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Home/ stevenwarran's Library/ Notes/ April 23, 1999, The Washington Post, Echoes of a Different Schoolyard, by Tamara Jones,

April 23, 1999, The Washington Post, Echoes of a Different Schoolyard, by Tamara Jones,

from web site

Brenda Spencer

700+ words 

The morning was unusually cold, they still remember.

Cam Miller was wearing the down vest he had just gotten from Santa Claus. Another 9-year-old, Christy Buell, was pretending to ice-skate on the frosty grass before the final bell rang. The principal was enjoying a cup of coffee in the front office when he heard a popping noise and charged outside, assuming he would find little boys setting off firecrackers.

What he found instead were children screaming, crying and bleeding on the ground as a teenage girl who lived across the street raked the schoolyard with bullets from her .22-caliber rifle. 

"I don't like Mondays," 16-year-old Brenda Spencer calmly explained to a reporter who reached her by phone during a siege that would last six hours. 

It was Jan. 29, 1979, and in a tranquil San Diego suburb, Grover Cleveland Elementary School had just become ground zero in an undeclared war. By the time the country's first high-profile school shooting was over that morning, the principal and a custodian were dead, and eight children were wounded. 

The smallest victims are grown now, their lives changed in ways both subtle and searing. What on that day had been unimaginable -- that a school could become a killing field -- is grimly familiar. When another school shooting is on the evening news, be it Jonesboro or Paducah or Pearl or Littleton, Cam Miller finds himself watching for the fearful faces of young survivors. 

"I think it's really sad all those kids are going to have to go through what I've gone through all my life," he says. 

Cam is 29 now, a strapping, dark-eyed man with scant resemblance to the fourth-grader with a bowl haircut whose picture appeared in the newspapers above the word "victim" so long ago. He remembers his mother dropping him off that morning, and suddenly feeling something like an electric shock next to his heart. He blacked out briefly. A 7-year-old girl led him around a corner to a teacher. Cam saw the principal and the custodian both lying on the ground, and thought, with childlike logic, that if he could just make it out of that square of sidewalk, "it will all go away." It never did. 

The bullet struck Cam in the back and exited his chest, missing internal organs but leaving scar tissue that still hurts two decades later if he stretches the wrong way or lifts weights. There are emotional scars, as well. Because he never saw his attacker, because he never had a chance to defend himself, however futilely, Cam grew up with an overwhelming fear of leaving his back exposed. 

"If I go somewhere, like to a restaurant, I have to sit where I can avoid having my back to the window," he says. As a child, he suffered terrifying nightmares of Brenda Spencer "popping out of the bathtub to finish me off." At least once a night, he remembers, he would wake his mother and have her walk him around the house, to the back where there was a wall of windows. Cam would insist on touching each pane of glass, to assure himself that none was broken, that "she" hadn't slipped inside. 

He still has occasional nightmares about Spencer. He was wearing his brand-new blue down vest that day, he recalls, and a matching shirt. Blue was Brenda Spencer's favorite color, he later heard. Blue made him a target. To this day, Cam Miller hesitates before dressing in blue. 

He has seen Spencer a few times. First, on the television news from his hospital bed, which showed police leading away a petite freckled girl with long red hair and aviator glasses. Later, Cam went with his parents to court. "When I saw her, the look she gave me -- her whole appearance was very evil and scary. . . . Blank, empty stare. She just sat there and glared at me," Miller says. 

Spencer eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, where California law forbids her to grant interviews. Because there was no trial, few details about her family or her past ever came to public light. The Spencers were divorced, with Brenda and her older brother living with their father. Kids in the comfortably middle-class neighborhood would later say Brenda was known to torture cats, and had dug a series of tunnels in her back yard; adults would describe her as a quiet loner. 

The last time Spencer came up for parole, the district attorney's office contacted the victims it was still able to locate and asked them to write impact statements. Miller decided to deliver his in person. He and his wife drove the hour and a half through the desert to the California Institution for Women, arriving much too early. "I was psyching myself up," he explains. Once there, Spencer decided to withdraw her bid for parole. "My wife saw her through the window and said, 'There she is.' " By the time Miller looked, he saw only her retreating back, a glimpse of her red hair. He felt cheated. He had wanted to confront her, finally. 

There were questions he meant to ask: How could you do something like that? Why do you think you should deserve a second chance when the principal and the custodian had none? Why didn't you just pull the gun on yourself? The school offered counseling immediately after the shooting, but Cam never went. "I didn't talk about it. I held it in. In junior high, a neighbor went around telling people, 'There's Cam, he's shot,' and I'd deny it." He wore T-shirts when swimming to cover his scar. 

Today, Cam Miller is a probation officer who still feels nervous around guns, leaving the room even if it's just a friend showing off a new hunting rifle. He took a month-long training course to learn how to handle a weapon himself with more confidence. He was in the process of moving to a new house when the Colorado school massacre happened Tuesday. "It brings back memories," he acknowledges, "but as time goes on, you heal. You learn to basically cope. Hopefully these kids will get counseling." They need to talk about their fears, he says. He wishes he had. 

Christy Buell never left the old neighborhood, still living in her childhood home just a few blocks from the school, and from the ranch- style house where Brenda Spencer's father still lives. She remembers that there was snow in the mountains on the morning of the shooting; her father, Norm (her mother died when she was 3), considered letting his kids play hooky so he could take them up to play in it. He could hear the gunfire while he was taking his morning shower, and raced down to the school to see what was happening, crying out his daughter's name from behind the SWAT team cordon. 

Now 30, Christy is a sunny preschool teacher who is reluctant to talk about the shooting, because she considers it just "part of my life," and has moved on. She keeps a scrapbook of newspaper articles and photos, and still has the jacket she wore that day stashed away somewhere. "Six months after I got my jacket back, I found a hole in the hood," she recalls, surmising that a third bullet passed through it without striking her. She was the most seriously hurt of the children shot, hit in the abdomen and buttocks; part of her intestine was removed and she had a colostomy bag for four months. 

Her memories of that morning form a terrible collage: the principal dying; doctors cutting off her bloody Winnie-the-Pooh shirt; nurses calling her name but Christy finding it impossible to open her eyes until she hears her father's voice. "I saw the principal in the sticker bush, moaning," she flashes back. "It was frightening. I can still hear it. The janitor used to give me erasers. Suddenly all the kids were gone. I remember feeling weird, but no pain. I didn't see blood." 

She spent 42 days in the hospital and underwent two operations that left a foot-long scar across her stomach. She remembers how her dad used to walk her slowly through the hospital corridors, and how they would stand in a breezeway and watch the lights of passing cars on the freeway below. Whenever she drives past the hospital, Buell automatically looks for the same window on the second floor.

Like Cam Miller, she never sought professional help to cope with the trauma's aftermath. "We just kind of went on with life," she says. "Dad didn't want me to see a psychologist. He just said we'll deal with it as a family. Dad set the direction, and I took the path. We talk about it all the time. It's an incident that will never leave my mind. I'm not traumatized for life or anything. If I hear a loud bang or a car backfire, it gets my heart beating, but that's about it." 

Still, she finds herself thinking about it in the abstract at the preschool where she teaches, especially when she's outside with the children. "I have often had visions of it happening there, and think about what I'd be doing if it did happen," she allows. Mentally she plots an escape route, how she will get the children to safety. The sandbox, she thinks -- she will push them to the ground in the sandbox and shield them with her own scarred body. 

Not long after Brenda Spencer went to jail, her father married his daughter's teenage cellmate. They had a child, and the little girl attended Buell's preschool. She resembled Brenda. Sometimes Wallace Spencer would say hello when he came to pick his daughter up, and Buell is certain that he knew who she was, and she wonders now what he thought. One day the little girl announced to her: "My sister's in jail." Buell was jolted by the casual reference, but managed to muster a benign response. "Oh, really?" 

When another neighborhood is on the evening news, and Buell's father sees the stunned faces of parents in Jonesboro or Paducah or Littleton, he finds himself hungry for any scrap of information about the families of these children who kill, hoping, as he still does with Brenda Spencer these 20 long years later, to put all the pieces together and finally make sense of it. 

For 20 years now, Wallace Spencer has maintained a public silence about his daughter's crime. Norm Buell found himself on the Spencers' doorstep a couple of months after the shooting. "I went over there father-to-father, hoping to talk to him," he recalls. "I wanted to tell him that I was a single father, too, raising four kids alone, and I know it's a hard job and a thankless job and I know you probably did the best you could, that Christy was going to be okay." He could see Wallace through the screen door, sitting in front of the TV. "He said to go away, and I respected that," Norm recounts. 

Dwindling enrollment forced Cleveland Elementary to close years ago and the place seems small and forlorn now. It's used mostly for teacher workshops. A tiny brass plaque by the flagpole commemorates the principal and custodian who died trying to rescue fallen children and herd the others to safety that day. Two saplings planted in their memory took root in the bloodstained earth and have grown into trees now, sentries that stand tall and strong over an empty playground. A version of this article originally appeared in Good Housekeeping magazine.

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on Aug 16, 13