Forty-two years ago today, on July 18, 1984, an ordinary summer afternoon in the San Ysidro neighborhood of San Diego, California, became the scene of what was then the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in United States history. James Oliver Huberty, a 41-year-old former security guard, walked into a McDonald's restaurant carrying several semi-automatic firearms and opened fire on the patrons and employees inside. Over roughly 77 minutes he killed 21 people — among them an 8-month-old baby boy — and wounded 19 others, before a police sharpshooter's single shot to the chest finally ended the siege.
The McDonald's sat in a predominantly Hispanic community, and the people inside that afternoon were ordinary San Ysidro residents: families sharing a meal, workers on a break, children. The attack came without warning or apparent provocation. As gunfire echoed through the small building, customers tried to flee or hide; many could not reach the exits in time. Emergency calls flooded local dispatchers, and San Diego police established a perimeter around the restaurant, evacuating the surrounding area while Huberty continued to fire from inside.
The man responsible had left a trail of warning signs in the weeks before. Huberty had lost a job in Ohio roughly a year earlier and moved his family west to San Diego, where he took work as a security guard — only to be fired from that position about a month before the shooting. The repeated instability weighed on a man already in visible decline. On July 15, three days before the massacre, he told his wife, Etna, that he thought he had a mental problem and that he had tried to reach a mental health clinic, which had not returned his call. "Society had their chance," he reportedly said. In the same period he made a chilling remark to his family about going "hunting humans" — a statement that, in hindsight, read as a plainly telegraphed threat.