The Stockton schoolyard shooting occurred at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, on January 17, 1989. The perpetrator, 24-year-old Patrick Purdy, shot and killed five children and wounded thirty-one others—all but one of them children—before committing suicide approximately three minutes after first opening fire.
The shooting sparked intense public controversy regarding private ownership of assault weapons, and ultimately inspired the Roberti–Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989, which prohibited the ownership and transfer of over fifty specific brands and models of assault weapons in California. This act was signed into effect on May 24, 1989.
At the time, the Stockton schoolyard shooting was the worst school shooting (in terms of number of fatalities) to occur at a non-college institution, being surpassed ten years later by the Columbine High School massacre. The shooting was also the deadliest to occur at an American elementary school until the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
On the morning of Tuesday, January 17, 1989, an anonymous individual telephoned the Stockton Police Department to report a death threat against Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California. At approximately 11:40 a.m., Patrick Purdy arrived at the school in his battered 1977 Chevrolet Caprice station wagon; he parked the vehicle at the rear of the property and, minutes later, entered the premises through a gate carrying an AK-47 semi-automatic rifle with a fixed bayonet and two handguns. Approximately forty-five seconds later, his station wagon detonated and burned courtesy of a Molotov cocktail and two open gasoline containers he had placed inside the vehicle. Approximately three hundred children were in the school playground at this time.
Purdy first entered the school playground, where he began firing with his semi-automatic rifle while positioned behind a portable building; he fired a total of sixty-six rounds in his initial salvo from a distance of approximately fifty yards. According to a teacher who survived this initial section of Purdy's attack on the school, Purdy "was not talking [or] yelling; he was very straight-faced ... it didn't look like he was really angry" as he fired "left to right" in a spraying motion. One child injured in this initial salvo, 6-year-old Robert Young, would later recollect his feet "were swept up" as he was shot in the foot by a bullet followed by an immediate "slap against [his] chest" as a further bullet impacted against the playground and ricocheted into his upper chest as he fell. The sole adult wounded in the shooting, second-grade teacher Janet Geng, was injured in the upper leg as she ran to the assistance of wounded children.
Purdy then ran toward a differing vantage point within the school grounds and fired the final nine rounds of ammunition from his 75-round drum magazine into fleeing children before reloading and expending all thirty rounds of ammunition within a second magazine at any available targets he sighted.
The first 911 call to emergency services was received approximately one minute after Purdy opened fire. The individual who made this call described himself as a veteran of the Vietnam War and specifically stated the gunfire sourcing from the grounds of Cleveland Elementary School was from an AK-47 rifle. This information was immediately relayed to the Stockton Police Department, who immediately dispatched armed officers to the scene.
At approximately 11:48 a.m., Purdy committed suicide by shooting himself once in the right temple with a Taurus 9mm pistol. He had fired 106 rounds of ammunition — the vast majority at or in the direction of children — within the space of approximately three minutes. He was still alive when emergency responders first observed his body lying on the fringes of the playground at 11:50 a.m., although he died of his wound shortly thereafter.
Prior to embarking on his spree, Purdy had symbolically dressed in combat fatigues including a green flak jacket worn beneath a camouflage shirt jacket upon which he had inscribed "PLO", "Libya", and "Death to the Great Satin" [sic]. His identity was quickly established via documents upon his person. A subsequent autopsy revealed no traces of drugs or alcohol in Purdy's bloodstream, although traces of caffeine indicated he had likely drunk a final cup of coffee shortly before his death.
An inspection of Purdy's rifle revealed he had carved the words "freedom", "Earthman", "Victory", and "Hezbollah" upon the stock of the weapon; one pistol also bore the word "Victory" in white lettering upon the grip.
Five children were killed in the Stockton schoolyard shooting; thirty children and one teacher were wounded. Two of the murdered children, Ram Chun and Rathanar Or, were brought into classrooms prior to succumbing to their injuries; the other three died on the playground. Several of those injured were critically wounded, although all survived their injuries.
Four of the children who died were of Cambodian ancestry, and the fifth was Vietnamese. All five fatalities were children of families who had emigrated to the U.S. as refugees — at least one of whom had been born inside a refugee camp. Furthermore, although the wounded consisted of children of all races, over two-thirds of the wounded were also of Southeast Asian ancestry.
Funerals and community mourning service
On January 23, 1989, a two-hour service to remember the victims of the Stockton schoolyard shooting was observed at the Stockton Civic Center. This multifaith service was attended by over 2,000 mourners and saw many attendees wearing black and white ribbons in a traditional Cambodian symbolic gesture of mourning in the presence of the flower-draped caskets of four of the murdered children.
This service concluded with five minutes of silence — one for each victim — and was followed by the funerals of four of the five children. These funeral services observed the Buddhist rituals in accordance with the beliefs of Oeun Lim and Rathanhar Or and the Baptist faiths of Sokhim An and Ram Chun. The fifth child murdered in the Stockton schoolyard shooting, Thuy Tran, had been laid to rest on January 21 in a Christian burial following Mass in accordance with her Roman Catholic beliefs. Nonetheless, Tran's loss was also observed at this service, in which Christian hymns were also sung within a community chorus. All five children were buried in the same cemetery.
Patrick Edward Purdy (November 10, 1964 – January 17, 1989) was born in Tacoma, Washington, to Patrick Benjamin and Kathleen (née Snyder) Purdy. He had one older sister, Cynthia (b. August 1963). At the time of Purdy's birth, his father was a soldier in the U.S. Army and was stationed at Fort Lewis. Following his dishonorable discharge from the military, Purdy Sr. worked as a taxi driver.
When Purdy was two years old, his mother filed for divorce against her husband following an incident in which he had threatened to kill her with a firearm. Purdy's mother later moved with her children to South Lake Tahoe, California before settling in Stockton, where Purdy attended Cleveland Elementary from kindergarten through to second grade. Resultingly, Purdy seldom saw his father as a young child.
Purdy's mother remarried a man named Albert Gulart in October 1968; the couple had one child: Albert Jr. (b. November 1968), although neither son had a close relationship with his mother, who devoted much of her free time to socializing and reportedly abused alcohol on a regular basis — often in the presence of her children. In addition, Gulart is known to have physically assaulted his wife in the presence of his stepchildren. Purdy's stepfather would later state that, as a child, his stepson was overly quiet and markedly emotional with a reputation among his peers as a loner.