Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 518 - San Ysidro McDonald's Massacre

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

From the troubled life of James Huberty to the horrifying events inside a San Ysidro McDonald's on July 18th, 1984, we explore how one of America's first modern mass shootings - still the deadliest mass shooting on California soil and the deadliest one perpetuated by a lone shooter in US history at the time - forever changed America's understanding of public violence.  Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com  Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :) For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste) Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast. Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 sound, 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 friars. Some little kids screaming as they launched 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 is McDonald's with his 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 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 Pedro McDonnell'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 TimeSuck. This is Michael McDonald, and you're listening to TimeSuck. You're listening to TimeSuck. 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 glory 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 100 of these babies available, so be sure to grab yours quick over at bad magic productions.com if you want one, because these are limited edition, specialty item discount codes will not be valid. The elixir sauce guys

are the bit elixir guys. Chris Paquel, till time suck aptitude, his hot sauce company has been taken off lately and I have been loving watching it. Very cool to see his hot sauce in stores all around here. We've kept in touch.

We're buddies. And yeah, it's very cool. I also want to give a massive congratulations to this year's Cummins Family Scholars recipients, each of the following people will receive $5,000 towards their ongoing education. So way to fucking go. Ogeno Chuko, Ija Ife, Kimberly Schoalter, Austin Gregerson, and Marola Yukim. And a big thanks to Kara and the Scholarship America team for administering the scholarship

again this year. It's so wonderful to have a team of professionals behind the scenes making sure this process is smooth and fair for every applicant. And we don't play favorites. Finally, long-time friend and artist Will XX, a guy who's tattooed a bunch of tattoos on me, is posting flash art for tattoos for this year's camp in the Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp Facebook group.

And I believe the camp has pushed back the deadline to buy tickets a little bit. Did not know that when I was recording a while back. Yeah, the camp's decision, so they were nice. Check badmagic productions.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 going to 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? Whether it's the more reality TV-oriented, stuck on a desert island story,

the story of somebody escaping a massive natural catastrophe, or the story of someone to come face-to-face with a murderer and make it not alive. 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. A 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 the participants read a story

about a protagonist who was stranded, in some grasslands, for example, 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 menial 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. But really, this is interesting, right?

Well, this phenomenon sometimes called survival processing tells us what we do 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 the situation and I'm thinking about how I'm going to survive. 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 helped 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, you know, animal predator, starvation, rival groups. Today, however, the survival stories that dominate our media landscape are often, 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 and nonprofit research group that tracks shootings 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 15th,

there have been 215 mass shootings so far, according to Wikipedia. The latest being in Louisville, Kentucky, yesterday, July 14th, when five people were injured by gunfire in the Park Hill neighborhood when a confrontation in a park resulted in a shooting. According to another source, 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, there have also been a lot of trainings in places like schools or 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 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, 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 fuck ton 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 Nevese Valente, entered a study session in a brown academic, Brown University, academic building, and open 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-Velente, who had been a graduate student at Brown University, studying physics,

20 years earlier, also fatally shot Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nino L'Oreo at L'Oreo's home. Later, it would come out that L'Oreo and Nevis Valente had been physics students at Portugal's Instituto, Superio, Technico, many, many years before. That engineering course was fully gifted students, recalled classmate Felipe Maura, but Nevis Valenti 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 Nuno Morayas another classmate

told the news outlet Publico that Nevis Valenti and Lorero 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 of course, he was much more theoretical.

Nuno 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, Nevis 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, again a Felipe Maura, on Facebook. I could tell that he wasn't enjoying being at Brown University. Scott Watson, a classmate at Brown,

said Nevis Valenti 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 Neve-Volente's warped mind two 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 happened 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 mask on 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 to work. Or, for those with children, learn emergency response plans 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 lines of, wait, 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 you can. Better to be right that it wasn't anything serious if you did kind of hesitate mentally and then be embarrassed for, I don't know, for running, than 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. One should identify to 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 all about who the assailant is and you don't want them to think that you are the threat that needs to be taken down. But what if the gun fire 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 zizi 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 it works in Fortnite. I don't think that'll work in real life. If you are escaping, your top priorities 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 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, you know, thick barriers, etc., things that stop bullets. Concealment is stuff like drywall, bushes,

you know, 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, right? Don't over-explain. But what about other scenarios? Scenario's where it's not safe to run. In these scenarios, it is best, you know, 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 assailant in a locked space,

if possible, locate an area with big 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, right? Stay out of sight. Silence your phone.

You know, 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 the door is closed. Think about windows, sight lines. Anything that would alert someone outside the room to the presence of someone inside the room. If you happen to find 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 shooters need for power and control. So try your best not to freeze. Easier's had 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 in 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, ooh, 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 that 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 upgrade installed.

But then on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2018, 19-year-old Nicholas Cruz opened fire on students and staff at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people, injuring 18 others. Publicly 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 problems. one is it's expensive according to a non-profit group formed by a major lock manufacturer for example upgrading in 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 dollars and so a cottage industry of cheaper fixes sprung up the swift shield barricade device invented by a roofer offer schools quote unparalleled safety, the company claims. Sells for one-twentth 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 address the blatantly obvious problem of gun access.

This new industry was recently portrayed in the 2025 HBO documentary Thoughts and Prayers. The $3 to $4 billion a year school shooting preparedness economy features, as the documentary shows, bulletproof desks that can double as shields, blackout shutters to block visibility in the 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 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, that, that, uh, that, uh, 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. Haven't done a lot to defend us, training or not. I don't care how many simulations you 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 the 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 110 pounds, maybe 5 foot two. 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 manufacturers and sells innovative emergency medical and trauma equipment used by first responders, military personnel, and wilderness rescue teams, 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-produced 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 fearmongery, a little predatory, praying on parents and teachers' worst fears to make a quick and dirty buck.

other people figured 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 walk in 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 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. Uh, we lived in a much more innocent society. A society that was much less capable of imagining these events.

You know, innocent in some ways, right, when it comes to these kind of events. Uh, a society where, you know, the,

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, uh, which occurred on July 18th, 1989, just,

just not as many. They weren't as frequent. Uh, 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 when did it start? One source traces mass

shootings all the way back to the 19th century in America. On March 28, 1891, a man with a double-barreled shotgun fired on a crowd of students and faculty attending a school concert, an exhibition in Parsons Hall School, House, and 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 didn't kill anybody.

Just a few days later, April 9th, 1891, 70-year-old shift 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 were 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 to two mid-show 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 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 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 Unru wasn't interested in which movie he was going to see.

he was 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 Coens, neighbors who live next door and owned the drugstore, 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, P-08, a 9-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 6th, 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 the wrench. Everyone had seen him on 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 stuccle building and began blasting away at the apartment with machine guns, shotguns, and pistols, even though some in the crowd

estimated to be around 1,000 people were in the line of fire. Before they did anything, took a phone call. Journalist Philip Buxton of the Camden Courier Post, having heard Unruh's identity reported over police radio, retrieved Unru's number from a local telephone directory, dialed it, and he answered. And what Buxton later described as a strong, clear voice, Unru, answered the phone, and then he and Buxon had the following brief, weird conversation. Hello? Is this Howard? Yes. What's the last name of the party you want? Unru?

"'Who are you? What do you want?' "'Unru, 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 asks, 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. Who is this? Sorry, I'm in the middle of shooting a bunch of people. I'll have to call you back. In the ensuing chaos, a 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, Unru called out he was surrendering. He then shouted he was leaving his gun on the desk. He walked out the back door with his hands held high. Local police were so unprepared for a mass shooting threat that Detective Ron Conley simply brought home Unruh's luger would not be returned to the Camden County authorities until the 1990s. Unruh was patted down, cuffed as Gawker 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 Unru, what's the matter with you? You a psycho?

And Unru flatly replied, I am no psycho. I have a good mind. Well, he was kind of a psycho, actually. He would be declared legally insane, would spend over 60 years in a psychiatric hospital dying at the age of 88 there. Search of his department 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,

the times you're 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. How do we jump from an atmosphere,

excuse me, which mass shootings were 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. 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 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 didn't dramatically increase,

you know, these recent firearms generally more lethal, something driven by significant improvements, significant improvements, inaccuracy, bullet technology, fire rates, magazine capacity primarily. At the same time, guns became more culturally embedded in American identity. They weren't just tools for hunting or defense, but also, you know, they've been used in war experience. 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 Gunsmoke.

Watch those a ton as a kid. Portrayed guns as symbols of courage, manliness, self-reliance. The kind of thing that a man could use, that a 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 Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge. He'd occasionally served as a tank gunner and received accommodations,

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. We actually spoke about him, I think, pretty recently in our episode, and 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 Unru, Whitman had a military background.

He was a former U.S. Marine who had enlisted to escape his abusive father and ultimately earned a sharpshooters 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, 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

as it specifically relates to today's topic? It means that the San Ecedro 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 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. Shrap on those boots, soldier.

We're marching down a time suck timeline. James Oliver Huberti, born on October 11th, 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. the metro area right around 400,000.

Founded in 1805 by 1942 when James Hubertie was born, the city's population was quite a bit bigger than the 70,000 in 2020, actually. There was around 110,000 people, a population 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, Hercules engine company would build approximately 750,000 engines for military vehicles. Timken opened the Timken Ordinance Company in 1941, manufactured roughly 80,000 gun tubes. The Dieboldt, 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 and nearby Masselin, 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, Ikel, Evalon, Hubertie, was a homemaker. Don't meet a lot of Eichols anymore. And both of his parents were said to be very religious, very strict, heavy on the spare of the rod, spoil the child stuff.

And despite his family seemingly being a solidly middle class, at least from what sources described, early life was hard for little James in a way that life was simply harder for a lot of folks back then. For example, 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. Or it attacks motor neurons, the nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain stem,

the 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, 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 tell-tale 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, in 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. years. Comparatively, James was lucky. He only had to wear a brace, helping the polio weakened 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 in 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 mechanical gait. Even after James recovered enough to take off the brace, he still would walk with a limp. He would walk with a slight limp for life. And life was about to get worse. In 1950, when James was just seven years old, Earl Hubertie,

purchased a 155-acre farm in Mount Eaton, this little tiny rural community. 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 Eichol 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 and they repented soon. The end times were coming fast. The world sold full of sinners, 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 Ikel. 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, quote, 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 one. 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 continue 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 when he came to religion and his reluctance to make friends.

Bertha Eggeman, a neighbor who lived about 10 miles down the road, would recall the 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 name of these people? James thought about joining his basketball team at school.

He was 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 that many kids at Waynesdale High School, where he attended. Waynesdale High School in the Apple Creek, Ohio, town of less than 1,200 people, only about 700 people at that time, and many of them Old Order Amish. And those kids stopped going to school in eighth grade.

They didn't go to public school. They didn't play basketball. So by the time he was a senior, most of his public school classmates barely paid attention to him, 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. So what did James plan to do with his life? his extended family, they were so fervently religious

that many of them hoped James was going to go into seminary and studied 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?

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 kind of God was that? They're worried about this. God's a real fucking monstrous mother. who has a real hankering for smite and the ever-lover and shit out of his finest creations. What's going on there?

In 1962, Hugh already enrolled in Ken's local Malone College, a private Christian university, founded in 1892 by Walter and Emma Malone, is a small co-educational Bible Institute, called the Cleveland Bible College originally. Pretty fundamentalist, to this day, incoming students required to sign a so-called community agreement, which stipulates amongst many other things. 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 kind of a college. One where the education maybe is not so grounded in science. I imagine back in 1962, college

was, you know, pretty fucking hardcore straight edge. So despite studying sociology, James did not really escape a culture of strict religious doctrine, but he would soon. He would leave him alone. 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. So now we got a guy who doesn't understand his peers. Peers don't like him. Quiet. Withdrawn. Fucking love shooting guns

a lot. Mommy issues. A lot of anger. Maybe he's pushing down. And now he wants to work around dead bodies because he can't stand a living. nothing to be concerned about. 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. 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. Canton's funeral director, Don Williams, Huberti'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 by your kid. He died unexpectedly. Blah, blah, blah. You want to look like he did before the accident. Well, look. I'm going to 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 my way. Let me get back to slapping your kid's corpse around,

lady you know maybe had that kind of uh fucking bedside manner uh despite don's concerns hubert he finished his internship and the ohio embalming board you can you fucking imagine by the way sorry mortician talking you that way uh that'd be good way for them to die uh despite don't's concerns hubert he finished his internship and the ohio embalming board licensed him in nineteen sixty six 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 it pretty well. 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. They looked a, boring to talk to. These were not two people smoking joints,

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 looked 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. They married in a private religious ceremony, and moved into a small, tidy house in Masclan, Ohio, next to Canton. James worked in a funeral home for two years before opting become a welder for a firm in the nearby Akron area town of Louisville.

He worked for that firm for two years before securing a better paid job welding, 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. He also took night courses back at the Lone College until he earned a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1976 Would not help him understand the world

The couple would eventually have two daughters 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 approximately the equivalent of $187,000 today in terms of overall purchasing power. So he was killing it. Making that kind of money allowed him and his wife to buy a three-story home in an affluent section of Maslin, though that house would burn down in 1971, don't know why. Soon after, James and Etna bought another house on the same street. Clearly they like the neighborhood.

And they use 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 the pastor

who married James and Edna 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 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 temperate bay

a lot of anger he would snap from time to time mainly on Edna and the children as the marriage went on, Huberti started to become more and more verbally and then physically abusive. Start to slap and then punch his wife, started to punch her more often, also beat his daughters, sometimes even did shit like hold knives to their throats apparently.

On one occasion, Edna 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. She would then later say, though, that he had assaulted her many times but only hit her once. Hmm. beginning to 1976

Edna began to attempt to persuade James to seek counseling but he refused instead his paranoia deepened and now he got some snarling German shepherd guard dogs fun 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 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 coming from the Huberty House at night. They would come to find out that James had built a large shooting range in the basement. So that's a fun fucking neighbor. The weird, angry wife and kidbeater taking night classes at a Christian fundamentalist college

now has a gun range in the basement. Also, 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, was not watching TV or reading a book, not having a pleasant conversation with his wife and or kids. 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. Other guns decorated the walls around James. This guy, at this point in the story, he was starting to remind me of William Foster. Michael Douglas' character In 1993's falling down. Great movie. A disgruntled, unemployed defense worker who abandons his car

in a traffic jam. He's having problems with baby mom and he just fucking snaps. Supposedly James and I inspire Foster's character but I wouldn't have been surprised if he had.

This is a clip of him snapping in a place called Whammy Burger that looks a lot like McDonald's. Pull down a 9mmmm 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 that customer is 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. Hey, I'm really sorry to. How comes the gun. Calm down. Just calm down everybody.

Sit down. Sit down over there. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. This is James. This is James. But actually, James is much anger. Angrier than Michael Douglas' character here. But this is the kind of guy, James is.

James apparently had so many guns. All of them loaded with a safety off, laying around his house. According to one family acquaintance, a guy named Jim Aslan. Hubert'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 huberti home sometimes because the huberties 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 a fucking writing down a list 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 some day he would need to settle them uh he's a fucking he would need to settle them uh he He used this terminology when his daughters got into a squabble with some local girls, for example, encouraging his daughters to fight these girls physically. 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.

Stay away from his kids. Stay away from his kids. 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 statement. the reporting officer said a very belligerent James would 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, He already believed her. Meanwhile, Edna kept the Maslin House and pristine order, and at least in the early years of 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' disorderly conduct charged,

Edna herself charged, with four counts of aggravated menacing for waving a browning 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 in a plea agreement.

The next year, in 1982, when James Hubertie, I just turned 40, his already fragile mental state crumbled further. Let's find out how, after our second to two, mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors. Hope you heard some deals you liked. Okay, now let's head to 1982. When James Huberty has just turned 40 and his 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 coworker would later remember the violence, or that violence was now closer to James' mind more than it ever was. He said that if this was the end of his making a living for his family, this coworker said later,

he was going to commit suicide 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 to 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 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's situation like this are so tricky. Etna will later claim that James had a nervous breakdown

after the layoff. He was in a dark place. When life was going well, now life is not going well. James' nervous breakdown looked a tainty 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. Those forces included, not limited to, 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. 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 that 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 things, you know, Jane was worried about.

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 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, he would tell her that she should have just let him do it. And sadly, in the grand scheme of things, he was right. She should have let him. Would have saved a lot of innocent lives. but instead James decided to sell their six apartment building which brought them $150,000 a lot of money back then equivalent to almost $390K now but with a mortgage still to pay two growing kids

obsessive need to buy every gun ever fucking put on the market 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 sorts both are injured in a traffic accident.

Exactly how seriously, not specified either, but apparently in the weeks that followed the accident, Huberti noted an aggravation to some kind of neck pains he'd endured since childhood. Old polio flare up, maybe. I don't know. 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. 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 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'd never really specified how they were going to do that.

but that didn't stop them from moving there. In the summer of 1983, the Huberties applied for residency in Mexico, and they got it just like that. They would then sell their home, make another $12,000 cash in September, with the buyer assuming the remaining $48,000 mortgage. James was confident that a better life was waiting in Tijuana.

We're going to 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. Why are you moving to Arizona? I don't show people who's boss. That's why. Okay. All right. Well, I won't be visiting you. The Huberti family moved to the Mexican border city of about two million living in the urban area now,

but only around a quarter of that back in October of 1983. They moved quick, leaving all but their most essential possessions in storage in Ohio. James, of course, ensured he brought his huge collection of guns, ammunition, and survival supplies. You know, got to be prepared for the big battle. It's always around the corner. Down in Tijuana, James continued to hate his life. 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 Deseedro District of San Diego. Despite Edna 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 Anasidro, where the Huberties were the only Anglos and 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 minorities. Why the fuck did he move to Tijuana? He didn't care for living around Latinos. Oh, yeah, because he's bad shit insane. And his mental health is getting ever worse because he has 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, he's 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. He has a lot of training with guns. 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. 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. He 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've got to 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 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? 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 ship from Ohio, and the Huberties moved again, this time to Avril Vias, a Dowdy's stucco department building, a block off Ecedro Boulevard where they paid just $450

and rent. Looking out the window, you could see at McDonald's down the street. It wasn't 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 instability 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.

Other sources, general physical instability, 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. James was devastated.

Perhaps 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 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 that 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. Maybe they co-parent the kids after some family therapy, some sessions to rebuild some trust. 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 a new social circle that doesn't include gun-obsessed, paranoid, continually angry, conspiracy nuts. 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, Huberti 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 Schuberti. And since he had seemed very calm, so calm 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 due to other people who seemed to have needs more urgent than him. A judgment call that 99, 99 times out of 1,000 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. When he got back from his mystery trip, about an hour later, Hubertie, Etna, Zelia, Cassandra, they had dinner, they bite to a nearby park. He seemed calmer than normal, actually. After the kids went to bed, Hubert and Edna watched a movie together. Three days later, after again, seeming like, 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. Kubidy appeared to be in a good mood as he left. The judge had dismissed the citation, so he'd won. He and his family then headed to the San Diego Zoo. But then as they walked past the animals, Hubert he told Edna he believed his life was effectively over. When she asked him about the mental health clinic he had 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 Edna goodbye. She asked him where he was going and he said, hunting, hunting humans. The ominous comment did not phase 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 a 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 huberti 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 to write one but because the receptionist had written down his name incorrectly as shuberty nobody by the name of Huberti had contacted the clinic and they didn't connect the dots, right? There's a small chance that the carnage that follows could have been avoided had it not been for a typo.

Meanwhile, Huberti got into his black mercury marquee and drove in his duffel bag where his browning P35 high power 9mm pistol, a Winchester, 1,200 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. He then turned into the parking lot of the McDonald's, just 200 yards from his apartment, the one he could seat through on the window, 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. The week of vacation with Matteo'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, or never had a friend, excuse me, like Mateo Herrera. They shared a little boy's 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 him. 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 clothes, that meant she was gone a lot. Dad doesn't seem like he was really around, you know, much. he wasn't in the area, I don't think, at this time. She'd already been married three times before Keith was in fifth grade, had a steady stream of boyfriends when she 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 L.A. 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 Yota T-shirt. Fuck yeah, bro. The force was strong and little bit. man and Keith knew 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's 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 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. Blyde was in the 1980s equivalent of one of today's crunchy moms. 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 Blythe's alfalfa spout sandwiches and the comforting, warm atmosphere of their home. They spent so much time together that Ron and Blide 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 and 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 in 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 Jacero 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 Ensonata visor lower and studied the shining bracelet Mateo had given him. It was a chain

with a small silver plate bearing Matteo's name, the school ID. Adorable, right? Little kid friendships like this are so fucking cute. 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 San Yedro.

The roadside suddenly familiar again with American hotel marquees, franchise, break shops, billboards, and English. Some of these billboards are advertising food. As it turns out, after wait 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 out the freeway onto San Jacer Boulevard, the main drag, and 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 Blyde took the boys' orders. Keith loved these new things

called chicken McNuggets with sweet and sour sauce. Oh, dude, me too, bro. They're like crack. You also love the fries? I mean, McDonald's, they do have some tasty-ass salty fries. Before the food came,

the boys scampered into the play place where other children were already playing. 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 to town to some place at a McDonald's. I don't see many of them anymore. A few minutes later, carrying their loaded trays of fast food, Ron and Blyde took a corner booth inside the restaurant to the play area where the hungry boys quickly joined them. Blyde 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 and child out of his way as he entered through the door, set his canvas 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. John, especially like Neva, she was a good manager, firm, but kind of silly. She would tell John to talk to those patties, make them cook faster.

And she wasn't planning on being a McDonald's forever. She got married just a few months before, to her chiropractor, her 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. Some place where the worst thing that could happen was a kid might puke. Somebody might blow up the bathroom.

Somebody might yell you for not getting enough fries, you know, in their fucking basket or not put enough pickles 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 going to shoot you.

But when Hubert he pulled the trigger, nothing happened. The gun jammed. as Huberti inspected his shotgun Neva Kane walked toward the service counter to Arnold 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

You know maybe everybody lives Crazy how a couple little things A typo at a mental health clinic A quick misreading 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 seemed 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, Hubertie fires his shotgun at John Arnold, wounding the teen in the chest and arm before ordering everybody to get on the ground. Huberty then called everybody in the restaurant, quote, dirty swine Vietnam assholes, even though literally no one there was Vietnamese, 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, tried to persuade Huberti, not to hurt anybody else. Victor had come to McDonald's with his wife, Maria, their four-year-old daughter, Maria, because McDonald's was Maria's favorite restaurant. In response, Hubertie 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, yeah, Maria and Maria, they would both be injured, but both would survive. Now I was 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. 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, directing in Hubert's path. Jackie Wright-Reyas, a hungry and pregnant 18-year-old, have 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, still the light of her life. You know, she thought she could work

hard, make a better life for them. He thought that too. Coming to McDonald's with her friends and family was an easy, cheap way 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 Pena, as best she could, but Hubert just looked down on them and started firing. He first killed Jackie's friend, 19-year-old Maria Colmenero, Silva, 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 Hubert 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 pulling blood in wails. Huberty shouts angrily for little Carlos to shut up.

But when the baby won't stop screaming, Hubertie aims his pistol and fires a single bullet into the baby's back, killing him. Meanwhile, Mario Lopez and his wife, April, had just finished eating and taken 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 was sitting nearby Huberti 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 towards the door nudged it open

the boy toddled to safety my God how lucky they were to survive that unscathed 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 Huberti, who was now marching towards the booths, towards the Herrera's, little Keith Thomas, right, fresh back from that vacation. At first, Keith had no idea what was going on. There had been so many fireworks. Then, Senada, 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. Blyde 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. Blide screamed. Blide hungered at Keith's feet, and Matea was bawled 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, Blyde said. Keith turned to face the wall, 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 Blyde and Mateo are quiet and still. And Hubertie's not done, not even close. Nearby, three women are doing their best to hide. 24-year-old Guadalupe del Rio lay against a wall.

she was shielded by her friends. 25-year-old Gloria Ramirez, a 31-year-old. Arisdelsi Vargas. Huberti advanced and started firing. Guadalupe hit several times. Gloria, not hit at all. Arisdelzi 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 Arrestelzi will die the next day, the only person fatally wounded who made it to a hospital first before they passed. At another booth, Huberti killed 45-year-old banker Hugo Vasquez, with a single, or Vasquez, with a single shot to the chest. It's likely that everyone was alive, was 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. Kind of nearby, two miles from the one where Hubertie was currently waged in 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

She stopped at the drive-thru window Notice shattered windows, the sound of gunfire Looked through the drive-thru, saw Huberti, Thinking fast, she reversed her car Until 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 405 p.m., a Mexican couple, Astolfo, and Marcella Felix drove toward one of the service areas of the restaurant. There was shattered glass everywhere, but Estolfo assumed there was some kind of construction going on. This belief was reinforced when he saw Huberti walking towards the car to him with his big sack and workwear-like outfit. He looked like a kind of repair man. But, of course, he wasn't. Hubert fired his shotgun and Uzi at the couple and their four-month-old daughter, Carlita, 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 Huberti's line of fire after all those hits. And Estolfo 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 Estalfo and Marcella into a nearby building. miraculously 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, 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,

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 was like yeah sure seemed like a normal day for while it was a taste of the summer they were all so excited for after a long year at school 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 mcdonalds 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 Hubertie. He had seen them, and now he opened fire. Joshua Coleman fell to the ground as bullets ripped through his back, arm, and lake. Then there was another spray of bullets, and David went down. Both David and Omar would die on the scene.

Only Joshua Coleman, seriously wounded, would survive. Huberti then noticed an elderly couple, 74-year-old 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

who had been widowed when Miguel and Aida's son had been fucking decapitated by a propeller in an airport accident. So what's tragedy in this family? After visiting with her and their two small granddaughters, they washed a load of clothes at a laundromat in Ysidro, stopped to 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, Hubertie fired his shotgun. gun, 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, executed 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 and a lot. He got a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He looked up to see a man, Huberty, open a side door

the restaurant, the Uzi slung across his chest, the two men eyed each other, and then Huberty moved aggressively. The SWAT trained officer ducked behind a parked pickup truck as Huberty 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.

Huberty retreated inside his other police units swarmed the scene. officers deployed immediately imposed a lockdown for six blocks around this McDonald's, simultaneously they established a command post and stationed a 175 officer officers at various points in the area, making sure Huberti could not make a successful escape. Meanwhile, Lozario 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 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 and become the gold standard for how to respond in America to the 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 Huberty 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 a 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. A 21-year-old Paulina Lopez, 19-year-old Elsa Borboa, Fiero, 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, the 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 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 the 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. And 17-year-old Albert Lios, 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 Hubertie 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 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, a 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. She'd been sitting out with Gloria Gonzalez and Michelle Carncross, both also dead. At one point, Aurora Pena, just 11 years old and shot, mind you, a girl who would quietly lay 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?

Right? 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 him that Huberty 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 north. They finally got a hold of him around 430, by 445 SWATSW, 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 the McDonald's parking lot. Etna called a police told him everything she could about her husband, including that he owned 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 p.m., more than an hour after Huberti's first shot was fired, he walked in after parking his car at 3.56 p.m.

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 to 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 gunmen 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 changes. 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 Huberty, they had to go for it.

Moments after the second green light was given, Hubertie shot out the restaurant's front window along San Ysidro Boulevard. Cops fired two shots back, but both missed. By this time, Huberty 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 of 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 517 p.m., Hubertie walked from the service counter toward the doorway close to the drive and window of 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. The bullet entered Hubert's chest, severed his aorta just beneath his heart, exited through his spine, leaving a one square inch exit wound, and sending Hubertie 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, the charge of officers entered the restaurant, led by a police sergeant who raised his gun at Hubertie's body. Nearby, a wounded girl picked her head up. Sergeant asked her if Hubertie was the man responsible for the mass slaughter. She nodded.

As a precaution, an officer turned Huberti's body face down. They handcuffed 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 camouflage 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 talked to the combat-booted men

who were budging bodies on the floor, and then he realized that these men were cops. Keith wriggled around. Mateo and Blyde were slumped under the bench, both seemingly asleep. Blyde 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, pulled him out from underneath the table. Keith 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 bled. 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, ambulance where medics were treating a woman who had 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 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. Joss 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 families of the victims

before the police managed to contact them. When his parents, Miguel and Iida Victoria, were two hours late bringing him as Berger Ricardo, who had heard of the massacre from newscasts, jumped in his car and drove fast towards San Hesedro. Police stopped him to the restaurant where he spotted his parents' car in the parking lot and was pretty clear what had happened. Adelina Hernandez, 11-year-old Omar's mother, learned of the killings from a neighbor who called to ask if she had 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, Richard 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 stanch their own wounds 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.

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 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 in Blyde'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. Right? 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 Mattio 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 students, his mom took him on a Mexican cruise, just the two of them. She thought it would be good for him.

him a chance to get him out of the surroundings, a constantly reminded him of the carnage he'd experienced. The nightmares hadn't subsided, though, and he still couldn't sleep. And one night in 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 James. What had everybody missed in the hours, days, and years led up to what was a 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 DeCanton 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? Like that's that fucking tick a lot of my in-laws have. He had a lot of guns in his house. okay. You 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 win, okay? 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 it might get back to them, that, you know, you.

you were the one who ratted on them. I don't know. It's a very, very tricky situation. Etna, for her part, told her reporter that she regretted thwarting her husband's futile suicide attempt a 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 Huberti, James' father. Day after the massacre, reporters visited him at his farm and Mount and eat in Ohio. They found out that Earl was a well-like, 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. Arch rival fast food chain Burger King also temporarily suspended all forms of advertising. The nearby Black Angus Steakhouse and Nightclub, unfortunately not nearly as cool and didn't do that. 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 Night Club, 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 on 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. I 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. It's real butter and real bacon for just $9.99. And if you bring in a receipt for McDonald's, and literally it can 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 sell no dope beverages in Mickey D's. Anywho, everyone who's not obviously nutter than a pile of squirrel shit and armed the teeth, is welcome with the new Black Angus Steakhouse of Night club right down the street from that McDonald's. Two blocks up on the ride, 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. Yeah, that was fucked up. I didn't like that. That was zero class. Zero class. By the people at Black Angus Steakhouse.

I know it was fucked up for me to do, but this episode is so dark I needed to try and break the tension. my God. Woo! 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 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 Ancedro 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 Isidro 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 Hubert's corpse, but did discover elevated levels of the metal's nickel and cadmium, likely remnants of his days as a welder, but most welders, of course, don't do what he did. Huberty's body cremated on July 23rd, 1984, without any kind of religious ceremony, which is good. His ashes were returned to Edna, later interred in his home state of Ohio. That's a bummer. I think she should have given him to the families of his victims. See if anybody wanted to pour him into a toilet, shit on him.

Meanwhile, following discussions between community leaders and McDonald's executives, a decision about the San Jacero McDonald's was reached. on July 24th, it would not reopen. Meanwhile, Joan Crock, widow of McDonald's founder Ray Croc, needed, or excuse me, ceded a fund for survivors and victims' families with 100 grand of her own money, and then the corporation added another million. And that is equivalent to over three and a half million today.

Good on her. It's not like she pulled the trigger or did anything at all to share responsibility for a madman walked into her restaurant. Donations would eventually top 1.4 million, right? 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 a impromptu protest from some San Ysidro residents and donors, Aetna Huberti received the first payout from this fund with the company maintaining she was a victim too. August 2, 1984, San Diego Police Chief,

William Cullender held a press conference to disclose the results with 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. police officer arrived and Huberti's death. Why hadn't they done something faster?

Coulinder 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 spiderwib by bullet holes. He also emphasized the eight-minute delay between the passing of the instruction authorizing all law enforcement personnel to kill Huberti and his death made no difference to the final death toll. All of Huberti's victims had been dead by that point. Collander 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. If 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 Hubert'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 mind, was a racial one since many of the victims were Hispanic, right? And he was white. But the police maintained correctly. Hubbardi's massacre was not racially motivated, just happened to take place in a primarily Latino area. Cullinor said he didn't like anybody. Yeah, accurate. The renovated restaurant was demolished.

I mean, I know he was fucking racist, but he fucking hated everybody. The renovated restaurant demolished midnight, September 26. 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 on one of their locations. They were a victim of James, completely senseless rage to. Following the closure and demolition of the restaurant, McDonald's donated the ground to the city with the stipulation that no other restaurant could ever be built at 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, Etna filed a $5 million wrongful death lawsuit against McDonald's and James' former employer

Babcock and 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's work. Fuck off, Etna. 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 Edna and the girls gone?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, life was not easier for them in the wake of the massacre. In the weeks after the incident, she and her daughters received numerous death threats, which is fucked up, forced them to temporarily reside with the family friend. All three would attend counting sessions for more than nine months. I feel especially sorry for his daughter as being born into that shit. The family initially relocated from San Jacido to Chula Vista, whereas Ali and Cassandra enrolled in school under her. assumed names. One year later, the family moved to the community of Spring Valley in San Diego

County, where Edna 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 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 been 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 the teddy bear the place to run now is there

what do you think of teddy bear's gonna help you huh what this movie doesn't appear to be lit at all uh oh he's unzipping the back of the teddy bear we got you now the thugs are very slowly approaching him. Only one of them has a bat. No their weapons. Oh, he had a big gun

and hit them the teddy bear. Now the thugs are like, oh shit. What, dude? Hello, balloons. 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, now... Now they're all tied up. All that's left is to pronounce judgment. You've got a chance. Silence! They're sitting in chairs

All over Tied to chairs He takes five bullets Out of his six shooter He's gonna play Russian roulette with them And the teddy bear will decide Who lives And who dies

Who fucking scored that movie in 10 minutes Who got paid a sandwich To score that movie? Oh It's It actually is so bad it might be unintentionally good. Back in 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 could have couldn't have possibly stopped Hubry, 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 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 sculpture designed by former Southwestern college student Roberto Valdez, who would say this about the design. T-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 care for young classmates. He didn't feel like he could relate to them anymore. One day, 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 and abandoned trailers or empty poolhouses, living on shoplifted food mainly. He then developed his own interest in guns.

he smoked up 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 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 ward. His mom is getting desperate, nothing's working. She begins to seek out specialist, to her credit.

Good for her. People who might be able to reach Keith, she finds Dr. Robert Pinus, a UCLA psychiatrist who was just beginning to investigate the unexplored mysteries of the effects of violence on children. Pine News 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 understood PTSD back then like they do now. Pine News 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 to 75. Pinews immediately assigned one of his key age, 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.

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. He still skipped classes, though. Still picked fights, still did drugs. He soon graduated from Huff and Scotch Guard to drop an acid. I would argue Huff and Scotch Guard's worse, but yeah, still okay.

They started doing a bunch of speed, snorted a bunch of coke, became obsessed with books and movies about killers. 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, started instigating more fights surrounding himself with kids who were as prone to violence as he was.

Starting to look like he's going to become another hubridy 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, and then the law would catch up with him.

In 1992, after a violent attack involving some of his skinhead buddies, he's hanging out with these guys now, Keith did some jail time for misdemeanor assault, spent more than a few nights and lockup on some other charges, but it did nothing to dampen the rage inside of him. Only one thing would make that feeling go away, heroin.

Although he started to see Nader again, Dr. Nader mostly to appease his mom and keep her 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 McDonald's massacre, an 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 of antibiotics, doctors required Keith's damage... Excuse me, after a month of antibiotics, doctors repaired Keith's damage 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.

Finally, in 1996, 12 years after James Hubert, he 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 he not only wanted to be, 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. 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 restaurant of any kind. 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. He still talked to Dr. Nader of a couple months, no longer as a patient, but as a friend, a pioneer in childhood PTSD, a veteran of dealing with later school shootings, mass murders, the Gulf and Balkan Wars, even the World Trade Center attacks. Nader 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. Wendy Flanagan, that employee who had hidden the kitchen before she made it to the basement, spent years struggling with drug abuse and suicidal ideation. Albert Leos, the employee who 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,

Laos later said. But the memories had not gone away. I can still see the McDonald's there. I remember everything like it happened yesterday. We'll hail Albert Leos as well. James's widow, Etna Huberti would die of breast cancer October 1st, 2003 at the age of 60.

Next year, it would mark the 20th anniversary of the killings. Slowly we have understood and accepted, but we have not forgotten anything that happened, said Adelina Hernandez, Omar's mother. One more thing before we hop out of the timeline. in March of 2014, the Police Executive Research Forum published critical issues in 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 Ecedro 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 quickly as possible and not necessarily waiting for SWAT or other special units to arrive. Additionally, it was recommended The 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 dinner public is that they felt 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, draw the connecting line between somebody's personal background, what made them want to commit an act of violence and how they carried it out. Tendency, sure, but, you know.

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 Huberti decided to walk into the San Jaceto 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 Huberti on drugs? Had he been poisoned through years of welding and eating cheap fast food? Was it the police's fault? We're not responding quick enough,

or was it McDonald's fault for not preventing this somehow, for not having better security forces, 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 hubrity, getting badly needed mental health treatment 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. 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, transportation, a way out. There could be some way of de-escalating the situation. Indeed, traditional police tactics typically emphasized surrounding the location, 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. Huberty 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 will 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 the U.S.? In 2015, Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium member Adam Langford 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 and 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 33% 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, you know, 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 students? 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. It's 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 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 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 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 of the takeaways. Time shock. Top five takeaways.

Number one, on July 18th, 1984, James Huberty entered a McDonald's restaurant in the San Diego near his apartment and quickly opened fire on customers and employees, people he did not know, most of whom people he had never seen before. Just a massacre of strangers. Last in about 77 minutes, leaving 20 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, 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, people worked, eight, socialized, could be the site of mass carnage. Some, like poor Victor Rivera, tried to persuade Huberti 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 reveal that the police had not made any big mistakes and McDonald's was not responsible for preventing an active shooter from entering their restaurant. Hubert'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 an obsession with so many fucking guns. And how many times has this personality tendency to blame others before blame oneself come up in past serial kill?

mass shooter dirtbag episodes, you know, 99%. If you're somebody who never wants to take a good, hard look in the mirror, you might want to start. If you're always looking at others, you're not in good company. Number four, many of the victims of the shooting, the ones who lived had to confront parents, loved ones, in a community that expected them to be able to return to normal and didn't know about the impacts of complex 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, Mateo's parents, Ron and Blide. Ron survived the incident despite being shot multiple times. In fact, shielding Keith's body with his own, but Matteo and Blide both died. In the years afterwards, Keith's struggle with substance abuse, reactivity, anger issues, homelessness, 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. Today, we know more about what people go through when they experience these traumatic events, thanks in part to Keats. Heath. And number five, new info, people cross the border between Tijuana and Santa Cedar all the time, as we saw here, to visit friends, go to restaurants, see the sites, vacation elsewhere in the U.S. or Mexico. One reason for border crossing has been on the rise in recent years. Drugs are cheaper. Drugs are cheaper in Mexico, like pharmaceuticals. 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. The study compared the best discounted. prices available on a variety of drugs to the cash prices across the border. Mexican pharmacies not actually legally allowed to fill prescriptions unless they've been written by a doctor who's licensed in Mexico, but they've got to work around. Many large chain pharmacies employ on-site 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. Of 45 pill samples, nine sold as Adderall, contained methamphetamine. Eight sold as oxycodone had fentanyl. Three sold as oxyconode contained heroin. But generic medication for stuff like blood pressure,

oh, you're probably good. Go ahead and fucking roll those dice. Time suck. Top five takeaways. The Sanisidro McDonald's massacre has been sucked. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for the help of making time suck. Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins. to Logan Keith, helping publishing this episode,

designing merch for the store at bad magic productions.com. Thank you to, well, they got that fucking hot sauce, the elixir sauce. 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 your Discord run smooth, the people over on the TimeSuck and Bad Magic subreddits.

And now, update time. Get your Time Sucker updates. I will start with Informant. informative, and then informative again, and then silly. This week's first message from those sent in to Bojangles at timesugpodcast.com comes from Military Sack, James Doughton, who wrote it was a subject line of rape and abuse, never. How do you mother sucking information, vomiting, 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, Third Brigade, Third 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 the broomstick. Rape with the fucking 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 can share with you of all sorts. I refuse to apologize for my girth or length deal with it. James Dodin, pronounce it right this time, mush mouth. 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 I get older, some young 18-year-old, I mean, just become 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 to themselves to push things forward, to do something meaningful, to improve their station, their lot in life, to serve their country. And they list. 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 him up therefore makes our military stronger. The shit's just unnecessary, right? Shit that's been happening for too long already.

There are just too many 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 up the subdubid line of Nordic suck. Hello, Dan, and everyone a bad magic. I just finished the 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 health care, housing, welfare, etc. 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 skin like so many people in society today. Yes, I'm not going to be like, what? No, what? We don't agree. Oh, fuck! I'm so sick of that.

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, a legal 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. It doesn't have anything to do with legal immigrants, but it doesn't have everything to do

about why we're not getting the benefits of these normal. 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 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 in one year you have $170 billion in county. 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 can 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 who you think. 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 it with 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. Remind 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, I don't 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 neighbors saw his garage open, and this guy had a nice car.

Would never have left it open, blah, blah, blah. Nosey neighborship. My partner and I pulled up, and the gated community security officers were checking out the perimeter of the house. house with flashlights. They explained at the garage door. Sorry, I just know where the story's going. Leads of 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, and 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 lines of, sorry man.

Oh, yeah, man. 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 is streaming down his face and making a shoe in motion telling us to get out. Now I know this shit has got to be good.

So I just played it cool. The 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 and heaven, he's all right. Bless your hearts and stay safe. Meanwhile, we all meet up behind the ambulance, huddled up in a circle. 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 thing.

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 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 therapist, and sometimes people end up literally choking 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 pito, of course, because then we should lynch lynch you in the streets.

Cheers to you in the bad magic fam. Three out of five 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 tendency towards pain, but in some cases, you're just not jerking off right. Like you just never learned how to jerk off right. 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 come when you've 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 for masturbation. And the shit that makes you want to masturbate like porn for two to four weeks. Allow your nerves to reset and your abused member. Step two, use decent lube, shithead. when you resume masturbation, use high-quality

loop, a nice lotion to reduce friction and increase sensitivity. Don't put fucking thick, nasty-ass lotion where you still got a 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.

You should be able to come just fine in most cases. Sounds like that dude wasn't just trying to choke a chicken. He was trying to rip its 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 think, 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 this, I'm recording a little bit late right now. uh, 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.

Uh, yeah, I've, uh, you know, seen, seeing these talking points discussed on the internet between some people and some people have no interest in rational discussion and they just want to shout stupid shit. So sorry if that came across is directed, uh, directed towards you. and now I'll hit this button I'm suckers

I needed that we all did well thanks for listening to another bad magic production be sure in rate and review time suck if you haven't already 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 problem. Get help, you fucking weirdo. So others around you and yourself can keep on sucking. And Magic Productions. Let me walk you through a little bit more of Bloody Wednesday because it is so terrible.

I love the music. Okay, all the guys are sitting in chairs, tied up again. Still there. That was a teddy bear. The teddy bear told him the first guy's guilty. So he pulls a trigger butt, rush he relish, He got lucky. So now he's going to walk to the next guy.

Let's skip ahead. Guilty. Oh. Guilty? Guilty. Pull the trigger. You hear nothing. It's taking a long time.

Bad acting. 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 peeping in his jeans. He's not going peeping in the party like a good boy. skip ahead third guy

what's your verdict your honor what's your verdict your honor oh hey bear went with a not guilty not guilty uh huh are you sure teddy

actually calls him teddy i feel like the budget for that entire movie was a tray of tuna free 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 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