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 deadliest mass shooting at a K–12 school in U.S. history, 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.
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.
Police response
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.
Suicide of perpetrator
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.
Victims
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.
Perpetrator
Early life
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.
In the fall of 1973, Purdy's mother and stepfather separated; she moved with her children from Stockton to Sacramento. That December, the Sacramento Child Protective Services were twice called to her residence in response to a neighbor's allegations that Kathleen was physically abusing and neglecting her children. All three children would be taken into protective custody due to concerns of neglect, although charges against Purdy's mother were dropped when she agreed to participate in a counseling program. She later regained custody of her children.
Adolescence
In the summer of 1978, Purdy, then aged thirteen, struck his mother in the face following a heated argument. As a result, he was permanently banned from her house. This incident instilled a lifelong belief within Purdy that he had been abandoned by his mother. He briefly lived on the streets of San Francisco and — having no alternative to survive — briefly resorted to prostitution. Shortly thereafter, he was placed in temporary foster care before being placed in the custody of his father, who had relocated to Lodi, California, following his divorce from Purdy's mother.
Purdy enrolled in Tokay High School in September 1979, although he was an unmotivated student and something of an outcast. He attended high school only sporadically and gradually became an alcoholic and a drug addict with an accumulated criminal record for offenses including drug dealing, robbery, and burglary. At his father's urging, Purdy would undergo treatment at a Stockton drug rehabilitation clinic in the early 1980s. This treatment only produced limited results, although a counselor would note Purdy's behavior was indicative of an individual "seeking a father figure to restrain him," adding: "If his acting out is not contained now, he will develop into a highly deceptive sociopathic character and be practically untreatable."
On September 6, 1981, Purdy's father died after being struck by a car. His family filed a wrongful death suit in San Joaquin Superior Court against the driver of the car, seeking $600,000 in damages; the suit was later dismissed. According to relatives, although Purdy's father had left his son $5,000 in his will, his mother refused to give him his bequeathment — instead using the money to purchase herself a car and fund a lavish trip to New York City. This incident greatly deepened the animosity between the two.
Following his father's death, Purdy was briefly homeless; he alternately slept on the streets, in cheap motels, or flophouses, supporting himself financially with odd jobs, petty theft, and small-time drug dealing. He was eventually placed in the custody of a foster mother in Los Angeles until he turned eighteen.
Criminal activities
Purdy's first known criminal activities occurred in October 1978, when officers from the Sacramento Police Department confiscated BB guns and knives from Purdy, then thirteen years old. In May 1980, Purdy was first arrested for a court order violation; he would also be arrested for underage drinking the following month. In August 1980, he would be arrested in West Hollywood for soliciting an undercover police officer. A single arrest — again for a court order violation — would occur in 1981, and further arrests for breaking and entry, cultivation and possession of marijuana, and drug dealing would occur in 1982. Arrests for possession of an illegal weapon, public intoxication, drunk driving, and receipt of stolen property would occur in 1983.
At age nineteen, Purdy briefly relocated to Florida. He found employment in Key West, but returned to California after approximately one month. Shortly thereafter, on October 11, 1984, he and another man were arrested for an attempted purse snatching in Broderick. At the time of this arrest, both Purdy and his accomplice were homeless and living on the shores of the Sacramento River. Purdy pleaded guilty to being an accessory to a felony and spent thirty-two days in the Yolo County Jail.
Later years
Due to Purdy's alcohol and drug dependency, he was awarded disability support by the Social Security Administration in November 1984. Beginning in 1985, Purdy did make sporadic efforts to improve his life by undergoing various forms of vocational training. Although he did pass several courses, he failed to gain many skills.