world this is where the story ends james gets the help he needs he admits through therapy to beating his wife and kids it was not their fault all his fault he changes maybe edna leaves him anyway you can't blame her but amicably he understands why uh maybe they co-parent the kids after some family therapy uh some sessions to rebuild some trust uh james gets the tools possibly including medication he needs to best rebuild himself he stops blaming the rest of the world for all of his anger he realized a lot of it comes from not the current targets of his conspiratorial mind but from getting picked on as a kid from his mom abandoning him from fire and brimstone apocalyptic talk forced into his head as a kid he works really hard to build himself he's a man of his word he's a man of his word he's a man of his words he's a man of his words he's a man of his words and we never know his fucking name because he's just a regular dude that didn't end a lot of innocent people's lives and caused so much pain physical and otherwise to so many people who had never done him wrong or even met him but of course that is not what happened after several hours passed and there was no call back hubert he got up walked out of the house rode to an unknown destination on his motorcycle unbeknownst to him the receptionist had misspelled his name as hubertie and since uh he had seemed very calm so calm when he got up and walked out of the house on the phone and emphasized that he had never been hospitalized for mental health issues before she decided in the end to log the call as a non-crisis inquiry that would be responded to in a couple of business days not faster uh due to other people who seemed to have needs more urgent than him a judgment call uh that 99 uh 999 times out of a thousand would have probably been correct would have led to nothing more than minor disappointment but now with james at least to his family it initially though seemed like james was willing to wait longer for help uh when he got back from his mystery trip about an hour later huberty etna zelia cassandra they had dinner they biked to a nearby park uh he seemed calmer than normal actually after the kids went to bed huberty and etna watched a movie together three days later after again seeming like uh you know maybe a little calmer than normal on july 18th 1984 he had some business to attend to he took his wife and daughters to breakfast before appearing in traffic court for a routine citation huberty appeared to be in a good mood as he left the judge had dismissed the citation so he'd won uh he and his family then headed to the san diego zoo but then as they walked past the animals huberty told etna he believed his life was effectively over when she asked him about the mental health clinic he'd called he literally said well society had their chance she didn't know exactly what he meant by that but she would before the day was done they ate lunch at mcdonald's in the claremont neighborhood of san diego and then went home where james took a nap sometime before 4 p.m the 41 year old currently unemployed welder security guard got up dressed in camo fatigues black combat boots and a maroon t-shirt and he kissed etna goodbye she asked him where he was going and he said hunting hunting humans the ominous comment did not faze etna that much at first and why not well because for years he's been saying weird creepy and or threatening shit i mean this is the guy who used to sit in the living room shotgun draped across his knees on the recliner by the front door no fucking tv or radio playing no book in his lap staring into the distance like the psycho he was on his way out the door he glanced toward his 12 year old daughter zelia and said goodbye i won't be back and now presumably having overheard that weird exchange etna is worried enough to try and contact the clinic he had phoned unfortunately she did not know which one it was so she goes through each mental health clinic listed in the yellow pages trying to tell them that her husband might be homicidal she eventually gets the right one but because the receptionist had written down his name incorrectly as shuberty nobody by the name of the clinic and they didn't connect the dots right the there's a small chance that the carnage that follows could have been avoided had it not been for a typo meanwhile hubert he got into his black mercury marquee and drove in his duffel bag where his browning p35 high power nine millimeter pistol a winchester 1200 pump action 12 gauge shotgun a semi-automatic fucking uzi all legal weapons all legally purchased prior to may 1986 brand new fully automatic uzi submachine guns could be purchased by civilians james also had more than 500 rounds with him first he drove down san ysidro boulevard towards a big bear supermarket then towards a post office might have considered doing what he did in those locations but neither of them for whatever reason seemed to hold his attention uh he then turned into the parking lot of the mcdonald's just 200 yards from his apartment the one he could see from the window uh where about 45 people were grabbing an early dinner one of them was 11 year old keith thomas whose morning had started off abnormally but in a beautiful kind of way that morning july 18th the small mexican town of ensenada was already becoming a distant dream to keith and his friend mateo uh the week of vacation with mateo's relatives at their little trailer full of fish fireworks mateo's first kiss the scorpion they captured in a jelly jar the sea cliffs and sunsets was fading away as they entered a stream of exhaust car horns and tijuana heat sounds like it had been a magical day right a little magical trip keith had never been uh or never had a friend excuse me like mateo herrera uh they shared a little boy's uh passion for toy soldiers drawing baseball star wars pretending to be heroes on magnificent quests in the backyard oh my god i still remember and love those days thinking about uh you know it's a kind of comfort instability that keith needed his mom and dad had been divorced for years while his mom worked hard to keep her son fed and clothed that meant she was gone a lot dad doesn't seem like uh it didn't seem like he was really around uh you know much he wasn't in the area i don't think at this time uh she'd already been married three times before keith was in fifth grade had a steady stream of boyfriends when she was a little girl she was a wasn't married keith was used to watching guys come and go not staying long a lot of instability he was on his own a lot of the time until his mom took a new job as a telephone operator in the la suburb of orange on his first day of second grade in his new school the teacher assigned the blonde and freckled keith to be buddies with a playful mexican-american kid named mateo mateo was wearing a yoda t-shirt fuck yeah bro the force was strong and little man and keith knew uh he would like any kid wearing a yoda t-shirt i mean not a bad way to judge other kids character really i mean if they're wearing a darth vader shirt maybe you have problems boba fett shirt could be the coolest kid you'll ever meet in your life could be the most chaotic emperor palpatine shirt run yoda probably well adjusted just like that they're best friends keith even liked mateo's parents ron and uh blight herrera who were 30 something hippies who'd fallen in love in high school ron worked as a precision inspector for an oil company uh blight uh and that was a 1980s equivalent of uh you know one of they came to treat keith like their own kid feeding him including him and everything they did their little bungalow was small but keith loved blight's alfalfa sprout sandwiches and the comforting warm atmosphere of their home they spent so much time together that ron and blight had invited keith to tag along with mateo on this mexican vacation and family reunion it was a wonderful trip for a week the boys made their own adventures in the old fishing village of ensenada and everybody was happy all right the kids had plenty to explore parents got to enjoy the days by themselves on the beach everybody won now heading north toward the border the car crawled through tijuana lining up to go through the always clogged u.s port of entry at tijuana san ysidro transit center it was mid-afternoon on a wednesday so the traffic was already congealing at the gates as northbound travelers scurried to get to california before rush hour on san diego's swarming freeways while they waited keith pulled his ensenada visor lower and studied the shining bracelet mateo had given him it was a chain with a small silver plate bearing mateo's name the school id adorable right little kid friendships like this so fucking cute uh because keith's mother had moved again they would be attending sixth grade in different schools in the fall and the bracelet was a reminder of their friendship a promise that they would still hang out still do fun things together after what seemed like a lifetime in the mid-july heat and the smoggy air the american border guards eyed ron herrera's car asked a few questions and then waved him through the mexican asphalt suddenly blossomed into a sleek six-lane interstate freeway in uh san ysidro the roadside suddenly familiar again with american hotel marquees franchise break shops billboards in english some of these billboards are advertising food as it turns out after waiting for so long the herreras and keith they were starving about up a mile up i-5 from the border they spied the golden arches of mcdonald's and got off the freeway onto san ysidro boulevard the main drag and uh sounded like a perfect plan it was just before 4 p.m the restaurant's parking lot between a donut shop and a post office was already crowded with the early dinner rush about 50 people in total right 45 50 inside ron and blight took the boys orders keith loved these uh new things called chicken mcnuggets with sweet and sour sauce oh dude me too bro uh they're like crack you also love uh the fries i mean mcdonald's they do have some tasty ass salty fries uh before the food came the boys scampered into the play place where other children were already playing uh kyler monroe i used to take them to these places these playland places when they were little so many good memories watching them play i played in those places too as a kid you know when we'd go out of town to some place see many of them anymore a few minutes later carrying their loaded trays of fast food ron and blight took a corner booth inside the restaurant near the play area where the hungry boys quickly joined them blight sat beside mateo on one side ron beside keith on the other with their back to the kitchen and counter area as they tore into the burgers and fries they talked about their vacation and then they heard the first fucking blast of the mentally unwell angry and ignorant the world owes me more than i'm getting motherfucker who had walked in the door the man had pushed a mother through the door set his canvas uh war bag on the floor unzipped his ungodly arsenal of weapons and ammunition then the man james huberty of course pointed his shotgun at 16 year old employee john arnold who was approximately 15 feet away behind the service counter 16 john had gotten the job of mcdonald's the previous december after he'd portrayed santa claus at the restaurant for the christmas season for just over six months he had worked under guillermo flores the assistant manager and neva kane the 22 or 23 year old manager uh john especially like neva she was a good manager firm but kind of silly she would tell john to uh talk to those patties make them cook faster and she wasn't planning on being a mcdonald's forever she got married a few months before to her chiropractor husband andrew kane bought a new car excited for the future to everyone john neva and guillermo the mcdonald's seemed like a pretty safe place to work someplace where the worst thing that could happen was a kid might puke somebody might blow up the bathroom somebody might yell at you for not getting enough fries uh you know in the uh in their fucking basket or uh not put enough pickles on their on their bun but now all of a sudden there's a guy pointing a gun at john as john struggled to process what was happening the assistant manager guillermo shouted hey john that guy's gonna shoot you but when huberty pulled the trigger nothing happened the gun jammed as huberty inspected his shotgun neva kane walked toward the service counter to arnold uh she thought the whole thing was just a bad joke and she just started to walk away like whatever fuck if somebody would have tackled him right there uh you know maybe everybody lives crazy how a couple little things a typo at a mental health clinic uh a quick misread reading of james's intent you know change such a such a tragic situation right that's life crazy how life is full of so many of these little moments choices that seem inconsequential at the time but the consequences of those choices can just be so severe a few moments later the shotgun started working huberty fired it towards the ceiling first before then aiming the uzi at neva came shooting her once beneath her left eye she would die a minute later ending all her hopes all her dreams leaving her chiropractor husband a widower the chaos and carnage had begun immediately after shooting neva huberty fires his shotgun at john arnold wounding the teen in the chest and arm before ordering everybody to get on the ground uh huberty then called everybody in the restaurant quote dirty swine vietnam assholes even though literally no one there was vietnamese uh before claiming that he had killed a thousand people and intended to kill a thousand more at that point one brave customer 25 year old victor rivera you tried to persuade huberty not to hurt anybody else victor had come to mcdonald's with his wife maria their four-year uh four-year-old daughter maria uh because mcdonald's was maria's favorite restaurant in response huberty shot him 14 fucking times shouting shut up shut up over and over as he did so shot him in front of his wife and child victor fell to the ground dead maria uh yeah maria and maria uh they would both be injured but both would survive now it's becoming clear to everyone in the restaurant that there was no reasoning with this dude this was not a situation where somebody was tracking down one person this was not a revenge mission uh huberty like he had said to edna was here to hunt humans he was getting revenge on society at large settling debts nobody knew what to do especially not the group huddled by the counter directly in huberty's path uh jackie right reyes a hungry and pregnant 18 year old had been standing by the counter with her eight month old baby carlos on her hip when she heard the first shot jackie had dropped out of high school when she'd first gotten pregnant but her boyfriend carlos uh still the light of her life uh you know she thought she could she could work hard make a better life for them he thought that too coming to mcdonald's with her friends and family was a easy cheap way to to keep her family and community close then she heard the man's voice commanding everybody to get on the floor huddled on the cold tile with everybody else jackie shielded carlos and her 11 year old niece aurora piña as best she could but huberty just looked down on them and started firing he first killed jackie's friend 19 year old maria uh comanero silva uh with a single gunshot to the chest then fatally shot lillian and maria with a single gunshot to the chest then fatally shot little aurora's nine-year-old friend claudia perez in the stomach cheek thigh hip leg chest back armpit and head with the uzi aurora was hit in the leg by one of the uzi bullets curled herself against her aunt jackie's body her eyes squeezed tightly shut except for the split second when she saw the man aim his little black machine gun at her aunt then huberty fired jackie's body jolted and shuddered as it absorbed a long barrage of bullets in her shoulders breast back buttocks left arm legs neck and head the corner would later count 48 separate wounds what the fuck baby carlos splattered in his mother's gore shrieks unable to walk he simply sits in his pooling blood and wails huberty shouts angrily for little carlos to shut up but when the baby won't stop screaming huberty aims his pistol and fires a single bullet into the baby's back killing him meanwhile uh mario lopez and his wife april had just finished eating and taking their two-year-old daughter griselda to romp in the mcdonald's playground when they heard the first pop lopez had then pushed his family behind the playground's brick wall as they huddled there trying to stay quiet and unseen in the heat the shooting went on methodically a 62-year-old trucker who was set to retire in just a few days named lawrence for sloss uh was sitting nearby huberty aimed and fired at him killing him instantly but around this point some people started to run maria diaz fled with her daughter out of a side door when the shooting started then realized she had left her two-year-old son inside fuck she crept back to the window saw him sitting obediently in a booth she motioned him to the side of the car and shot him in the head towards the door nudged it open the boy toddled to safety my god how lucky they were to survive that unscathed uh but there were many others who were far from the doors who were seated at booths or near the play area people who had no way to escape without being seen by huberty who was now marching towards the booths towards the herreras uh little keith thomas right fresh back from that vacation at first keith had no idea what was going on uh there have been so many fireworks then sonata he thought somebody set off a firecracker he turned to look toward the front of the restaurant but instead of fireworks he sees frightened people ducking down as a deep and angry male voice is booming everybody down keith slid down beneath the table with mateo his parents as the room seemed to explode around them glass from the big front windows popping under a hail of bullets blight screamed began to cry under the seat and against the wall shielded by ron keith could not see anything except parts of other terrified people hiding under the next table and the camouflage pants of a man walking deliberately just feet away the thundering continued amid shouts and screams what's happening he asked be still ron shouted don't move blight screamed blight hunkered at keith's feet and mateo was balled up beside her next to the aisle she could peer between the seats and the table and saw her worst nightmare he's coming down the aisle shooting everybody blight said keith turned to face the the wall uh closed his eyes and then huberty started to fire at his group keith thomas was shot in the shoulder arm wrist and left elbow ronald herrera who was shielding keith was shot six times in the stomach chest arm hip shoulder and via a ricochet in the head and then there were more shots and now blight hao are quiet and still and huberty's not done not even close nearby three women are doing their best to hide 24 year old guadalupe del rio uh lay against the wall she was shielded by her friends 25 year old gloria ramirez a 31 year old uh risdel c vargas huberty advanced and started firing guadalupe hit several times gloria not hit at all aris delci shot in the back of the head for the moment though all three men still alive though guadalupe will die in a few minutes and aris delci will die the next day the only person fatally wounded who made it to a hospital first before they passed at another booth huberty killed 45 year old banker hugo vasquez uh with a single or vasquez with a single shot to the chest uh it's likely that everyone was uh alive uh was uh praying that the police would show up soon now at this point right they could make it out of this still but the cops not there yet help would not arrive for quite some time actually the first of many calls to emergency services had been made shortly after 4 p.m and it had been reported that a child had been shot in mcdonald's and then taken to a post office on san ysidro boulevard but the dispatcher mistakenly directed the responding officers to a different mcdonald's nearby uh kind of nearby two miles from the one where huberty was currently waging a one-man war as a result lockdown warnings were delayed and nobody knew not to pull into this mcdonald's lot like it was just another afternoon and that was exactly what lydia flores did shortly after 4 p.m lydia drove into the parking lot uh she stopped at the drive-thru window noticed shattered windows the sound of gunfire uh looked through the drive-thru saw huberty thinking fast she reversed her car till it crashed into a fence and bolted into some nearby bushes with her two-year-old daughter melissa she'd gotten away by acting quick others would not be fast enough at approximately 4 or 5 p.m a mexican couple uh astolfo and uh marcella felix drove toward one of the service areas of the restaurant there was shattered glass everywhere but astolfo assumed there was some kind of construction going on this belief was reinforced when he saw huberty walking towards the car to him with his big sack and workwear like outfit uh he looked like a kind of repairman but of course he wasn't huberty fired his shotgun and uzi at the couple and their four-month-old daughter carlita uh striking marcella in the face arms and chest blinding her in one eye rendering one hand forever unusable carlita meanwhile was shot in the neck chest and abdomen while bullets sprayed through her father's chest and head still the couple managed to stagger out of huberty's line of fire after all those hits and astolfo handed four-month-old carlita to a passerby a young woman named lucia velasco as his wife collapsed against a car lucia velasco rushed the baby to a nearby hospital as her husband pulled astolfo and marcella into a nearby building miraculously despite despite taking all those hits all three members of the felix family would survive but so many others wouldn't at that moment three 11 year old boys rode their bmx bikes into the parking lot looking forward to the wednesday free ice cream promotion mcdonald's was running they were joshua coleman omar hernandez and david delgado the three had spent much of the day as usual uh together riding their bikes around the neighborhood at about 3 p.m omar and david had gone to joshua's grandmother's house joshua was showing his grandma uh this barracuda and six bass he had caught on a deep sea fishing trip that morning barracuda that's badass boys asked joshua if he wanted to bike down the hill to get something to eat he's like yeah sure seemed like a normal day and for a while it was a taste of the summer they were all so excited for after a long school uh just a few weeks before on june 14th omar had posed proudly for a photograph with his mom at his elementary school graduation ceremony at sunset elementary now the boys had grabbed donuts then peddled their bikes over to mcdonald's for soft drinks but then as their tires rolled over the asphalt they heard somebody yell and they hesitated for a split second it was huberty he had seen them and now he opened fire joshua coleman fell to the ground as bullets ripped through his back arm and leg then there was another spray of bullets and david went down both david and joshua fell to the ground and david fell to the ground and david fell to the ground david and omar would die on the scene only joshua coleman seriously wounded would survive huberty then noticed an elderly couple 74 year old uh miguel yaloa and 69 year old aida victoria walking toward the entrance on wednesdays it was miguel and aida's habit to drive across the border from their home in tijuana to visit their daughter-in-law uh who had been widowed when miguel and aida's son had been fucking decapitated by a propeller in an airport accident so much they washed a load of clothes at a laundromat in ysidro stopped at mcdonald's to pick up some burgers for their other son ricardo who lived in tijuana as miguel reached to open the door for his wife huberty fired his shotgun killing aida right point blank shot to the fucking face miguel was wounded but managed to cradle his wife in his arms wiping blood from her face as he cursed at Huberti. Then Huberti fired at Miguel, executing him point-blank with a shot to the head. Now we're at 4.10 p.m. All of this carnage has occurred over just a few minutes. Approximately 10 minutes after the first call had been placed to emergency services, police now arrive at the correct McDonald's. The first officer on the scene, Miguel Rosario, arrived woefully underprepared. Carrying a standard-issue.38 caliber revolver with six bullets, the Marine Corps veteran quickly realized he was in for the fight of his life, if he chose to engage. But Rosario still didn't even really know what the fuck was happening. Talk about feeling inadequate, he would later say. He's got an Uzi. I've got a.38. I'm thinking it's a robbery gone bad, and his buddies are going to encircle me. When Rosario arrived at the McDonald's, he saw people hiding behind cars in a lot. He got a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He looked up to see a man. Huberti opened a side door of the restaurant. The Uzi slung across his chest. The two men eyed each other, and then Huberti moved. The SWAT-trained officer ducked behind a parked pickup truck as Huberti unleashed a hail of bullets. Rosario was badly outgunned, and he knew it. Worse, he still believed he had more than one adversary. As he heard about 30 armor-piercing rounds explode against metal posts and skip off the asphalt, he radioed in a code 10, send SWAT, and then seconds later, a code 11, send everybody. Huberti retreated inside as other police units swarmed the scene. Officers deployed immediately imposed a lockdown for six blocks around this McDonald's. Simultaneously, the establishment of the Uzi was able to escape. The Uzi was able to escape. The Uzi was able to command post and stationed 175 officers at various points in the area, making sure Huberti could not make a successful escape. Meanwhile, Rosario ran back to his car to retrieve his Ruger Mini-14 military-style rifle. Two patrol officers fired shotguns to cover him while he took up a new position. But still, none of them could get a clear shot on Huberti, and they still had so many questions. How many people are inside the restaurant? Was there one shooter? Were there two, three? How many? Multiple? Had the shooter, or shooters taken hostages? Thanks to the shattered reflective glass that cut the visibility of the restaurant into sparkling and shadowed slices, police couldn't see much that would give them the info they desperately needed, so they had to make some assumptions. They thought that Huberti wanted something, that he would be open to negotiation, and they just had to slow things down enough to get him to come outside and talk. Throughout the 70s and 80s, hostage negotiations had become the gold standard for how to respond in America to things like this until SWAT could be deployed to take the shooter out, with a high degree of accuracy usually. The police didn't know at the time that every minute that Huberti was still in that McDonald's meant the possibility of another person dead. And indeed, inside the restaurant, he was still prowling and killing. After seeing the cops, he walked towards the service counter and just adjusted a portable radio, possibly looking for news reports about his shooting spree. Unable to find that if he was looking for that, he settled on a music station and then celebrated in a pretty upsetting way. Motherfucker literally started to dance. Then the sick fuck, fired more shots. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, the restaurant's young employees are doing whatever they can to stay alive. 21-year-old Paulina Lopez, 19-year-old Elsa Borboa Fierro, 18-year-old Margarita Padilla, 17-year-old Albert Leos, and 17-year-old Wendy Flanagan are hiding, trying to keep as quiet as possible. It was Elsa's first job, although she had graduated high school with honors. She found it difficult to land a job after high school, a job that she wanted. She dreamed of studying computer programming at San Diego State University, didn't have the money to put herself through all the classes she needed to take, not right away. She was frustrated by her situation. Would she be able to chase her dreams? She wondered. But now she's probably wondering, will I live to see tomorrow? Next, they hear footsteps. In a flash, Huberty bursts in. As he does, Margarita Padilla grabs Wendy Flanagan's hand, pulls her to run. Huberty shouts, oh, there's more. You're trying to hide from me, you bastards. He then sprayed bullets into Margarita Padilla's back, killing her. As someone else started to scream in Spanish not to kill them, he fired a gun at her. She was shot dead. She was shot dead. She was shot dead. She was fired more shots, killing Pauline and Elsa. She would not live to see tomorrow. He also critically wounded Albert. Wendy Flanagan was able to keep running. I imagined I was running through rain, she would later say. I felt like I was running through rain. And I heard bing, bing, bing, because I believe now he was shooting with a machine gun and he was shooting at us and the bullets were ricocheting all over. And then Maggie got really heavy and she was keeping me from running. So she slipped from my arm and I ran down the stairs into a closet and she never came. Wendy found four other employees and a female customer and her infant. She had rushed down into the basement utility room. Actually, this closet, actually a room. A few minutes later, they heard a sound again. It's 17-year-old Albert Leos, who had managed to drag himself down the stairs after being shot five times. The adults in the room tried to give him medical attention, but if he yelled out in pain, they feared it would draw Huberti downstairs. So he bit down on a rag to stifle his screams. He would later describe it as this. I grabbed the shoelaces. I used them as tourniquets to slow the bleeding down a bit. And I grabbed a cloth and bit on it. And I grabbed a cloth And as I'm biting on the cloth and I'm seeing the blood coming out of my body, I'm getting dizzy. And I'm starting to get the feeling that I might not make it. And so I just said a quick little prayer. God, I just want to see my family one more time. And then you can take me away and take me with you. But if you don't take me with you, I'm going to do something good with my life, something positive. Meanwhile, Huberti's focus is drawn once again outside. When a fire truck drives within range, he opens fire and repeatedly pierces the vehicle with bullets, slightly wounding one occupant. Then back inside, he hears 19-year-old Jose Perez moaning, shoots him in the head. Jose slumps over dead beside the booth. He'd been sitting out with Gloria Gonzalez and Michelle Karncross, both also dead. At one point, Aurora Pena, just 11 years old and shot, mind you, a girl who had quietly lain wounded beside her dead aunt, baby cousin and two friends, notes a lull in the firing. Opening her eyes, she sees Huberti nearby, staring in her direction. He swears, throws a bag of French fries at her, retrieves his shotgun, shoots her in the arm, neck and jaw. However, none of these new injuries are fatal. She plays dead and he walks away. God, she was a tough kid. And this motherfucker is vicious. How long had he wanted to do something like this? How long did he want to just fucking blast somebody walking through his front door when he's sitting there with a shotgun like the piece of shit he was? Meanwhile, the police had gotten confirmation of something important. A survivor who had managed to get out of the restaurant, one of the employees, in fact, who had taken refuge in the basement and was able to sneak out, had told them that Huberti was working alone. And had not taken hostages. If a SWAT team sniper could kill him, it would all be over. So where was the SWAT team? Indeed, though the police originally could not contact the SWAT commander at a reception in Mission Valley, 20 miles to the north, they finally got a hold of him around 430 by 445. SWAT snipers were encircling the restaurant. In the meantime, Huberti's wife had seen the shooting on TV and one of her daughters told her that, you know, dad's car is parked at McDonald's parking lot. Etna called the police, told them everything she could about her armor-piercing ammo and could shoot accurately with either hand. They even brought her to the perimeter to try and coax her husband back out. That wouldn't work. At 5.05 PM, more than an hour after Huberti's first shot was fired, he walked in after parking his car at 3.56 PM. The SWAT commander was speeding toward San Ysidro when he heard sharpshooters giving the green light to shoot the gunman if they had a clear shot. He immediately countermanded the order until he arrived at the scene nearly 10 minutes later. He could not be sure the proper precautions had been taken place for the safety of his officers and people inside the restaurant. Like the police officers had worried before, he was worried that the gunman might have hostages or had traded clothes with one of the innocent people inside, which might lead the SWAT team to fire mistakenly on a victim. It's not clear what changed his mind, if it was the extent of the carnage or more info, but finally he gave the second green light. If someone got a clear shot at Huberti, they had to go for it. Moments after the second green light was given, Huberti shot out the restaurant's front window along San Ysidro Boulevard. Cops fired two shots back, but both missed. By this time, Huberti had fired 247 bullets. 21 people were dead or dying. 19 lay wounded all around him. 13 of the dead had been shot in the head, seven in the chest, one baby Carlos in the back. Throughout the ordeal, young Keith Thomas had huddled under the booth and listened to the cacophony of death around him. The alarms of the deep fat friars incessantly bleeding, babies crying, glass shattering, the wounded choking and gasping for air, and of course the sound of Huberti's guns, the metallic jangle of empty bullet casings hitting the tile floor. A small child lay next to a man's legs near Keith's head. He didn't know whether either one, the child or the man, were alive or dead. He peeked up through a hole in the bench above him, saw the gunman lurking near the front counter, lifting his gun, firing at somebody else. That's when Keith noticed his own left arm was bleeding. Must have been cut by flying glass, he thought. He surely hadn't been shot because he never felt any impact. Just a slight burn. And then there was silence. At 5.17 p.m., Huberti walked from the service counter toward the restaurant, right into the path of 27-year-old police SWAT sniper named Charles Chuck Foster. James had fucked around. Now Chuck was going to make sure he fucking found out. Foster had been deployed to a strategic position on the roof of a post office directly opposite the restaurant, and now he saw an unobstructed view of Huberti's body from the neck down through the telescopic side of his.308 caliber rifle. Foster fired a single round from a range of approximately 35 yards, hit pay dirt, hail Nimrod. A bullet entered Huberti's chest, severed his aorta just beneath his heart, exited through his spine, leaving a one-square-inch exit wound, and sending Huberti sprawling backwards onto the floor directly in front of the service counter, dead almost instantly. What a fucking shot. Immediately after shooting Huberti, Foster reported back to the other responding officers that the target was down. Still, the police weren't sure that Huberti was really dead. Nevertheless, a charge of officers entered the restaurant, led by a police sergeant who raised his gun at Huberti's body. Nearby, a wounded girl picked her head up, sergeant asked her if Huberti was the man responsible for the mass slaughter. She nodded. As a precaution, an officer turned Huberti's body face down. They hand cuffed his wrist behind his back right smart move then they began leading people out single file and getting the wounded loaded into waiting ambulances wendy flanagan would later say i looked and saw there were a pile of bodies and i saw the mcdonald's uniforms they were just thrown with the bodies everywhere it was horrible and then i realized that maggie was being shot as she was shielding me meanwhile from his hiding spot keith saw more camouflaged pants just a few feet away and he was confused and scared were there more bad guys he grew even more confused when he heard ron herrera talk to the combat booted men who were budging bodies on the floor and then he realized that these men's that these men were cops keith wriggled around mateo and blight were slumped under the bench both seemingly asleep blight was stained with blood mateo had blood all over him too seeping from some holes on his bare legs keith slapped mateo's leg wake up he yelled just then a cop with a mustache grabbed keith from behind you pulled him out from underneath the table he fought him as he was hustled to the curb outside where the cop left him sitting alone keith watched the chaos unfold around him as other wounded people and survivors were hurried to waiting ambulances wailing and bleeding he also saw a bloodied ron herrera in the parking lot sobbing as he tried to go back inside seemingly unaware that he had been shot eight times my god the human body is an amazing machine somehow ron had made it out alive but little mateo had not nor had blight as keith sat outside another cop tried to remove mateo's bracelet from keith's arm which was streaming blood under his shorts and legs keith refused to give it up he started to sob then a paramedic walked him to an ambulance where medics were treating a woman who'd been shot in the breast and a teenage mcdonald's worker who was shrieking over a leg wound the paramedics quickly moved keith to another quieter ambulance he sat there with a little girl about his own age whose mother and sister were wounded the ambulance took them all to the hospital including joshua coleman that 11 year old who had been shot in the parking lot with his friends omar and david how had joshua survived i just stayed down he would tell reporters from his bed in the hospital uh where he was undergoing treatment to remove shotgun pellets from his chest back and shoulders i was just wondering whether he was going to shoot me dead if i ran i was afraid he might shoot me again josh still didn't know the full extent of what had happened at that time it was left to debbie coleman joshua's mom to tell him that omar and david were dead the boys were like brothers to him meanwhile news coverage started to roll out which often got to the point where the police were able to find out who was shot to families of the victims before the police managed to contact them when his parents miguel and aida victoria were two hours late bringing him his burger ricardo who had heard of the massacre from newscasts jumped in his car and drove fast towards san jesidro police stopped him to the restaurant where he spotted his parents car in the parking lot and was uh you know pretty clear what had happened uh adelina hernandez 11 year old omar's mother learned of the killings from a neighbor who called to ask if she'd heard about the mcdonald's massacre she rushed to the scene her heart pounding saw her son's bloody body dead on the ground david's father guillermo would also find out in a terrible way he was in los angeles when he recognized his son's bike on a news report later uh richard uh adelina guillermo others would find out what the officers were putting together at that moment that in 77 minutes huberty had fired a minimum of 257 rounds killing 20 people wounding just as many others one of whom would die at the hospital the following day several victims had tried to stop him from getting out of the hospital but he was not able to get out of the hospital or to stop others bleeding using what they had on hand which was mostly mcdonald's napkins only 10 people inside the restaurant escaped physically uninjured six of whom had hidden inside that basement utility room psychologically nobody walked out of that mcdonald's unharmed dr tom s newman the medical officer who first examined the death scene would say it was like they had just stopped in time all these bodies were lying around heads were slumped on the table the old man walking out the door was lying on the floor donuts beside him the two kids were dead by their bikes the infant was dead in the arms of these people there were two burned hamburgers on the grill meanwhile as doctors worked to attend to the survivors they found that one nine millimeter bullet had grazed keith's right wrist another had entered his left forearm and burrowed into his shoulder where it ricocheted back down his arm exited near the crease of his elbow uh then his mom was late getting to the hospital posing a horrible scenario in the little boy's mind was she dead too to him the possibility that anybody could die at any moment without any reasonable explanation of what had happened to him he was dead and he was dead and he was dead and suddenly became all too real. Just like nobody knew how to react to a mass shooting, nobody knew the kind of help that the victims, especially kids, would need immediately afterwards. Keith would spend a week recovering from his wounds. Recovery made even more difficult because he was too terrified to sleep. When he could sleep, he heard the sound of gunfire and vivid nightmares, horrific PTSD. After he was released, his mom took him to Mateo and Blythe's funeral. In the casket, Mateo's sweet little face looked swollen, which upset Keith even more. Soon after the funeral, Keith visited Ron Herrera in the hospital, where he was still recovering. This is Mateo's father. He had lost his son and his wife. He took off Mateo's bracelet, gave it to Ron, and they both sobbed. Fuck. When I first read this, man, that part of the story fucking wrecked me. Then Keith withdrew and he got angry. At first, it was with the people who kept telling him that Mateo died because God needed him. He thought that was so fucking stupid. Why was God such an asshole? Didn't he already have enough people up there? Not long after the McDonald's shootings, his mom took him on a Mexican cruise, just the two of them. She thought it would be good for him, a chance to get him out of the surroundings, a concert reminding him of the carnage he'd experienced. The nightmares hadn't subsided, though, and he still couldn't sleep. And one night on the ship, during an argument with his mom about what to wear for dinner, she reached out and touched his leg, triggering a memory of how the police officer at the restaurant had grabbed him, and on instinct, he kicked her off of her feet. Meanwhile, everybody was still trying to figure out who the fuck is missing. The hours, days, and years led up to what was truly a massacre. As it turned out, a lot of people had missed a lot of troubling signs, or hadn't known to look for those signs back then, didn't know what they might be warnings of. He always did comment on how he wanted to go through a lot of people. His ex-foreman at the plant told the Canton paper the day after the rampage. He had a lot of guns in his house, and he always said he wanted to kill a lot of people. I picture that okay thing from the Ohio thing now. Sorry, it just popped into my brain. Okay? A lot of my in-laws have. He had a lot of guns in his house, okay? He always said he wanted to kill a lot of people, okay? We watched him a lot, okay? We believed him, okay? It's a question of when, okay? God, what do you do in a situation like that, though, again? I mean, you know, you want to call the police, but, you know, if somebody says in a vague sense that I, you know, I just want to, I want to fucking kill strangers, as opposed to I'm going to kill so-and-so tomorrow right when they get off of work, well, they're not going to be arrested, right? And the police, and it might get back to them, that you were the one who ratted on them. I don't know. It's a very, very tricky situation. Etna, for her part, told a reporter that she regretted thwarting her husband's futile suicide attempt the year before. She said that, yeah, she should have let him kill himself. I mean, okay. Also said she wished she had killed him, which she said she actually had tried to do during one of their many explosive arguments from the early days of their marriage. Man, these two. Nobody was as devastated as Earl Huberty, James's father, day after the massacre. Reporters visited him at his farm in Mount Neaton, Ohio. They found out that Earl was a well-liked, quiet, sensitive, very religious man. His only explanation for how this could have happened was to point to a painting of a lost sheep by the Jordan River. And then he just started to weep. Yesterday was the worst day of my life, he said. I feel so sorry for those people. Meanwhile, McDonald's temporarily suspended all TV and radio advertisements in the days following the massacre in an act of solidarity. Also temporarily suspended all forms of advertising. Uh, the nearby Black Angus Steakhouse and nightclub, uh, unfortunately not nearly as cool and didn't do that. Uh, they started, uh, they started running ads. Condolences, partners. All of us here at the new right down the street from that McDonald's, very safe. Black Angus Steakhouse nightclub, where we have a newly installed metal detector. Armed security guards. We are deeply saddened by what happened only two blocks down the street from us down the left, McDonald's. What happened directly under Ronald McDonald's careless watch, I'm afraid to say. Can I be frank with you? He's a clown. He's always been a clown. When was the last time you remember a clown keeping anybody safe? And again, I'm not trying to be disrespectful. Condolences. In honor of the recent tragic events for a limited time. We're selling a perfectly prepared filet mignon with a loaded baked potato, smothered in cheddar cheese, real butter, and real bacon for just $9.99. And if you bring in a receipt from McDonald's, and literally it could be from any McDonald's from any point in time in history, it's only $4.99. And happy hour is now every hour. All well drinks, half off all day. And let me add, last time I checked, the hamburger weren't selling no dope beverages at Mickey D's. Anywho, everyone who's not obviously nutter than a pile of squirrel shit and armed to the teeth is welcome at the new Black Angus Steakhouse and Nightclub right down the street from that McDonald's. Two blocks up on the right, where the crowd's always safe. Where we don't put anybody's lives at risk by letting some damn clown run our operation. Condolences. Come on down. We'll take care of you. Better than McDonald's. Okay, that was fucked up. I didn't like that. That was zero class. Zero class by the people that Black Angus Steakhouse. I know that was fucked up for me to do, but this episode is so dark, I needed to try and break the tension. My God. Back to what actually went down at that McDonald's. There was still hope. from the corporate perspective initially, that they could reopen. Within two days of the massacre, the restaurant had been refurbished and renovated. A restaurant planned to again open for business in the hope that as one employee commented, the building would become just another McDonald's soon. Yeah, that wasn't going to happen. Meanwhile, the small town of San Ysidro now had to deal with a different kind of nightmare, the logistical nightmare of holding a mass funeral. Because the sheer number of victims, local funeral homes had to use the San Ysidro Civic Center to hold wakes. The local parish, Mount Carmel Church, forced to hold back-to-back funeral masses in order that each of the dead could be buried in a timely manner. And the question remained, what had happened to drive Huberti to this decision? Could it have been drugs? Some kind of crystal meth binge? Had he been drunk? An autopsy would find no drugs or alcohol in Huberti's corpse, but did discover elevated levels of the metals nickel and cadmium, likely remnants of his days as a welder, but most welders, of course, don't do what he did. Huberti's body cremated on July 23, 1984 without any kind of religious ceremony, which is good. His ashes were returned to Aetna, later interred in his home state of Ohio. That's a bummer. I think she should have given them to the families of his victims. See if anybody wanted to pour them into a toilet, shit on them. Meanwhile, following discussions between community leaders and McDonald's executives, a decision about the San Ysidro McDonald's was reached on July 24th. It would not reopen. Meanwhile, Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, ceded a fund for survivors and victims' families with $100,000 of her own money, and then the corporation added another million. And that is equivalent to over $3.5 million today. Good on her. It's not like she pulled the trigger or did anything at all to share responsibility for a madman walking into her restaurant. Donations would eventually top $1.4 million. That's fantastic. This in some ways would pave the way for how corporations would come to deal with mass shootings, volunteering to pay for funeral expenses, rehabilitation, etc. Amidst impromptu protests from some San Ysidro, San Ysidro residents and donors, Etna Huberty received the first payout from this fund, with the company maintaining she was a victim too. August 2nd, 1984, San Diego Police Chief William Cullender held a press conference to disclose the results of the San Diego Police Department's inquiry into their response to the massacre. The main focus of those who blamed the police was the fact that an estimated 73 minutes had elapsed between the time the first police officer arrived and Huberty's death. Why hadn't they done something faster? Cullender stated that it wasn't that simple. He stated that any suggestion that police should have stormed that restaurant was ludicrous. They hadn't been able to see what was going on inside, thanks to the windows that had been spiderwebbed by bullet holes. He also emphasized the eight-minute delay between the passing of the instruction authorizing all law enforcement personnel to kill Huberty and his death made no difference to the final death toll. All of Huberty's victims had been dead by that point. Cullender finished his report by stating, I believe the operation was handled the way it should have been handled. Still, that explanation, right? Not satisfying to many. The police couldn't have done anything better. What was to say this wouldn't happen again? How could this be prevented? Well, the answer to that would take a complete rewiring of a massive portion of America's collective psyche. One topic that came into focus was Huberty's motive. Perhaps if people understood that, some steps could be taken to prevent things like this in the future. The motive on the top of most people's minds was a racial one, since many of the victims were Hispanic, right? And he was white. But the police maintained correctly Huberty's massacre was not racially motivated, just, happened to take place in a primarily Latino area. Collender said, he didn't like anybody. Yeah, accurate. The renovated restaurant was demolished. I mean, I know he's fucking racist, but he fucking hated everybody. The renovated restaurant demolished midnight, September 26th. Good on McDonald's, right? They didn't have to do that. It was not their fault. This happened to be, you know, happened to go down at one of their locations. They were a victim of James' completely senseless rage, too. Following the closure and demolition of the restaurant, McDonald's donated the ground to the city with the stipulation that no, no other restaurant could ever be built to that site. The land would be sold in February of 1988 to Southwestern College for $136,000 with the agreement that a 300-square-foot area in front of the small campus be set aside as a permanent memorial to 21 victims. Backing up a little. In 1986, two years after the shootings, Aetna filed a $5 million wrongful death lawsuit against McDonald's and James' former employer, Babcock & Wilcox, claiming her husband's killing urges his murderous urges were triggered by a combination of monosodium glutamate in the chain's food and the poisonous metals from James' work. Fuck off, Aetna. What greedy ambulance chaser got to you? Get the fuck out of here. That's a gross-ass money grab. Together, she said, they caused delusions, kidney failure, and uncontrollable fury. Uh-huh. Her case was thrown out. So where had Aetna and the girls gone? Perhaps unsurprisingly, life was not easy for them in the wake of the massacre. In the wake of the massacre, a few weeks after the incident, she and her daughters received numerous death threats, which is fucked up, forced them to temporarily reside with a family friend. All three would attend counting sessions for more than nine months. I feel especially sorry for his daughters being born into that shit. The family initially relocated from San Ysidro to Chula Vista, where Zali and Cassandra enrolled in school under assumed names. One year later, the family moved to the community of Spring Valley in San Diego County, where Aetna went to work figuring out how to provide for her family. The best way she could think of was to sell the movie rights to her story. Several TV networks passed on the movie idea, but eventually, in 1988, producers would release Bloody Wednesday, a movie very loosely based on the massacre, a movie that was very poorly received, currently sits at around 30% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, didn't stick around very long in theaters, as in, never made it into theaters, straight to VHS, three years after it was filmed. You can watch it on YouTube for free if you hate yourself, if you don't respect your time, or if you enjoy movies so bad they might not be unintentionally hilarious to you. The trailer is almost four minutes long and fucking painful to watch. But I tried. Here's a little taste, a little scene of the killer based on James holding a teddy bear he thinks talks to him. They made him cartoonishly insane. He's being approached by some dudes who appear as if they have just squeezed in their one and only acting role on the way home from the gym. So here we go. These guys are coming to get James. He's holding a teddy bear. The thugs are very slowly approaching him. Only one of them has a bat and other weapons. Oh, he had a big gun hit in the teddy bear. Now the thugs are like, "Oh, shit. What, dude?" Hello, boys. One of the thugs has a bicep bracelet. Now that we're all here, you're all going to die. Okay, he's very sweaty. Now they're all tied up. All that's left is to pronounce, "Jay." Judge me. You've got a chance. Silence! They're sitting in chairs. All of them are tied to chairs. He takes five bullets out of his six-shooter. He's going to play Russian roulette with them. And the teddy bear will decide who lives and who dies. Who fucking scored that movie in ten minutes? Who got paid a sandwich to score that movie? Oh. It's. It actually is so bad, it might be unintentionally good. Backing up a year. In 1987, several family members of those killed, along with survivors of the massacre, filed lawsuits against McDonald's and the San Diego Police Department. Those suits heard in the San Diego County Superior Court. All lawsuits were consolidated, later dismissed before trial on a defense motion for summary judgment. And then the plaintiffs appealed. Then on July 25th, 1987, the California Court of Appeal affirmed summary judgment. For the defendants ruling that the McDonald's, or any other business, has no duty of care to protect patrons from an unforeseeable assault by a murderous madman. Yeah! They can't fucking protect people from that in a business, right? He just happened to walk into that place. The methods they did have on hand, guards and CCTVs, couldn't have possibly stopped Huberti, but that was not their fault, it was argued. Furthermore, the San Diego Police Department were also exonerated of any culpability or negligence with the appellate panel ruling, quote, "in view of the sheer horror of the ordeal, it is difficult to imagine anything the police could have done or failed to do which would have made the risk any greater than that to which the victims were exposed before the police arrived." I mean, yeah, it is one of those things where it's like, sometimes, you know, the only person that can be blamed is the person who does this shit. The final lawsuits would not be dismissed until 1991, just before the Supreme Court ruled that the McDonald's was a crime. Just before that, a memorial marking the site of the former McDonald's, unveiled in 1990, consisted of 21 hexagonal white marble pillars, each bearing the name of a victim. The sculpts were designed by former Southwestern College student Roberto Valdez, who would say this about the design: "The 21 hexagons represent each person that died, and they are different heights, representing the variety of ages and races of the people involved in the massacre. They are bonded together in the hopes that the community in a tragedy like this will stick together like they did." Circling back to young Keith Thomas, sticking together, or any sense of normalcy, was easier said than done. Once he was back in school, this 11-year-old kid, he felt like a monster. He was now quick to anger, quick to freak out. Compared to his carefree young classmates, he didn't feel like he could relate to them anymore. relate to them anymore. One date an annoying classmate pushed him too far and keith beat the shit out of him and it felt good every time he hit him afterward as he realized what he had done when he realized he had turned to violence just like huberty he wept conflict between keith and his mom continued eventually she sent him to live with his biological dad a former army ranger and vietnam vet living in washington state dealing with his own post-war nightmares keith lived with dad for about eight months then went back to california where things did not improve by the age of 13 he had carved a circled a the symbol for anarchy in his own forearm he freaked out over loud noises or unexpected touches once a teacher grabbed his arm and he fucking punched her unable to deal with the pressures of acting like everything was normal he started to run away started to spend long nights in abandoned trailers or empty pool houses living on shoplifted food mainly he then developed his own interest in guns he smoked flattened cigarettes he would find on the sidewalk he would steal beer from garages hide in ditches or alleys to drink himself into a stupor sometimes after doing that for a while he would give up and head back home or his mom would track him down and drag him back home one day when she found him after he'd run away again his mom took him straight to a mental hospital where he was diagnosed with a personality disorder not specifically named in sources locked down in the war with other kids just like him uh kids he perceived as misfits dopers rebels freaks after a few months no less depressed he was transferred to a new hospital there he ran away went awol for a while till his mom found him took him back to the hospital he escaped again this time he overdosed on a handful of no-dose pills and pcp before taking back to the war uh his mom is getting desperate nothing's working she begins to seek out specialists to her credit good for her uh people who might be able to reach keith she finds dr robert uh pinews a ucla a psychiatrist who was just beginning to investigate the unexplored mysteries of the effects of violence on children pinews was intrigued by keith whom he believed had been misdiagnosed keith did not have a personality disorder he thought but likely was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder right stress is directly related to the mcdonald's massacre not many uh understood ptsd back then like they do now pinews gave keith a test a test he'd been working on developing the childhood post-traumatic stress reaction index the first scale designed to measure the extent of a child's damage from violence a score of 60 would indicate a very severe reaction to whatever original trauma the child has suffered keith scored 75 pinews immediately assigned one of his key aides dr kathleen nader to meet keith she was the director of ucla's trauma violence and sudden bereavement program which researched and provided counseling to underage victims of violence disaster and war keith immediately hated her hated the therapy he thought was bullshit uh but he made it through enough to be able to get out of the hospital under nader's care keith was released from the hospital started seventh grade in an affluent school near the beach he's so young when all this is going on uh he still skipped classes though still uh picked fights still did drugs uh he uh soon graduated from huff and scotch guard to drop an acid i would argue huff and scotch guard's worse but yeah still okay uh they started doing a joke became obsessed with books and movies about killers uh even as he tried on the parts of victim and rescuer he always returned to the killer started dressing in fatigues right military fatigue tight black t-shirts like huberty uh started instigating more fights surrounding himself with kids who were as prone to violence as he was starting to look like uh he's going to become another huberty like he had caught whatever was wrong with him by the time he was 16 keith was doing what one source described as quote dirty jobs for cash partying constantly getting more violent he loved to fight especially bullies he was a man of his word he was a man of his word and then the law would catch up with him in 1992 after a violent attack involving some of his uh skinhead buddies he's hanging out with these guys now uh keith did some jail time for misdemeanor assault spent more than a few nights in lockup on some other charges but it did nothing to dampen the rage inside of him uh only one thing would make that feeling go away heroin uh although he started to see nader again dr nader mostly to appease his mom and keep her uh on the hook for more drug money he's drifting in and out of jails rehab clinics and drug houses when he is 22 10 years after the murder of keith he's in jail for more drug money and he's in jail for more drug and odd pain develops in his legs when he could no longer ignore it he goes to a hospital where they tell him he has a heart infection likely caused by intravenous drug use the prognosis is poor because he had waited too long the infection was too advanced after a month antibiotics doctors required keith's damage uh excuse me after a month of antibiotics doctors repaired keith's damaged valves in open heart surgery surprising everybody he lived and he's eventually released from the hospital and he goes right back to his angry strung out life back to heroin uh finally in 1996 12 years after james huberty turned his world upside down when he was now 23 he decided to get clean he spent his first week in the metropolitan state hospital non-medical detox aka the old-fashioned cold turkey method in the spartan wet room where they put the worst cases the ones who would puke shit and piss on everything in their delirium when he was ready he was sent to a halfway house where he met more people like him suddenly he realized he was not a freak there were other people people who had gone through really horrific things three years in his sobriety he met the woman he would eventually marry they had a son who helped keith learn that uh he not only wanted to be a better man he needed to be one but his problems were still not behind him the day his son keith was or his son was born keith was undergoing a second emergency surgery on his damaged heart he survived again he eventually went back to school got his ged started taking college classes uh but it wasn't like his trauma would allow him to simply go back to live a normal life for many years he would not set foot into a when he finally did he would sit with his back against the wall facing the door in other ways though his life somewhat began to look like a normal one after a while he got a job as a project manager for a southern california company that built high-tech high-end home theaters for wealthy clients he also started to dabble in oil painting preferring themes of light and dark inside and out and hail keith thomas good on him uh he still talked to dr nader every couple months no longer as a patient but as a friend a pioneer in childhood ptsd a veteran of dealing with later school years and he was a great friend of mine he was a great friend of mine and he was a great shootings mass murders the gulf and balkan wars even the world trade center attacks nato would move to texas and become one of the nation's leading authorities on the long-term effects of catastrophic trauma on kids keith not alone in how he struggled uh wendy flanagan that employee who had hidden the kitchen before she made it to the basement uh spent years struggling with drug abuse and suicidal ideation albert leos uh the employee who would uh leos uh the employee who had uh had to stifle his screams in the basement would decide to use his experience and become a police officer and later captain that was the changing moment of my life of what had happened i wanted to be a protector protect the community and help people leos later said but the memories had not gone away i can still see the mcdonald's there i remember everything like it happened yesterday well hail albert leos as well uh james's widow etna huberty would die of breast cancer october 1st 2003 at the age of 60 next year would mark the 20th anniversary of the killings slowly we have understood and accepted but we have not forgotten anything that happened said uh adelina hernandez omar's mother uh one more thing before we hop out of the timeline in march of 2014 the police executive research forum published critical issues and policing series the police response to active shooter incidents describing some of the changes that police departments made in the face of active shooters which went all the way back to how police had dealt with the san ysidro massacre these changes included policies and practices focusing on reducing the number of victims when an active shooter incident happens by engaging the shooter as a result of the police response to active shooter incidents describing some of the as quickly as possible and not necessarily waiting for swat or other special units to arrive additionally it was recommended that police fire and emergency medical services now conduct joint training designed to get medical assistance to gunshot victims as quickly as possible sometimes this involves allowing ems workers to enter warm zones before it is certain that the shooter or shooters have been apprehended and that will take us out of our timeline good job soldier you've made it back barely the san ysidro mcdonald's massacre what a nightmare on july 18th 1984 which should have been an ordinary afternoon in an ordinary mcdonald's a restaurant filled with parents getting their kids an early dinner retirees stopping on their way home teenage employees working the grills became a real life slasher flick but with guns instead of knives when james oliver huberty a 41 year old unemployed former welder security guard fucking dickhead entered with multiple firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammo without warning he opened fire on the people inside and around the restaurant targeting strangers indiscriminately on employees young parents kids even an eight month old baby for over 77 minutes the people inside the mcdonald's endured a war zone they tried to hide under tables flee into back rooms or simply to shield their friends and family members with their own bodies many survived but the aftermath living after a tragedy that nobody understood was a trauma in and of itself part of the reason that san ysidro massacre that this massacre was so horrifying for the general public is that they felt uh it felt to many not only like something horrific but also like something new for many americans in 1984 the idea of a man walking into a crowded restaurant and killing strangers without a clear political financial or personal motive was almost impossible to make sense of today most mass shootings don't come with a clean answer and many of us know that in many cases we can't at least not with perfect accuracy uh draw the connecting line between somebody's personal background what makes it so important to us and what makes it so important to us and what makes it so important to us and what makes it so important to us and what makes it so important to us to commit an act of violence and how they carried it out tendency sure but you know uh and indeed it seems like many shooters today actually rely on that part of the power they get is to take away life senselessly without any closure for the victims of their communities when huberty decided to walk into the san ysidro mcdonald's excuse me what followed was inconceivable to many violence had to have a reason right a trigger in the wake of the shooting people desperately tried to come up with some possible explanation for the massacre for why it happened how long it went on was Uh, had he been poisoned through years of welding and eating chips? cheap fast food was it the police's fault for not responding quick enough uh or was it mcdonald's fault for not preventing this somehow for not having better security forces uh was it the fault of the receptionist at the mental health clinic who had written his name down wrong in the end investigators never found a single point of failure that could explain or have prevented the massacre outside of huberty getting badly needed mental health treatment you know uh earlier but even that might not have worked sadly right it's not like there's a hundred percent success rate the shooting did help us as a society understand several key things we didn't know before uh first it showed that an active shooter can inflict catastrophic harm in a very short period of time and that when a shooter's mind is set on causing violence there's no negotiating with them whether that negotiation comes from police or from someone on the inside indeed before the 1980s police training largely revolved around containing a scene negotiating waiting for specialized units the assumption was that the suspect wanted something money hostage training training training training training training training the assumption was that the transportation, a way out. There could be some way of de-escalating the situation. Indeed, traditional police tactics typically emphasize surrounding locations, slowing things down. San Ysidro showed that every minute an active shooter remains unchallenged, that can mean more casualties. That lesson reinforced by later shootings ultimately contributed to the rapid deployment tactics used today. Second, it showed that mass violence could take place anywhere, not just a government building, a bank, or a place where a specific individual is congregated. Any place that was full of regular people going about their days could be targeted as a potential site for annihilation. Finally, San Ysidro foreshadowed something that would become tragically familiar in later decades. Mass shootings often leave communities without closure, explanation, or any way of feeling like they'll ever be safe again. Huberti died at the scene, left no manifesto explaining his actions, never faced trial. Families were left not only with immense grief, but with questions that would never be answered. But we did figure out that victims could be given psychological help counting, and community support. So how do we reduce the amount of mass shootings like these? The answer is pretty obvious, despite so many people stubbornly refusing to see or accept it. Stricter gun control is, you know, in addition to other things, but it needs to be the primary focus in my mind. If the age-old tired argument that criminals will always get the guns they want and more gun control only takes guns out of the hands of the good guys, then why doesn't any other nation in the world have as many mass shootings as we do? And why doesn't any other nation in the world have as many mass shootings as we do? And why doesn't any other nation in the world have as many mass shootings as the U.S.? In 2015, regional gun violence research consortium member Adam Lankford found that despite making up less than 5% of the global population, the U.S. has experienced 31% of global public mass shootings. That's fucking insane. By one definition, there were 109 public mass shootings in the U.S. and 35 public mass shootings in 35 other economically and politically comparative countries, such as France, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. between 2000 and 2022. The U.S. made up 35% of the global mass shootings in the U.S. and 35 other economically and 23% of the combined population of these 36 countries. However, it accounted for 76% of public mass shooting incidents and 70% of victim fatalities in those incidents. The U.S. has the world's highest rate of gun ownership among civilians with an estimated 120 and a half firearms per 100 people. That translates to nearly 400 million firearms in civilian hands. Second place, Yemen, 52.8 per 100, less than half as much. Are there other cultural reasons that lead to mass shootings? Yeah, sure. But to pretend that the sheer volume of guns, very lethal guns, very, you know, these aren't your fucking, you know, grandpa's guns, is not part of the problem of gun violence is insulting to the intelligence of anybody wanting to have a rational, non-emotional, calm, logical discussion about this. It is like pretending that opioids had nothing to do with the opioid epidemic. It's like pretending that the HIV virus had nothing to do with the AIDS crisis. I mean, come on. How many more people have to die before more rational discussions are held? Before, you know, real brainstorming is done? What if we required gun owners to take a mental competency exam every couple of years? If you want to own firearms, well, you got to meet with a licensed, trained therapist who can evaluate how fucking paranoid, angry, conspiratorial, or not you are. If you pass, you're good, right? If you talk about needing to settle debts with society, you're good. You're good. You're good. You're good. You're good. If you admit you frequently sit in your fucking recliner, staring at the door in a quiet living room, like a fucking maniac, go fuck yourself. All your guns, right? Like I mentioned earlier, they're, they're fucking confiscated and you have to go, uh, undergo further testing to maybe get them back. And maybe if you fail that testing, you know, there, there is no further evaluation. You just get a lifetime ban, right? Error on the side of caution. And if you're found to illegally obtain a firearm after that ban, then you go to prison for a long fucking time, right? So many of us are so tired of this shit. I know a lot of you will disagree. And if you have a counter-argument again, based on data and logic, not in catchphrases and hollow slogans, you know, I'd love to hear it truly. You know, I'd love more just to have less stories like this to choose from, right? Wouldn't you? Let's head to the takeaways. Number one on July 18th, 1984, James Huberty entered a San Diego near his apartment and quickly opened fire on customers and employees, people he did not know. Most of whom, uh, people he had never seen before. Just a massacre of strangers. Lasted about 77 minutes, leaving 20, uh, victims dead. Another would die the next day at the hospital before Huberty killed himself by a police sniper. If you include James and an unborn child, then the death toll is 23. At the time, the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history remains the deadliest mass shooting in California history. Number two, uh, the victims range in age from under a year to 74. Many were local residents, families eating together, and McDonald's employees working their shifts. I had no idea, obviously, that something like that could happen at a place where people worked, ate, uh, socialized, could be the site of mass carnage. Uh, some, like poor Victor Rivera, tried to persuade Huberty not to shoot, not knowing that in all likelihood, a severely mentally ill shooter cannot be reasoned with. Remember, if, and I hope to God you never are, if you are at the scene of a mass shooting, run, hide, fight, in that order. Number three, in the wake of this tragedy, and at a time before mass shootings were frequent and more understood, a lot of people wanted answers they were not going to get. In the end, very few would be satisfying. Police inquiries and court proceedings revealed that the police had not made any big mistakes, and McDonald's was not responsible for preventing an active shooter from entering their restaurant. Uh, Huberty's autopsy didn't offer much either. Only thing that really explains the shooting, and so far that there can be an explanation, is his long history of mental illness, his tendency to blame others for the problems he faced, and his access to and obsession with so many fucking guns. And how many times has this, uh, personality tendency to blame others before blame oneself come up in, uh, past serial killer, mass shooter, dirtbag episodes, you know? 99%? If you're somebody who never wants to take a good hard look in the mirror, uh, you might want to start. If you're always looking at others, you're not in good company. Number four, uh, many of the victims of the shooting, the ones who lived, had to confront parents, loved ones, and the community that expected them to be able to return to normal, and didn't know about the impacts of psychological trauma. One of them was Keith Thomas, an 11-year-old who had spent the week before vacationing with his best friend, Mateo Herrera, uh, Mateo's parents, Ron and Blyde. Ron survived the incident despite being shot multiple times, in fact, shielding Keith's body with his own, but Mateo and Blyde both died. In the years afterwards, Keith struggled with substance abuse, reactivity, anger issues, homelessness, uh, almost died due to those struggles, right? Twice. Thankfully, the pioneering work of some psychologists would eventually diagnose him with PTSD. He was able to get his life back on track. His heart seemed to hold. Uh, today we know more about what people go through when they experience these traumatic events, thanks in part to Keith. And number five, new info, uh, people cross the border between Tijuana and San Ysidro all the time, as we saw here, to visit friends, go to restaurants, see the sights, vacation elsewhere in the U.S. or Mexico. Uh, one reason for border crossing has been on the rise in recent years. Drugs are cheaper, right? Drugs are cheaper in Mexico, like pharmaceuticals. Uh, a federal government study found Americans who cross into Mexico can save about 60% on prescription drugs. It's a lot of money. And this is not just people who don't have insurance either. Uh, the study compared the best discounted prices available on a variety of drugs to the cash prices across the border. Uh, Mexican pharmacies not actually legally allowed to fill prescriptions unless they've been written by a doctor who's licensed in Mexico. Uh, but they gotta work around. Many large chain pharmacies employ onsite doctors who quickly examine patients, create treatment plans, and write those prescriptions. However, these are not always safe. In 2023, a study reported that counterfeit pills containing fentanyl, heroin, and or meth were sold at 11 different Tijuana pharmacies. That's terrifying. Uh, of 45 pill samples, nine sold as Adderall contained methamphetamine. Eight sold as oxycodone had fentanyl. Three sold as oxycodone contained heroin. But generic medication for stuff like blood pressure, oh, you're probably good. Go ahead and fucking roll those dice. Time shock, top five takeaways. The San Ysidro McDonald's massacre has been sucked. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for the help in making Time Suck. Uh, thanks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsey Cummins. To Logan Keith, helping publishing this episode, designing merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com. Uh, thank you to, what do they got, that fucking hot sauce? The, the elixir sauce. Uh, thanks to Sophie Evans for awesome research again. Thanks to the All Seen Eyes, moderating the cult of the Curious Private Facebook page. The Mod Squad, making sure Discord runs smooth. Uh, the people over on the Time Suck and Bad Magic subreddits. And now, update time. Updates? Get your Time Sucker updates. Start with informative, and then informative again, and then silly. This week's first message, from those sent in to Bojangles at TimeSuckPodcast.com, comes from military sack James Doughton, who wrote him a subject line of rape and abuse, never. Howdy, you mother-sucking, information-vomiting, dumb-dumb, educating, culty bastard. In the Fort Hood episode, you mentioned sexual assault, known as MST, military sexual trauma in the Army, and other abuse multiple times, and how it often was swept under the rug. Well, I got some shit for you. I was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, 3rd Brigade, 3rd Battalion, 269 AR. A couple of weeks after I arrived at my unit, we transferred a soldier from our company to the company next door, company being a collection of typically four platoons of soldiers. Companies make up the battalion as a collective. When the soldier arrived, he was hazed hard. Now, we were infantrymen. Hazy was normal and expected to an extent. This soldier was taken into a conference room with a higher-ranking soldier and another NCO. He was then raped with a broomstick. Rape with a fuckin' broomstick. The assault was caught on video from another soldier's phone that was spying through a crack in the door. The results of the investigation. The two offenders were transferred to other units on the same base. That soldier was separated from service by his choice. And I don't blame him, but that's it. No rank loss. No extra duty. Nothing. Another one, we had female soldiers in our battalion as medics. We had one, I will not name her. That was cool as fuck. But she dealt with so much sexual harassment constantly that I don't know how she stuck it out. She reported multiple soldiers for the vulgar shit they would say to her. And those reports never went anywhere. Female soldiers are disgustingly treated like second-rate citizens in army combat units. They are treated either like they are stupid and useless or like every dude there can sleep with them. They are underrepresented and underprotected. While male soldiers do also face sexual assaults, like I described, obviously female soldiers are far more likely to be abused. It is pathetic and revolting. Assaults and abuse in general are grossly underpunished in the military. I tell people regularly, just because someone is or was in the military does not make them a good person. I met plenty of absolute piles of garbage during my service. I have plenty more stories of abuse across the board I could share with you of all sorts. I refuse to apologize for my girth or length. Deal with it. James Doden. Pronounce it right this time, mushmouth. Oh, well. James, first and foremost, thank you for your service. And thank you for sharing that. Yeah, this shit just pisses me off so fucking much because, you know, I just think about, like, you know, especially as I get older, some young 18-year-old, I mean, just becoming an adult, a kid and still in so many ways, you know, maybe they come from a proud military family. Maybe they just have always loved the military. They just always wanted to be a soldier. Maybe they're exceptionally patriotic. Maybe they come from an impoverished background. They're trying to make something of themselves, to push things forward, to do something meaningful, to improve their station, their lot in life, to serve their country, and they enlist. And instead of being repaid with respect, gratitude, you know, they get a broomstick in the fucking ass. You know, from some sadistic bully and the bitch is too weak to stand up to him. It's just so despicable, right? Service members deserve so much better, deserve to be taken better care of by the government they serve, by their fellow servicemen and women, by their officers. Find me one fucking study that proves that getting hazed makes somebody a better soldier. Find me one study that shows women getting continually sexually harassed toughens them up, therefore makes our military stronger. This shit's just unnecessary, right? Shit that's been happening for too long already. There are just too many people and pieces of shit in the world. And it's all the more reason for the rest of us to work harder to not join their ranks. Remind others, that's not the way you have to be. Up next, skeptical sucker Andrew has concerned about a recent short suck expressed in a message sent with a subject line of Nordic suck. Hello, Dan and everyone at Bad Magic. I just finished a Nordic episode. I feel you left out something important. Take a look at their immigration policy. They have very strict policies on immigration and asylum seekers. I believe it would be easier to have all these free services when the people are paying for them in taxes but don't have incurred costs of free healthcare, housing, welfare, et cetera, for illegals. I don't mean for this to be political, but all sides must be looked at. Thanks and have an awesome week. Well, thank you, Andrew, for pointing this out. No, man, send in fucking whatever political. I'm not so fucking thin-skinned like so many people in society today. Yes, I'm not gonna be like, whoa, whoa, we don't agree. Oh, fuck. I'm so sick of that. I can't, I can't just fucking deal with people like that anymore. Those people, all of them can just fuck off. Personal life, podcast life, get the fuck off, you fucking bitches. But yeah, this comes up in a lot of discussions about why America couldn't possibly provide this or that for American people, right? Illegal immigrants. Here's my problem with this argument. There's a ton of data out there saying that this is a valid concern, but also a ton of data out there saying it's not. The research around issues like this has become so politicized. It's so frustrating. It's so unfortunate. And let me just share a quick example of what I'm talking about. A recent landmark, 2026 study by the Libertarian Cato Institute found that illegal immigrants reduced the federal deficit by $1.7 trillion over the 30-year period started in 1994. They argued that undocumented immigrants heavily subsidized the government because they pay into systems they are legally blocked from utilizing. They found, quote, every year since 1994 when data collection began, immigrants have paid more in taxes than they have received in benefits from the federal, state, and local governments. The fiscal benefits have continued to rise, reaching their highest level ever in 2023. And if you were to look up that study, right, there's a lot of data supporting their argument, but also you can look to the other side. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, very conservative group in 2023, found that illegal immigrants cost the nation $150.7 billion in 2022 alone, up from previous years. What accounts for the difference? Well, it's way too much to get into here. It would be its own subject and such a data-heavy, subject that a lot of people would probably be like, what? To sum it up as best I can, according to what the web gods tell me, most economic research finds that undocumented immigrants are a fiscal benefit to the federal government because they tend to be young and highly employed. They contribute tens of billions annually to federal income and payroll taxes, often paying into Social Security and Medicare benefits they are barred from accessing. Conversely, studies frequently find them to be a net burden at the state and local level, primarily due to education. To the localized costs of public K-12 education, emergency health care, and public safety. We could go around and around and around on this, but I want to share some other data that illustrates what I'm talking about that doesn't have anything to do with legal immigrants, but it does have everything to do about why we're not getting the benefits of these Nordic countries are. The current military conflict in Iran has cost the U.S. an estimated $100 billion in direct military expenses and counting, as I record this, according to internal Defense Department estimates. When including the U.S. military, including broader economic impacts, like higher borrowing costs, right, surging fuel prices, the total exceeds $130 billion. And the conflict thus far has accomplished exactly fucking nothing. And check this out. The federal government loses billions annually to improper payments and fraud, often tied to Medicare and Social Security. Watchdog and congressional audits frequently cite over $70 billion annually in improper payouts, including payments to the deceased. Add that to Iran, and, you know, in one year you have $170 billion in counting. One of the things I have argued for that the Nordic countries get is free higher education at the university level. The estimated gross cost to make all public higher education tuition-free ranges from $58 billion to $78 billion per year. Not housing, right, but just the tuition. Less than the cost of either improper payments or Iran, right? And I could go on and on and find ways to pay for other benefits. It's there. It's doable. I truly believe, backed by a lot of data, that the U.S. government could do a much better job in taking care of its citizens. And I say this because I love this country enough to want to make it better. Not because I hate it. I'm also done with that argument. Well, if you don't like it, just get out. Well, I'm sorry that you're fucking dumb. That's what you think. Fucking. I'm getting too old to deal with that level of fucking stupidity. No, people who fucking love something are willing to critique it and try and make it better. And if you don't understand that, I'm sorry, but you are fucking dumb in that regard. You truly are. And that's your fucking problem to deal with. But now let's lighten it up with something absurd. Sexy curious sucker Chanel wrote up the subject line of response to Carl Tanzer episode. Hey, Dan. Just listen to the weird-ass Carl Tanzer episode and the tangents about dick stuff reminding me of a story that you will fucking love. I'm a paramedic, so I can't tell you where or when, obviously, but there are no identifying factors in this story anyway, so it doesn't matter. That means you can use my name on a mind. One day in the fall, we received a call for a wellness check, which is like if you notice the mail piling up at your neighbor's house or you haven't heard from them in a while. The police will go in and check on them. This time, the neighbor saw his garage open and this guy had a nice car, would never have left it open, blah, blah, blah. Nosy neighborship. My partner and I pulled up and the gated community security officers were checking out the perimeter of the house with flashlights. They explained that the garage door, sorry, I just didn't know where this story was going, leads into the house, is unlocked, but they obviously didn't go inside, but they thought they heard moaning. Oh, dear. We wait for the sheriff's department and the fire department to show up and let me paint the picture. The sheriff's deputy was first. The lieutenant for the fire department was next. Me, the paramedic, then everyone else, my partner and the other people on the fire engine enter the home and this door in the garage leads into the middle of the kitchen. The sheriff's deputy takes his flashlight because all the lights were off and looks all over the kitchen and the living room to see if the patient fell or something needed help while the rest of us are standing in the kitchen still. A little creepy, right? Why were we in a stranger's house with all the lights off, with no weapons and only one cop? Good fucking question. For the plot, I guess. He walks over to a short hallway that has two bedrooms on opposite ends He makes it to the master and we hear him say something along the lines of sorry man. Oh, uh, yeah, man Uh now we're just checking on you Oh, okay. All right. Sorry to bug you. We're leaving. Just make sure you close your garage. Yep. Sorry. Bye And when this man turns around he almost loses it I'm talking face red like a baboon's ass and one single tear streaming down his face And making a shoo-in motion telling us to get out now. I know this shit has got to be good So I just played it cool security people were like is he okay? And I just said yeah, he's fine He'll be out to lock up in a few. Thank you all so much The security guard was like praise the lord in heaven. He's all right. Bless your hearts and stay safe Meanwhile, we all meet up behind the ambulance huddled up in a circle as if that's not weird at all And this is what the sheriff's deputy described He said when he walked into this man's room. He was in bed laying on his back facing the door Fat blunt in one hand and a rope in the other If you follow the rope from his hand It would lead you to a pulley System on the ceiling and back down to his dick where the rope was attached into some sort of dick harness thingy And he was pulling it not like jerking with it like pull and hold with enough strength and tension that one It looked painful and two he was moaning But obviously enjoying himself because why the fuck else would he be would you be doing that? The deputy said this man made eye contact and never let his up his grip He was white knuckling this goddamn rope that was tied to his pulley dick system While talking to a deputy With the blunt in his other hand The deputy said he just wanted to get the fuck out of there Told the guy to close his garage got everyone out of the house And you know what I said? Obviously why the fuck didn't you let me go in there? I need to know how this contraption works On the drive back to the station Of course I googled this phenomenon And I fell down a rabbit hole of men who cannot get off without pain Which led me down another rabbit hole of death grip syndrome What is that you ask? Oh, I'll gladly tell you Apparently there's a group of people that because of how they relate pain and pleasure There's a phenomenon where they can only ejaculate if they squeeze their penis as hard as they can Yep, it's a recognized syndrome by sex therapists And sometimes people end up literally choking their chicken so hard That they become desensitized to normal partner intercourse Like they cannot come from normal sex anymore They have to death grip their dick to come I hope you enjoyed that We can all collectively hope this man is having the time of his life Because we don't kink shame in this house Unless you're a pedo of course And you're a pedo of course Because then we should lynch you in the streets Cheers to you and the bad magic fam 3 out of 5 stars Wouldn't change a fucking thing With love, Chanel Holy shit, Chanel What a tale I try not to kink shame either But I also have what I call kink concern For some people's habits When they're medically unsound When they're unsafe I looked up death grip syndrome Yeah, it's real There's an easy fix for it Apparently in most cases Before I share the easy fix You can get it Not because you just have this Like You can get it Tendency towards pain But in some cases You're just not jerking off right Like you just never learned how to jerk off And you just fucking grab your dick way too hard And then you just do that Too long over time And you just basically You train your dick To only want to cum When you got a fucking tight ass grip on it And the way to fix this Is to leave your poor dick alone for a little while You just need to restore sensitivity To your abused rod Three steps Take a fucking break Step one Take a fucking break Abstain from masturbation And the shit that makes you want to masturbate Like porn For two to four weeks Allow your nerves to reset In your abused member Step two Use decent lube, shithead When you resume Masturbation Use high quality lube A nice lotion To reduce friction And increase sensitivity Right? Don't put fucking thick Nasty ass lotion Where you still got to Fucking death grip your dick Don't choke the fuck out of your shaft When you start back up That's step three Practice a new technique Using a lighter stroke Slower stroke That's it And you should be able to cum just fine in most cases Sounds like that dude wasn't just trying to choke his chick And he was trying to rip his head off He was trying to render it unusable I have a lot of kink concern for that guy Also, did he want to get caught? Seems like he did You know, if you have a fucking dick rope In your bedroom You would think that you would check all your doors first Before you get to dick roping Make sure the garage is locked Everything Thank you for that message Oh, and I wanted to thank I don't think Did I thank my previous Was it anonymous? Sorry, sorry, sorry I'm just going back here I wanted to thank you Oh, this is I'm recording a little bit late right now Andrew, I think Yes Andrew Andrew, I don't think I said your name in the initial Yes, I did Okay, skeptical sucker Andrew Andrew, I didn't want you to think any of my rage Or sarcasm Was directed at you I'm so glad you asked that question You seem like a super nice person You also have an awesome week Yeah, I've, I've, uh, you know Seen, seen these talking points discussed On the internet between some people And some people have no interest in a rational discussion And they just want to shout stupid shit So, sorry if that came across as directed, uh Directed towards you And now, I'll hit this button Next time, suckers I needed that We all did Well, thanks for listening to another Bad Magic production Uh, uh Be sure and rate and review Time Suck If you haven't already done so If you haven't already Uh, please don't blame the rest of the world For your problems this week Don't punish strangers For your refusal to deal with your own shit Including any mental health struggles Stop staring at the front door with a shotgun on your lap I'm looking for a reason to distract yourself From your own self-loathing By killing somebody else They're not the problem, you are If you're fucking doing that, you're the problem Get help, you fucking weirdo So others around you And yourself can keep on sucking "Bad Magic Productions" Let me walk you through a little bit more of Bloody Wednesday Because it is so terrible "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" I love the music! "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" Okay, all the guys are sitting in chairs Tied up again Still there "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" The teddy bear told him the first guy's guilty So he pulls the trigger butt "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" So now he's gonna walk to the next guy Skip ahead "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" Pull the trigger "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" Took a long time Bad acting "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" "Bloody Wednesday" I love that this trailer is almost four minutes long And it's literally just one scene With very little dialogue Oh he peed himself He's pee-peeing in his jeans He's not gonna pee-pee in the potty like a good boy Skip ahead Third guy "What's your verdict your honor?" "What's your verdict your honor?" "Not guilty" Oh hey Bear went with the not guilty "Not guilty" Uh huh "Are you sure Teddy?" Actually calls him Teddy "Not guilty" I feel like the budget for that entire movie was a tray of tuna fish sandwiches Uh here's what one reviewer online wrote "Bloody Wednesday's greatest flaw is that while it has a lot of interesting ideas, this weird little tale just does not have the funds necessary to pull much of it off. The acting is hit or miss, the cinematography is less than stellar, and the logic it uses to get from point A to point B is ultimately a failure." I feel like a very polite like uh you know they intended to be polite like a polite way of saying that basically the movie's only problem is that the entire movie is terrible in every single aspect. So bloody Wednesday, have at it.