San Ysidro Split Seen Narrowing : City Delays Massacre Memorial Report

More than two years after a gunman opened fire in a McDonald’s restaurant here, San Diego city officials have yet to decide how--or whether--to commemorate the 21 men, women and children killed in the worst single-incident massacre in the nation’s history.

The office of City Manager John Lockwood was to have issued a report Monday containing recommendations for the memorial, but the city manager’s office decided to delay the report’s release until Nov. 26 so that staff members could “have further discussions with the community,” said Jack McGrory of the city manager’s staff.

However, a chief aide to departing City Councilman Uvaldo Martinez, whose 8th District includes San Ysidro, suggested that release of the report was probably delayed until a successor to Martinez is chosen. Martinez pleaded guilty Oct. 2 to two felony counts that he misused a city credit card and will leave office Thursday.

“I think the reason behind (the delay) is they want a representative in District 8 at the time the report comes out,” said aide Paul Grasso, who is among those seeking appointment to serve the remainder of Martinez’ term. “I think it’s too sensitive an issue for there not to be a councilman in office when it’s being discussed.”

McGrory said the delay has nothing to do with Martinez’ departure. “We just want to make sure we have as much community input as possible before we issue the report,” he said.

Two months after the massacre, McDonald’s officials razed the restaurant and donated the land to the City of San Diego. At the time, almost 30,000 signatures were gathered on petitions calling for a memorial to the slain men, women and children to be built on the site.

Since then, the lot at 522 W. San Ysidro Blvd. has remained a barren stretch of dirt, weeds and litter, adorned only by a crude wooden structure that is prey to graffiti and vandalism. This clapboard shrine--bearing religious symbols, the names of 21 people and eulogies in English and Spanish--is the only clue to the property’s tragic past.

Various proposals for the use of the land and commemoration of the massacre have been shunted between municipal agencies and City Council committees, but none has cleared the morass of bureaucracy. In April, George Penn, an assistant to then-City Manager Sylvester Murray, suggested an on-site memorial park costing $100,000, but the City Council declined to appropriate funds for the project.

Although the efforts to erect a memorial have been delayed in part by the usual bureaucratic obstacles, the greatest impediment has been sharp disagreement among residents and merchants in San Ysidro as to what, if any, memorial should be constructed and where it should be located.

‘It’s a real splinter issue in the community,” said Andrea Skorepa, director of Casa Familiar, a social service agency that has counseled many of the families involved in the tragedy. “We’ve been through so much and the families of the survivors have been through so much that we don’t want to be embroiled in something like this.”

Opinions run the gamut from those who want a full memorial park built on the site, complete with an inter-denominational chapel, to those who think the whole matter should be forgotten.

“We had the PSA (plane crash) drop right in the middle of North Park and they didn’t make that a memorial,” said Paul Zingale, manager of The Meeting Place, a bar located in a shopping center next to the site. “Tragedies happen. You rebuild and you remember the past, but you don’t want to have reminders all over the place.”

Bertha Alicia Gonzales, publisher of the San Ysidro community newspaper Ahora Now, is among those who favor building the memorial on the old McDonald’s site.

“We are from another culture and we feel that land has been blessed and should not be used for another purpose,” Gonzales said. “Members of the Jewish community, they have memorials of the Holocaust. Survivors of the atomic bomb in Japan have memorials every year. They were victims. The people here in San Ysidro were also victims.”

However, Gonzales’ opinion is not shared by some residents and local businessmen, who have argued that the empty lot, which is bordered on two sides by shopping centers and on the other two by San Ysidro Boulevard and Interstate 5, is not a suitable location for a park.

Instead of the grassy memorial park envisioned by Gonzales, they favor selling the land, which has an appraised value of $500,000, to a private developer, who would pave the property for use as a parking lot to serve the adjacent post office and nearby shops. The parking lot, it has been suggested, could feature a small statue or plaque to commemorate those killed by Huberty. The money raised from the sale of the land could then be used to create a park elsewhere in San Ysidro to serve the area’s young people.

“I think there’s concern that a park and a memorial on the site would not be the best use of the land,” Grasso said. “Sy Murray’s original proposal called for $25,000 for the memorial and $75,000 to pave the parking lot (for the memorial). I think people saw that meant putting a $25,000 memorial on land that’s worth half a million.

Grasso said the idea of selling the land is gaining favor among San Ysidro residents and families of the victims.

“For the first time, people who had opposed that are seeing the wisdom of doing something else with the land,” Grasso said. “ . . . I think they’re starting to come to a consensus in the community. We’ve gotten the sense that people want something done there.”

In fact, one of the few points of agreement uniting those on both sides of the memorial issue is a growing sense of impatience with the city.

“For so long, we get lots of promises, but not a lot of delivery,” Skorepa said. “I think that the city has to take some action now and take (the memorial idea) from the visionary stage to a more tactical, logistical stage. I think everyone’s been educated to the fact that bureaucracies and agencies and politicians move at a lot slower pace than we would often like . . . That’s where a lot of the frustration comes in.”

Grasso said Martinez’ staff delayed action on the matter “to let people’s emotions settle down.” This may have succeeded, Skorepa said, since many once-strident advocates of an on-site memorial may have moderated their stands.

“In the beginning, they wanted everything right there on that site and were strongly in favor of that being the memorial park,” she said. “While they clearly haven’t lessened their commitment, I think they’ve broadened their thinking. The important thing is there has to be some kind of commemoration of that place as a site, but that thing does not have to be as big as some of the people may have originally wanted.”

Opponents of the memorial said they are also anxious to have the city do something, anything with the prime commercial tract.

“Anything would be better than having it sit there fallow with a graffiti-ridden, outhouse-type structure,” said William Herr, manager of a Radio Shack store in the adjacent shopping center. “I would really like to see it put back into commercial use. It’s too small to be a park and what practical use can it be if it isn’t used for commercial purposes?”

And so, after two years of dispute, many say a compromise solution will be worked out that will give residents and victims’ families a memorial, while still reserving the old McDonald’s site for a use more consistent with its commercial location.

“I think any of the potential solutions will include a memorial area,” said Paul Curcio, the city’s assistant planning director for urban design. “(The residents) certainly want--and they should have--a memorial. It’s a very important part of the healing process. (But) it might be more fitting to memorialize the community rather than the tragedy.”