‘For the enjoyable of it. I simply do not like Mondays’: The chilling justification for homicide by America’s first mass shooter Brenda Spencer, 16, when requested why she was firing in school kids

It was colder than usual that Monday morning in late January 1979 and there was frost on the ground as nine-year-old Monica Selvig arrived at Cleveland elementary school in San Carlos, a pleasant suburb of the California seaside city of San Diego. 

Out of the blue, Monica felt a sharp pain in her left side, and was thrown to the ground. She had been struck by a bullet. 

Just moments later, another bullet struck eight-year-old Mary Clark in her stomach as she walked up the school path.

It went straight through her and bloodied her white top. Mary, who was incredibly shy, did not want to cause a fuss so she made her way into school and was eventually herded to safety with a group of other students.

At the same time Greg Verner, aged eight, was about to climb the steps to his classroom when a bullet pierced his green Toughskins jeans and hit his pelvic bone.

Though the small popping sound in the air was not immediately recognisable as gunfire, and while it was unclear where the danger was coming from, some children instinctively ran for cover, jumping behind parked cars or ducking into the office and under a window. 

Some made it upstairs into a classroom but many were stranded in the open or stood and watched and waited to be told what to do.

Ricocheting bullets echoed through the covered walkway that ran through the middle of the school but these shots could not be heard by those still at the gates waiting to come in.

Ten-year-old Crystal Hardy had just been dropped off by her mother when she heard shots. 

‘I thought some boys near me had firecrackers or something,’ she later recalled.

As she looked around curiously, she was struck through her right wrist. She fell to her knees and began to cry, blood pouring from her arm.

Moments later the youngest victim, seven-year-old Audrey Stites, snatched at her right arm as she walked up the school driveway with her older sister Madeline. 

They both stopped and saw Monica and then Greg on the ground.

Audrey was struck from behind through her bright puffy green ski jacket and into her right elbow. 

They stood in shock for a moment before noticing other pupils running for cover and hearing screams all around.

Audrey ran crying and bleeding to her classroom. She had not noticed a second bullet had burned the inside of each thigh.

Madeline avoided injury only because the bullets passed through her coat pocket and were stopped by her binder and pencil case.

It was still unclear exactly where the shots were coming from, but it was apparent they were not from the school. 

The shooter was outside the grounds and targeting pupils as they walked in.

Though no one could know it at the time, what was happening was the first murderous school shoot-up in US history. 

There would be many more since then but Cleveland elementary on Lake Atlin Avenue is the original.

In fewer than three minutes, five had been shot. Meanwhile, more and more pupils were arriving, unaware of the threat.

Twelve-year-old Michael McDaniel heard gunshots from down the road as he walked towards the building and saw little puffs of dust on the embankment next to him. 

‘It didn’t seem real,’ he said.

Nor did it seem real to Burton Wragg, in his first year as principal of Cleveland. 

He was having coffee with teacher Daryl Barnes in the office when they saw Monica and Greg on the ground and heard the whistle of bullets hitting the ivy outside the window.

Stunned, they watched the scene unfold before realising with horror that a sniper was firing on the school. 

Wragg dashed outside, making a beeline for the first child on the ground with Barnes closely in tow.

The pair ran directly into the view of the shooter.

‘Duck, you guys! Crystal, run!’ was the last thing Wragg said as he was shot twice in his chest. He fell, spinning into an ivy patch.

Coming up behind him, Barnes could see the principal was dead. 

With more shots ringing around him, Barnes continued down the drive and picked up wounded pupils Monica and Greg. 

Then he turned his back on the shooter and made his way to safety, dropping them at the nurse’s office.

Blood was gushing from Monica’s abdomen as the nurse went to work as best she could. Barnes ran to tell school secretary Mary Smith to call the police ASAP.

Her desk faced the school’s front window; she had seen the carnage as it was unfolding and was already ringing 911. 

She could also see where the shots were coming from – a house directly across the road from the school.

From his room, school janitor Mike Suchar saw what was happening and darted out to help the wounded children lying on the ground outside. 

Affectionately known as Mr Mike, he was a sturdy US Navy man who served in World War Two and Korea and was a popular figure. 

Pupils saw him as a big strong protector who would do anything for the school.

Barnes shouted to Mr Mike as he dashed into the line of fire, but he was too late. 

As Mike was lowering a blanket over the body of his boss, he was knocked to the ground by two bullets. 

‘My God, I’ve been hit!’ he cried out as he fell into the shrubbery.

Children continued to arrive, unaware of danger. Eleven-year-old Kathy Voeks was wandering up the walkway when she saw Mr Mike as he gasped for breath.

She heard Barnes’ cries for children to take cover and ran unharmed up the steps to her class. 

Jennifer Engle, ten, recalled: ‘I saw the principal and he was lying flat on the ground. He wasn’t moving. And then I saw the janitor and he was groaning. 

‘Mr Barnes told me to run and as I was running, I heard this shot from a gun.’

It was extraordinary how many parents had no idea what was happening. 

It was reported that one mother dropped off three of her children at 8:35am, which would have been the middle of the heaviest gunfire. 

She knew nothing of what had happened till she was back home and told by a friend. For whatever reason, the shooter did not fire at parents or their cars.

In her classroom, teacher Miyoko Miyashita was two buildings away and also unaware of what was going on. 

‘I heard a bang-bang like firecrackers but never gave it much thought,’ she said. 

She was alerted by a colleague who ran from the scene and together they went looking for as many children as they could find in the playground and pulling them into classrooms. 

‘After all the kids were secured, I locked my door and we stood closely together in the back of the room away from the windows,’ she added.

Outside, teacher Wanda Carberry was blowing her whistle to attract the attention of arriving children. 

In the madness, she was trying to direct traffic and keep them out of the line of fire. ‘The sniper seemed to pick them off easily as they ran towards the school,’ she said.

Christy Buell, nine, was playing with a classmate on the grass in front of the school when she heard a popping noise and was shot in the stomach and lower back in rapid succession. 

Blood began to soak her Winnie-the Pooh T-shirt. ‘It felt like my whole body was falling asleep,’ she remembered.

Crying, ‘I want my Daddy, I want my Daddy!’ she crawled up the walkway keeping as low as she could and reached a classroom door. 

The teacher heard her and let her in as bullets thudded against the door. She narrowly missed being shot a third time, later finding a bullet hole in her hood. 

Still bullets were flying everywhere and the miracle was that dozens more were not hit.

The kindergarten class were unaware of the danger and beginning to assemble in an orderly line at the door to troop out into the playground and into the direct vision of the sniper before they were stopped just in time.

And still the shots were ringing out. Nine-year-old Cam Miller strolled up to school, heard the noise and thought everyone was messing around. 

He had a smile on his face as a bullet tore through his left shoulder and just missed his heart. 

He managed to get round to the back of the school, saw his teacher and told her, ‘I think I’ve been shot.’ 

She opened his puffy blue coat and saw blood all over his clothes.

By now, scores of police were flooding the campus. The first emergency call came into the main city police station at 8:25am.

All available units were given the 11-6 call – the police code for gunshots. 

Officers took up positions in the parking area, helping pupils to find cover as shots rained in on them from across the road.

In trying to get to the principal and the janitor lying in the open, Officer Robert Robb was hit in the neck, the bullet nicking his carotid artery and lodging in his spine.

As Officer Ted Kasinak arrived on the scene he spotted a large white refuse truck. 

He waved it down and drove it into the school grounds, blocking the shooter’s view of the school entrance and providing a shield for officers to get more children to safety.

‘A volley of shots was fired at us in the front of the school,’ he recalled. ‘Rounds were striking the front of the building and around us.’ 

As he peered out from behind the rear wheel of the massive truck he noticed movement at the front door of the house directly across the street from the school.

Meanwhile at the offices of the San Diego Evening Tribune, all available reporters were being dispatched to cover the huge breaking story.

Senior editor Bernie Hunt, a lifelong journalist from Britain (and incidentally my father), threw a phone directory to rookie reporter Steve Wiegand and told him to start calling houses near the school to track down witnesses.

The first number Wiegand called was the house from where the shots were being fired.

He struck lucky. ‘When you are fishing for witnesses through the directory, you get very few results,’ he recalls. 

‘So, just getting someone to answer the phone on my first call was a win.’

He was even more surprised that what he heard was the voice of a young girl. She identified herself as Brenda. 

Wiegand asked if she had heard the shooting or if she knew anything about it. ‘Yes, I saw the whole thing,’ she replied.

What Wiegand could not know is that this was the sniper Brenda Spencer, 16, and she had paused her shooting to answer the phone.

He asked if she knew who did it and where the shots were coming from. 

Brenda said she saw everything – it was a 16-year-old kid and the shooting was coming from 6356 Lake Atlin Avenue.

‘Isn’t that your address?’ he asked, thinking she may have been confused by the question. 

‘Sure, who do you think did it?’ she responded with a laugh, before hanging up the phone.

Wiegand’s first thought was that she was a kid fooling around so he rang back to ask to speak to an adult. 

The young woman answered the phone fairly quickly and Wiegand told her he was a reporter and wanted to ask a few questions.

Brenda agreed to chat and the two began an extraordinary conversation in which she openly confessed what she had done.

She told him she started shooting about 8:30am, as school started. She said she used a 22-calibre rifle her father gave her for Christmas. 

For years she had practised shooting with a pellet rifle at cans and other small targets in the back yard or on trips to the mountains. She had become a brilliant shot.

Her father had decided she was ready for a rifle of her own and also as a reward for her hard work at school. 

He gave her a 10/22 Ruger carbine semi-automatic rifle with a scope and 500 rounds of ammo. She promised to take care of it and always keep it clean and in its case. 

The Ruger 10/22 rimfire semi was more than half her height with an 18.5ins barrel and hardwood stock. 

Weighing only five pounds, even with its four-power magnification scope it was easy to hold and load its 10-round rotary magazine.

Ruger advertised it as the perfect gift for an inexperienced or young shooter. 

With virtually no recoil and inexpensive ammunition, it had became America’s most popular rifle, with over a million sold since it was introduced.

‘I just started shooting. That’s it. I just did it for the fun of it,’ Brenda continued. 

‘I just don’t like Mondays. Do you like Mondays? I did this because it’s a way to cheer up the day. Nobody likes Mondays.’

When Wiegand asked why she opened fire on people she did not know, she responded: ‘What’s so different about that?’ 

The girl spoke about her father, giving his full name and place of work but said she did not know what he did there. 

She said he was Wallace E Spencer and worked at San Diego state university but she did not think he was a professor.

Brenda added she was worried what he would think and what would happen when he found out about the shootings.

‘My dad’s going to kill me when he gets home and finds out about this. He’s going to flip. This will really blow him away,’ she said.

Wiegand told the girl she might have shot three or four innocent people. 

‘Is that all?’ she responded with disappointment. ‘I saw lots of feathers fly.’ She was sure she had hit more.

In the middle of a sentence, she stopped to say, ‘Oh-oh, somebody’s moving around outside.’

Police were approaching the house. ‘If he gets close enough,’ she continued, ‘I’ll shoot him too.’ 

Moments before hanging up for the second time, Brenda said: ‘I nailed me a good pig and I want to shoot some more.’ 

Wiegand said: ‘Her demeanour in both calls was calm and quiet, no shouting or hysteria. 

‘There was no slurred speech or much emotion at all. I believed what she was saying.’

After she hung up, Wiegand was instructed to start writing up the story of his conversation with the sniper for the first edition and another journalist, Gus Stevens, was given the number and told to call back and keep the girl talking. Brenda answered again.

Stevens introduced himself and to his surprise she was still interested in talking. She told him she had never shot anyone before but she had been in fights. 

‘They usually don’t last long. I usually open up their skulls with a cleaver,’ she said. 

She added she had been in trouble with police before for burglary and shoplifting ‘but it never went to court. I always got off’.

Stevens then asked why she was shooting at people. ‘I don’t know. It just popped into my head. About last Wednesday, I think,’ she said.

She began talking about her older brother and sister; she also spoke about her mother and father being separated. 

She made it clear that she was alone in the house. ‘Do you think I would be doing it if someone was home?’

Stevens asked if she had chosen her victims at random or shot at particular people. 

She replied: ‘No one in particular. I kind of like the red and blue jackets,’ before hanging up for the final time.

In this unassuming California suburb, an armed stand-off was shaping up. 

Two people were dead, the principal and janitor, seven small children were wounded, none with life-threatening injuries though in several cases it had been a close call.

A police officer was critically wounded and fighting for life. Scores of pupils were in shock. Dozens missed death by a whisker.

The sniper – that teenage girl whose only explanation was that she didn’t like Mondays – was holed up in her house while outside a SWAT team was assembling.

The odds of a peaceful resolution did not look good. One wrong move by police, one miscalculation of Brenda’s hair trigger mood swings and there could be an even greater bloodbath – as is revealed in Monday’s Daily Mail.

As the news came out, Geldof hastily scribbled lyrics for hit  

On the morning of Brenda Spencer’s rampage, Bob Geldof and Johnnie Fingers from Irish band The Boomtown Rats were driving in LA.

They were meeting Paul Rappaport of Columbia Records at a radio station. News of the shooting was on local radio as they were travelling. 

Once they arrived at the station, they asked for the teletype machine printouts of the latest reports.

The band were promoting shows as Geldof was desperate to crack the US market. Columbia had strongly suggested he write songs that would relate to Americans.

Geldof and Fingers went away and hastily penned I Don’t Like Mondays, which Geldof then sang for Rappaport over the phone. 

Rappaport told him: ‘This is exactly what you need. You should go out and play this for people now.’

Geldof said he wrote the single because the crime appeared to be peculiarly Californian. 

It lacked any reason or logic and was pointless, much like most of America to him.

The song topped the UK charts for four weeks. It also won Britain’s Ivor Novello Award for Best Pop Song and Outstanding British Lyric of the year, beginning with the lines: ‘And the silicon chip inside her head / Gets switched to overload / And nobody’s gonna go to school today / She’s going to make them stay at home.’

By coincidence, the Rats’ first two shows in the US were in San Diego. 

Less than a month after the event, they debuted the song around the corner from the crime scene.

It sparked considerable controversy across the US, particularly as the video featured a classroom of children in uniform. 

Columbia was urged by Spencer’s lawyer not to release the single.

He also wrote to local radio stations urging them not to play it. 

‘It is extremely insensitive to the victims. It makes fun of a tragic situation and a very sick girl,’ he said.

San Diego rock station KGB-FM did play it on August 14, 1979, to determine what locals thought. 

‘We got 400 calls from listeners and the poll ran 3-1 against,’ said station manager Jim Price. 

‘Based on that, we do not plan to play it again and urge other stations to follow suit.’

Other San Diego stations agreed. ‘I don’t think it merits play,’ KMJC, a family-orientated station, said. 

‘The subject matter and what it will remind people here of is very morbid. We will not play it even if there is an overwhelming response to it.’

I Don’t Like Mondays was released as a single in the US in October 1979, followed by the band’s full album.

KROQ in Los Angeles was the only radio station in southern California to sporadically play it.

Despite enormous sales in almost all other English-speaking countries, the album containing the song failed to break into the top 100 in the US Billboard chart.

The single peaked at 73 on the Hot 100 singles chart.

Adapted from I Don’t Like Mondays by N Leigh Hunt, to be published on April 9 by Mirror Books at £10.99. © N Leigh Hunt 2026. To order a copy for £9.89 (offer valid to 18/04/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.