Feeling of Helplessness and Social Alienation Contribute to Violence

In the last 11 years, San Diego has been the setting for a number of so-called berserk crimes--the violent actions of someone who has run amok.

The city’s fast growth may be to blame for the rise of such crime, experts say, but so are what some call disturbing trends in society. One expert says that such crimes tend to be committed by those who feel disconnected from social institutions and powerless to change them.

The most recent incident occurred Saturday at Mission Bay Hospital, where two people were killed and two others wounded when a man said to be distraught over the death of his father entered the emergency room and opened fire with a handgun.

The rampage is being compared to other “berserk” crimes that have occurred in the San Diego area since 1979.

* In January, 1979, Brenda Spencer, a 16-year-old San Carlos girl, killed two men and wounded eight children and a police officer. From a sniper’s perch in her family’s living room, Spencer aimed at a crowd of people on the grounds of Cleveland Elementary School. When contacted by a reporter during the shooting, Spencer offered the statement, “I don’t like Mondays” as the motive.

* In 1984, James Oliver Huberty, an unemployed drifter from the Rust Belt of Ohio, walked into a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro and killed 21 people before he was shot and killed by a police marksman stationed on the roof next door. Huberty was said to be depressed over the closing of the Babcock & Wilcox steel plant in his Ohio hometown, where he had been a longtime employee.

* In November, 1988, a teen-ager named Kenneth Kovzelove shot and killed two migrant workers as they walked along Black Mountain Road in Rancho Penasquitos. Matilde de la Sancha, 19, was shot eight times with a semiautomatic rifle; Hilario Castaneda Salgado, 22, was hit five times. Kovzelove allegedly shouted, “Die!” as he fired the shots.

* In March, 1989, a transient named Patricia Perrellis entered La Jolla’s Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church and shot a woman in the back after asking her where the confessional was.

* Last October, disgruntled postal worker John Merlin Taylor shot and killed his wife, then drove to the Orange Glen postal substation and killed two co-workers, said to be his closest friends, before finally killing himself.

It’s no coincidence, said Gordon Clanton, a sociologist at San Diego State University, that the decade in which these shootings occurred was a period of phenomenal growth in San Diego.

San Diego rose “almost overnight,” Clanton said, from what used to be known as “a sleepy, backwater town” to the nation’s sixth-largest city.

The city’s shock and horror over such incidents is largely a reflection of a populace having to adjust, painfully at times, Clanton said, to the knowledge that this is no longer anyone’s small town.

“People tend to commit such acts when they don’t feel connected--to jobs, to people, to institutions,” Clanton said. “A tremendous amount of what people take for granted in social life is a result of having shared values and a stake in what’s going on . . . a collective understanding. As the underemployed and unemployed and the homeless increase, all of these things contribute to an erosion of social bonds that, in better times, keep things stable.”

David Phillips, a sociologist at UC San Diego, said “it’s hard to tell whether San Diego has more than its share” of such crimes, but he pointed out that the settings of local “berserk” killings have been “particularly interesting.”

For instance, Spencer targeted a school, Taylor his place of work and Huberty a restaurant that symbolizes a wholesome family experience. In each case, Phillips said, it may be that the perpetrator was “feeling betrayed by and violent toward” the institution in question. In Saturday’s shooting, Bradford Warren Powers Jr. allegedly killed two people and wounded two others while enraged about the hospital’s treatment of his father, who died earlier in the day.

“Berserk killings have been happening for centuries,” Phillips said. “Berserk is a Norse word, and such killings are traditional in other parts of the world as well. But it may be that, in a society where guns are easily available, acting out berserk impulses is more convenient and certainly more likely to happen.”

Phillips said the murder rate in the United States is “much higher than in any country in Western Europe. In European countries, when a person commits murder, a good part of the time the killer also commits suicide. In the United States, only a small percentage feel compelled to follow a murder with a suicide. The Europeans say that it takes three generations to lose an accent. It may be that, two generations ago, in the United States, people felt more comfortable settling problems violently. And we just haven’t lost the impulse.”

No one interviewed for this story seemed to think the problem of berserk crime would go away any time soon. In fact, most said a city growing as fast as San Diego might be a candidate for more of the same.

“California has often been thought of as the place people come to after they fail someplace else,” Clanton said. “So what we have at the Western edge of the country is a disproportionate number of unhappy, unsuccessful, unfulfilled people. There’s a tendency among sociologists to believe that Californians have higher rates of almost everything that’s bad.

“San Diego was left out of that for a very long time, because we were perceived as such a small place. But now, crazy things are happening here as often as they do in Los Angeles and San Francisco.”

“We’re simply getting to be a much bigger city--a California city--and, as that happens, we’re going to be a lot more like L.A. and San Francisco,” said Dr. Mark Kalisch, a forensic psychiatrist who often renders court evaluations of murder suspects. “Quite frankly, it’s caused me to reevaluate security in my own office. Doctors have long been perceived as these Marcus Welby care givers, but that perception is rapidly disappearing. A kind of societal protection that used to be there for physicians is no longer. So it’s by design that two massive oak doors separate my office from the waiting room.”

Kalisch said the problem of mental illness is one that continues to plague the country, especially its larger cities. As the numbers of mentally ill grow, almost exponentially, he said, the number of beds in state mental hospitals rapidly declines. Many of the mentally ill have turned to the streets, and some, he said, to crime.

Norm Stamper, assistant chief of the San Diego Police Department, said he is disturbed by a general erosion of limits and boundaries in society. People now seem to feel a greater freedom in crossing over boundaries once thought impassable, he said. Hospitals and schools are no longer the sanctuaries they once were.

Even so, it’s Stamper’s hunch that San Diego has fewer berserk crimes than other big cities.

“On any given any day, you can pick up the paper and read about some crazed gunman killing an entire family or shooting innocent strangers in a shopping center,” he said. “Society has a job on its hands in controlling such crime. But what we have to do as well is develop a better understanding of why berserk crimes occur.

“Regardless of where they occur, their effects are horribly devastating--not just to victims and the individuals who commit them, but to communities at large. Stranger-on-stranger violence--which in itself is rapidly increasing--takes a toll on all human beings, whether directly affected or not,” Stamper said.

“From a police point of view, and a social point of view, trends in society may offer explanations for such crimes, but they don’t offer excuses. In the quest for understanding why people do what they do, a kind of sympathy is built up that may be a noble gesture but which doesn’t excuse the behavior. That, I think, is something we must keep in mind. Regardless of the causes of berserk crime, we just can’t excuse the behavior.”