San Ysidro Site Is Barren, but the Agony Lives On

A McDonald’s restaurant used to be there, on that bit of land downtown between the doughnut shop and the post office. It was a nice place. Everyone went there.

Now it is mostly mud and rocks, a treacherous place to visit because of the recent rains in the San Diego area.

Unusually heavy rain. It left its mark on that piece of property, which sits just off the main highway in this border town of 14,000, 20 miles south of San Diego.

Perhaps that is appropriate. Five months ago, a 41-year-old unemployed security guard named James Oliver Huberty marked the site in a way no one in this town can erase.

On July 18 at 4 p.m., Huberty walked into McDonald’s and ordered the four dozen patrons inside to get on the floor. He was carrying an Uzi 9-millimeter semiautomatic carbine, a Browning 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, a 12-gauge Winchester shotgun and more than 400 rounds of ammunition.

He used 245 rounds to murder 21 people and wound 19 others in the worst single-day massacre by a lone gunman in U.S. history.

The slaughter lasted 77 minutes, until a police sniper picked him off. Huberty shot at everything that moved both inside and outside the building, stopping occasionally to sip a soft drink. He kept changing the station on his portable radio.

His victims ranged in age from 8 months to 74 years, and they never had a chance. Thirteen were shot in the head, seven in the chest and one in the back.

On the day of the slaughter, Huberty appeared in traffic court on a routine citation, ate with his wife and one of his two daughters in a McDonald’s in another part of San Diego, visited the zoo and took a nap.

He rose shortly before 4 p.m., dressed in camouflage-style fatigue pants and a dark T-shirt and told his wife he wanted to kiss her goodby. She asked where he was going. “Hunting humans,” he replied.

It was only a few hundred yards from Huberty’s apartment to the McDonald’s on San Ysidro Boulevard, but he drove.

The enormity of Huberty’s offense is difficult to define. He inflicted physical wounds on at least 40 people, psychological abrasions on hundreds.

Dr. Arlen Versteeg, who directs the San Ysidro Mental Health Center, said the center had been approached for help from about 200 people who were involved, directly or indirectly, in the tragedy. Thirty-five still receive regular treatment, some in a weekly group session.

Initially, the sessions were a recounting of the horror. Now, the primary concern is re-entering the world.

“We’re stronger now. We’ve been through something,” Versteeg said. “We realize that life is unpredictable, that things happen that we have no control over, which is healthy and it’s realistic. It’s truth. What we’re dealing in is truth.”

The McDonald’s, one of two in San Ysidro, was razed almost immediately after the tragedy, after it became the focus of a drive to erect a memorial, or “shrine,” as the local Latino residents called it.

McDonald’s Corp., which donated $1 million to a survivors’ fund, gave the land to the city of San Diego, of which San Ysidro is a part. The land remains unused.

Along San Ysidro Boulevard, across the street from the massacre site, one house had a Santa Claus and two reindeer on the roof during the holidays; the one beside it displayed a star of David in multicolored lights.

Up the block, in the apartment where James and Etna Huberty and their daughters lived after moving to California from Ohio, there were no lights.

Debbie and Emo Coleman wrapped Christmas gifts for two boys this year, which in itself is a miracle. Their 11-year-old son, Joshua, survived Huberty’s rampage by playing dead after being wounded in the McDonald’s parking lot.

Two friends who were riding bicycles with him, Omar Hernandez and David Flores, died.

Joshua, peppered by more than a dozen pellets from Huberty’s shotgun, has made a nearly complete recovery. Only a pellet lodged in his elbow prevented him from playing on his sixth-grade football team this fall in nearby Chula Vista.

He does not speak of the massacre.

“He keeps a lot inside. He says nothing bothers him, but I don’t know,” said his mother. “You try to go on with your lives the best you can.”

The boy has been interviewed several times but “really won’t talk to reporters very much,” Debbie Coleman said. She believes that, contrary to expectations, he has made an emotional recovery to match his physical progress.

He shows one psychological wound: He will not ride a bicycle.

Etna Huberty now lives in seclusion with her two daughters, ages 12 and 10, in Chula Vista, the same town as the Colemans. Her children attend school there under assumed names.

Etna Huberty has not changed her name. She refuses to do so. She wears her husband’s watch on her left wrist.

In her last published interview, which appeared in October in the San Diego Union, she said she regretted preventing her husband’s suicide attempt a year before the massacre. At times, she said, she wishes she had killed him herself, which she tried to do 13 years ago. The gun jammed.

Today on the vacant lot, a clumsily lettered placard commends the site “In Memory of Those Who Lost Their Life,” and urges visitors, “Por favor traigan flores” --please bring flowers.

In the middle, at about the point where James Oliver Huberty leaned against a counter and surveyed his slaughter, a miniature Christ figure was surrounded by dying plants and flowers and encircled by luminarios-- candles placed inside thin paper bags to light the area around them.

But the candles were cold, victims of the recent rain. The only light cast on the lot came from the doughnut shop next door. “Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum,” its sign says.

It is nothing but mud and rocks, this site of Huberty’s unraveling and his victims’ death and agony.