Thinking about the San Ysidro McDonald’s Massacre on its 41st anniversary
Memorial to victims of the San Ysidro McDonald’s Massacre in San Ysidro, California
Thinking about the San Ysidro McDonald’s Massacre on its 41st anniversary
On July 18, 1984, as I was frying burgers in a McDonalds in Indianapolis, a former funeral home embalmer named James Huberty visited the San Diego Zoo with his family. Afterwards, he took them to a McDonalds in the Clairmont neighborhood of San Diego, California. During this time, he told his wife that his life was “effectively over” and that he would be “hunting humans.” Then he left for another McDonald’s. This location was just blocks from where he lived in the border town of San Ysidro, directly south of San Diego. At 3:56 p.m. he walked into the restaurant, several blocks from the apartment where he lived. He was armed with a 9 mm Browning pistol, a 9 mm Uzi carbine, and a 12-gauge Winchester shotgun. What proceeded was the deadliest mass shooting up to that point in U.S. history. Huberty began firing, indiscriminately targeting customers and employees. He systematically moved through the building, reloading multiple times and firing over 250 rounds. During the 77-minute siege, he killed 21 people and injured 19. At 5:17 p.m. a police sniper shot Huberty dead through a window. During the summer of 1984, as I continued to work my first job, I dwelled on the shooting obsessively. I read all the articles that came out in The Indianapolis Star and Time. At the time, I was also obsessed with Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden and Civil Disobedience. These two obsessions came together in a piece of fiction I wrote the following spring, titled Bearing Witness, in which I imagine sneaking under a table in the McDonalds and reading Walden during work hours, an act that brings Thoreau to life. “What has man done to create this insanity?” he asked me. “Look around you.” In the story, I looked around and saw the world through his eyes. That is, the storm brewing outside the plate glass windows. Of course, none of the patrons noticed it because they were too busy ordering or consuming food. The story ends with a San Ysidro-style shooting in which I’m killed along with most of the McDonald’s patrons. It’s a piece of fiction awful in its pretentiousness and successful only as a lens into that period in my life. The piece fails to shed any light on the shooting itself let alone the harm done to the victims, their families, and the people of San Ysidro. The restaurant was never reopened in that location. It was demolished and replaced by the San Ysidro Higher Education Center. A memorial was commissioned on that ground, in front of the Center, consisting of 21 hexagonal pillars, in marble, ranging in height from one to six feet. Each marble pillar represents a victim. A bronze placard placed in front of the marble lists their names. On July 17, 2025 when I visited the memorial, pots of flowers were resting on many of these pillars, in preparation for the 41st anniversary of the shooting. The fence surrounding the memorial was lined with pictures of the deceased, ranging in age from 8 months to 74-years-old. Together with the flowers, the pictures of the victims transformed the abstract aesthetics of the memorial into something moving. Nearly all the victims’ names were Hispanic in origin. Whether this mattered to Huberty at all is still a matter of debate. But he was no doubt aware of his victims’ Hispanic background. Huberty lived for a brief time in Tijuana, a time beset by both financial and personal problems. You cannot NOT be aware of the presence of Tijuana in San Ysidro, as the city is visible from the former McDonalds, rising from the hills directly to the south. Looking south towards Tijuana is not a bad angle to look back on the summer of 1984, I suppose, now that there are a dozen or so James Hubertys weaponizing rage and resentment against immigrants in the White House.
—Dan Grossman
