Memory of Cleveland school shooting never fades
Editor's note: The Record is republishing this 2014 report on the anniversary of the Cleveland Elementary School shootings. Check back later this week for coverage of the 35th anniversary of the shooting.
STOCKTON - Friday marks the 25th anniversary of the Cleveland Elementary School shootings in Stockton. The somber anniversary will be remembered by a Friday night event in Stockton
Shortly before noon on Jan. 17, 1989, a lone 24-year-old gunman named Patrick Purdy walked onto the Cleveland playground during recess and started firing. Purdy's rampage ended with his suicide, but not before five young children were dead and 31 other people were injured. Four of the five who were killed were from Cambodian immigrant families. The fifth was Vietnamese. Two-thirds of the wounded children also were Southeast Asian.
To mark the 25th anniversary of the Cleveland shootings, The Record interviewed a cross-section of the affected community. Here are their stories, in their words:
"I heard from a friend who was going to pick up his kids at school. I was in shock. I was shaking. I didn't know if my daughter got hurt. I had to go find out what was going on at school."
- Sek Pho, 54, whose then-6-year-old daughter Sanny was on the playground but was uninjured
"We started hearing the radio, all these units being dispatched to the school. We thought it must be a drill. It wasn't until the second wave of dispatches that we realized, 'Hey, this is the real thing.' "
- Paul Willette, 52, retired Stockton Fire Department paramedic
"I heard a couple of shots fired off. (My left leg) went hot, then numb. I was still able to run on it. I was very fortunate it didn't hit bone."
- Brandon Smith, a 9-year-old third-grader in 1989
"There was a little girl just sitting there quietly. I asked her, 'Are you OK?' She had her hand on her stomach and removed her hand and there was some blood. She was shot but she was just sitting there calmly."
- Rocky Rodriquez, 66, retired Stockton Fire Department paramedic
"Twenty-nine bullets came through the wall. The room turned white, I think from the plasterboard, and the sound was tremendous."
- Sue Rothman, 69, retired kindergarten teacher
"I remember Sue coming in, coming around, and ducking down behind the table, and she said, 'Oh my God. They're killing our kids.' "
- Julie Schardt, 66, retired second-grade teacher
"When I got to class, my students were already in the room. Everybody was perfectly silent, all 32 students were standing behind their chairs not making a sound. It was as if a cloud of shock and anguish had taken over and settled on the room."
- Judy Weldon, 65, retired second-grade teacher
"I thought all these kids left their jackets outside. Then all of a sudden it hit me what happened. And it hit me that the bundles of clothes I saw outside were actually children who had been shot."
- Rodriquez
"I remember my dad was looking for me. I remember the relief on his face when he found me. And I remember my close neighbor. Her name was Ram Chun. We were childhood close friends. And then she was gone."
- Sanny Pho Mey, 31, the daughter of Sek Pho. She was 6 in 1989. Ram Chun was one of the five fatalities.
"I looked at her and I knew it was Oeun. She wore red shoes. I always talked to her about her red shoes because red's my favorite color. Her face was not damaged. I knew it was Oeun but I said, 'I can't be sure.' "
- Schardt on Oeun Lim, 8, who died in the shootings
"I got ready and went to school. They kept us at bay for a while, until they did their investigation and took away his body."
- Ruben Modesto, 57, night custodian at Cleveland
"This feeling of guilt came over me. I was going to be able to go home to my daughters, I was going to be able to put them to bed and read their story, I could say goodnight to them, but their parents could not ever."
- Weldon
"I didn't want to talk at all about it with my family. What they learned, they learned from news sources."
- Patti Doll, 61, kindergarten teacher
"I looked through the window and I could see a few of the children with their bodies covered with white sheets. I closed the shades because I didn't want to see what was going on."
- Tony Bugarin, 63, a resident of the Cleveland neighborhood in 1989
"I remember having trouble driving (home) because I couldn't see past the tears. It was awful and when I got here I had a cleaning lady who came every two weeks who was a Cambodian woman. Her best friend from Cambodia, who remained her best friend in Stockton, lost her son (9-year-old Rathanar Or) at the shooting. She had just found out."
- Rothman
"We did cleanup in the rooms, the mopping of the floors, shampooing of the carpets to get it ready for the next day because the students were going to come back. We were quiet. We just wanted to get it done. All our job was, we clean the school. We wanted to do it. This is our school."
- Modesto
"When I went to visit (Oeun's) parents ... I didn't know what to expect. They were so welcoming. They hugged me and they bowed to me. And here their daughter had just died a few days before, under my watch, in a way."
- Schardt
"It stands out in my mind when Michael Jackson came (three weeks after the shooting). By the time he got there, there were helicopters overhead just like the day of the shooting. There were policemen all around. He was late. We were told, 'Bring all the kindergartners into one room. Have them here. No, he's late. Go back into your own room. No, come back. I think he's coming.' He said, 'Hi.' Then he turned around and walked out. That was it. That's what all the commotion was about."
- Rothman
"I never felt safe in school again."
- Doll
"When I was in the hospital, I was really impressed with the doctors and nurses. I decided then I wanted to be a doctor. Then when I was 12 or 13, I decided I'd rather be a paramedic."
- Shooting victim Brandon Smith, who today works as a paramedic for American Medical Response in San Joaquin County.
"About three weeks after the shooting we got together and said, 'This is what we need to ask for.' We went down (to Stockton Unified's central office) as a whole group of teachers. They eventually gave us most of the requests: roving substitutes so that if we had trouble we could be relieved, much more counseling for kids, not having to follow the curriculum, support."
- Rothman
"People from all over the world sent us something. I have a little change purse that came from the Sun Valley Mall in Sacramento. To me, that's my little remembrance because I keep my change in it. I go nowhere without it. I keep this."
- Modesto
"The first three or four months, you just couldn't sleep. Now, I don't think about it unless it's brought up. Now there's an anniversary. I'm seeing all these images again. I don't have nightmares, but always the visions of little stacks of clothes that I thought were kids."
- Rodriquez
"We lived in the country. On Sept. 1, dove hunting starts. That was a bad day (in 1989). I just remember waking up and hearing the noises again, the popping noises. That was one reason I was really happy to move out of the country and back into the city."
- Doll
"Several months later the school facilitated a time and a day for first responders who had been there to come back to the school. ... This one little girl came up to me. She hands me this picture and she said, 'You took care of me.' That was incredibly powerful."
- Willette
"My first day ever as a teacher was at Cleveland (two years after the shootings). There was an orientation meeting the day before the kids came in. Construction workers on the other side of the wall were using an airgun. They shot off an airgun and some teachers dropped to the floor, and I'm just sitting there at the table, like, 'Oh my gosh.' "
- Lori Risso, 46, a sixth-grade teacher at Cleveland in 1991.
There were school shootings in the United States before Cleveland, but in the years since the Stockton tragedy, mass shootings have occurred with greater regularity. Columbine. Jonesboro. Virginia Tech. Newtown.
The Dec. 14, 2012, shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut had a particularly painful resonance for the Cleveland survivors. It was all so horrifyingly similar - a lone, psychotic gunman mowing down 20 small children and six adults before taking his own life.
"One of our corporals was in the lunchroom and the TV was on. She just stepped in the hallway and she had tears in her eyes and she just said, 'More little kids were shot today and killed.' A half hour, 45 minutes passed and I couldn't get away from the TV, and I remember seeing the footage of the little kids marching out. ... I remember thinking, 'Not again. Not again.' "
- Rob Young, 31, who was wounded at Cleveland and works today as police officer in the Bay Area.
"It was my day off. I turned the news on. When you heard about the death toll, it's heart-breaking, thinking about what those little babies went through. I wouldn't say it paralyzed me, but it brought back that day. The feelings came back, the vulnerability, being scared, the fear."
- Brandon Smith
"I couldn't tear myself away from the television but I didn't want to be there. I was crying. It was Cleveland all over again."
- Rothman
"A lot of our retired teachers had to come back. Judy Weldon came back, Julie Schardt came back, just to make sure we were OK."
- Heidi Mohammadkhan, 50, Cleveland's current principal
"It all came back, all the details, all the things that you try to put away. The same day was the Cleveland School Christmas party (at the home of Pat Busher, the school's principal in 1989). We were worried that (Newtown) would be a big problem at this Christmas party. So we tried not to talk about it."
- Weldon
Those who were at Cleveland when the shootings occurred are divided. Some are working to strengthen gun laws. Others say guns are not the problem. Doll, Rothman, Schardt and Weldon are part of a group that formed after Newtown to fight for gun control. Conversely, Rob Young has become active in the fight to protect gun rights. Others' opinions are equally divided.
"By increasing gun control, the only thing you're doing is prohibiting law-abiding citizens from being able to protect themselves adequately. My wife said it best at one of the Senate hearings up in Sacramento. She said when her husband is at work, he's a hundred miles away and she has guns in the house and she feels safe knowing that if somebody were to come into our house that she could protect her babies when her husband is gone. ... Something has to change in our judicial system. Maybe we have to focus on mental health more. I think that they're going after the wrong target. The gun is not the issue. It's the person behind the gun that uses that firearm to hurt innocent people."
- Young
"It's unacceptable how many people are killed in this country through gun violence. We've learned a lot since we've gotten into this. There is a difference in the states where they have strict gun laws and the states where they don't. ... Something has to be done. We need to start a dialogue. There's got to be an answer, and it isn't just mental health help. Some people who do the shooting were not bad guys before. They say you've got to keep the guns out of the hands of bad guys. Well, until they shoot the gun the first time they weren't necessarily bad guys. So there has to be some kind of dialogue with people who love their guns."
- Rothman
"If somebody has an evil intention, I think they're going to find a way to do it. A gun is a vehicle for them to do that. They could do it with a car, they could do it with a bomb, a knife, a club. There's always something. While I certainly understand the other side ... I don't think it's realistic and I don't think that would solve the problem. Somebody hellbent on doing destruction and taking lives is going to find another way to do it."
- Willette
"I believe there should be strict laws on how you can get a gun. There should be significant background checks. If it's harder to get a gun, ... if it saves one kid, I'd be happy. I don't believe you shouldn't own a gun but I don't believe you should be able to just go buy a gun. It should be very difficult to get a gun."
- Rodriquez
A quarter-century later, memories linger and emotions can surface in an instant, but lives have gone on.
Sek Pho still lives at Park Village Apartments, as he did in 1989. Sanny Pho Mey went on to get bachelor's and master's degrees and is a social worker in San Jose. Busher remained Cleveland's principal until she retired in 2006, when Mohammadkhan took over. Risso has become a principal herself, at August Elementary.
Ram Chun's older brother, 33-year-old Rann Chun, was on the playground when his sister was killed. Today, he teaches at Cleveland. Many of the other children who survived that day have gone on to lead successful lives. But there are sad stories, too. Sarim Chabb, 7, was wounded in her left leg in 1989. Today she resides in San Joaquin County Jail for her suspected role in a 2013 homicide.
The four teachers quoted in this article are part of a gun-control advocacy group named "Cleveland School Remembers" that was formed after the Newtown shootings. Young has testified in Washington, D.C., and Sacramento on behalf of Gun Owners of America. He and his wife, Jennifer, have two children, 8-year-old Christian and 6-year-old Allie.
"Christian asked me, 'Dad, what happened that day?' So I sat them down and told them. They just know it was a sick man who did a sick thing. I wanted to make sure that they didn't hear anything that was going to scare them to where they didn't want to go to school. I told them the odds of that ever happening to them were slim to none."
- Young
Modesto, one of the custodians who mopped and cleaned on that tear-stained night so long ago, today is the head custodian at Franklin High School.
"It's part of our life, our destiny, whatever you want to call it," he said. "Maybe our part was to make it look like nothing happened so you could come back to say nothing happened. You talk about bad individuals? Well don't let this bad individual keep you from your way of life. Don't let this individual take that from you. There's moments I do cry about it, but like my mom says, 'It makes you feel better, it cleans your eyes, and you see the world in a better picture.' "
This article originally appeared on The Record: Memory of Cleveland school shooting never fades
