January 29th, 1979 School shooting in San Diego.

Brenda Spencer kills two men and wounds nine children as they enter the Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego. Spencer blazed away with rifle shots from her home directly across the street from the school. After 20 minutes of shooting, police surrounded Spencer’s home for six hours before she surrendered. Asked for some explanation for the attack, Spencer allegedly said, “I just don’t like Mondays. I did this because it’s a way to cheer up the day. Nobody likes Mondays.”

Spencer was only 16 years old at the time of her murderous attack. She was a problem child who was widely known as a drug abuser with a violent streak. She repeatedly broke the windows at the Cleveland school with her BB gun. Still, her father gave her a .22 semi-automatic rifle and ammunition as a Christmas gift at the end of 1978.

This seemed to inspire Spencer into more grandiose plans, and she started telling her classmates that she was going to do something “to get on TV.” When Monday morning rolled around, Burton Wragg, the principal of Cleveland Elementary, was opening the gates of the school when Spencer started firing her rifle from across the street. Wragg and custodian Michael Suchar were killed. “I just started shooting. That’s it. I just did it for the fun of it,” explained Spencer.

Spencer’s hatred for the first day of the school week was later memorialized by Bob Geldof, the leader of the rock group The Boomtown Rats, in the song, “I Don’t Like Mondays.”

Spencer was charged as an adult. She pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon. On April 4, 1980, a day after her 18th birthday, she was sentenced to concurrent terms of 25 years to life in prison. Nine counts of attempted murder were dismissed. In prison, Spencer was diagnosed with epilepsy and received medication to treat epilepsy and depression. While at California Institution for Women in Chino, she worked repairing electronic equipment.

Under the terms of her sentencing, Spencer became eligible for hearings to consider her suitability for parole in 1993.

At her first hearing, in 1993, Spencer said she had hoped police would shoot her, and that she had been a user of alcohol and drugs at the time of the crime, although the results of drug tests done when she was taken into custody were negative. At her 2001 parole hearing, Spencer claimed that her father had been subjecting her to beatings and sexual abuse, but he said the allegations were not true. The parole board chairman said that, as she had not previously told anyone about the allegations, he doubted their veracity. In 2005, a San Diego deputy district attorney cited an incident of self-harm from four years earlier, when Spencer's girlfriend was released from jail, as showing that Spencer was psychotic and unfit to be released. Early reports indicated that Spencer had scratched the words "courage" and "pride" into her own skin; Spencer corrected this during her parole hearing as reading "unforgiven" and "alone".

In 2009, the board again refused her application for parole, and ruled it would be ten years before she would be considered again. In August 2022, Spencer and the Board of Parole Hearings agreed that she was not suitable for parole and that she would not be eligible for another hearing for another three years as a result of this parole suitability denial. She remains imprisoned at California Institution for Women in Chino. Her next opportunity for a parole hearing will be in 2025.

A plaque and flagpole were erected at Cleveland Elementary in memory of the shooting victims. The school was closed in 1983, along with a dozen other schools around the city, due to declining enrollment. In the ensuing decades, it was leased to several charter and private schools. From 2005 to 2017, it housed the Magnolia Science Academy, a public charter middle school serving students in grades 6–8. In 2018, the school was demolished to construct a housing development, and the plaque was relocated to the former school's southern edge, at the corner of Lake Atlin Avenue and Lake Angela Drive.

In the months following the shooting, one of Brenda Spencer's first cellmates, a 17-year-old girl, moved in with Spencer's father, eventually marrying him on March 26, 1980, in Yuma, Arizona. They had a daughter together, after which she fled the household and eventually divorced, leaving Wallace Spencer to raise their child alone. Wallace Spencer died in February 2016.