San Ysidro McDonald’s
massacre
The Event A seventy-seven-minute shooting
rampage at a fast-food restaurant leaves twenty-
one people dead
Date July 18, 1984
Place San Ysidro, California
Because of the high death toll, the familiarity of McDon-
ald’s, and the random nature of the attack—the killer had
no grudge against the franchise or any of the customers,
made no demands, and espoused no agenda—the San
Ysidro McDonald’s massacre stunned the nation, as it sug-
gested a new kind of vulnerability.
A single gunman—a forty-one-year-old former secu-
rity guard named James Oliver Huberty—killed
twenty-one people and wounded nineteen others
during his rampage at a McDonald’s restaurant. The
dead and wounded, Wednesday-afternoon patrons
of the restaurant, included men, women, and chil-
dren. Huberty, who had graduated with a
degree in sociology from an Ohio Quaker
college and worked as a welder for four-
teen years, had drifted through various
menial jobs before arriving in early 1984 in
San Ysidro, California, two miles from the
Mexican border. He worked as a condo-
minium security guard but was fired ten
days before the shootings. Concerned
about his own depression and mood
swings, Huberty contacted a mental health
clinic but never received a call back.
On the morning of July 18, Huberty set-
tled a minor traffic ticket. He took his wife
and two children to a different McDon-
ald’s (they frequently ate there) and then
to the San Diego Zoo. They left early be-
cause of the heat. After returning home,
he casually informed his wife, “I’m going
to hunt humans.” He drove to the nearby
restaurant, arriving around 4:00p.m., with
a nine-millimeter Browning automatic
pistol in his belt and a twelve-gauge Win-
chester shotgun and a nine-millimeter Uzi
semiautomatic machine gun across his
shoulders. Once inside, he ordered the
stunned patrons, mostly Hispanic, to get
down on the floor and began executing
them, showering the restaurant with indis-
criminate gunfire. When the police arrived, they as-
sumed that there were several shooters (Huberty
fired more than 250 rounds). Shortly after 5:00p.m.,
an employee escaped out a back door and informed
the special weapons and tactics (SWAT) commandos
that there was only one shooter and no hostages. Ev-
eryone else was either wounded or dead. The SWAT
team reacted quickly, and sharpshooter Chuck Fos-
ter killed Huberty with a single chest shot.Impact In the wake of the massacre, McDonald’s
razed the building and gave the land to the city,
which built a community college on the site after
erecting a memorial. Investigators never accounted
for the rampage. Huberty’s widow filed a lawsuit
against both McDonald’s and the Ohio factory
where Huberty had welded. She claimed the food’s
monosodium glutamate and the factory’s airborne
toxins had slowly poisoned Huberty. Forensic pa-
thologists, however, suggested Huberty might have
been a paranoid schizophrenic.842 San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre The Eighties in America
A blood-spattered woman is led away from the scene of the San Ysidro McDon-
ald’s massacre on July 18, 1984.(AP/Wide World Photos)