Memorial to Massacre Dead Breaks Ground

Every July 18 for the past five years, lighted candles and makeshift shrines have served as memorials at the site of the former McDonald’s restaurant in heavily-Latino San Ysidro, where 21 people were killed in the country’s worst single-day mass slaying.

Until this year, though, those memorials have come and gone. The flowers have wilted, candles have been snuffed out and altars bearing the Virgin Mary have been dismantled.

But today, on the massacre’s sixth anniversary, construction begins on a $50,000 permanent memorial.

Families and friends of those killed, survivors of the attack, and those in the border community who are haunted by that 1984 tragedy have crusaded to construct the formal memorial ever since the shooting stopped.

“In our Mexican culture, it is important to have something, some sort of monument, to commemorate the site where a loved one has died,” said Maria Neves-Perman, president of the Southwestern College board of trustees. A longtime teacher in San Ysidro, she said she lost three of her students in the rampage.

A one-building satellite campus of Southwestern College now stands on the lot at West San Ysidro Boulevard where the bustling fast-food restaurant once catered to a predominantly Latino clientele. Neves-Perman, who spearheaded the campaign to establish the memorial, said the school remains dedicated to commemorating those killed during gunman James Oliver Huberty’s shooting spree.

“I didn’t want to have another anniversary go by without having some sort of permanent memorial under way,” said San Diego Councilman Robert Filner. Filner, whose 8th District includes San Ysidro, helped raise half the money needed to construct the memorial by soliciting private donors.

“There are two memorials,” said Serafin A. Zasueta, dean and director of the Southwestern College Educational Center at San Ysidro. “One is the symbolic memorial we begin to build Wednesday, and the more important memorial is the active one of the education at the school everyday.”

Twenty-one hexagonal granite pillars of varying heights, from 1 to 6 feet tall, should be completed within six months, Zasueta said, and will be placed along the school’s driveway. Although each pillar represents one of Huberty’s victims, the memorial is also a tribute to the community of San Ysidro, he said.

Six years ago, Huberty sprayed the restaurant with bullets from his Uzi submachine gun, 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and a 9-millimeter Browning semi-automatic pistol during his hot afternoon madness.

Police fatally shot Huberty, 41, 77 minutes after the unprovoked shooting began.

The fast-food restaurant was torn down soon after the rampage at a loss of about $300,000 to the owners. Although San Ysidro residents talked of replacing the restaurant with a memorial park, the land, which was given to the city, remained vacant for four years.

In 1988, Southwestern College purchased the nearly 1-acre property for $40,000, well under its value before the shooting.

School spokeswoman Susan Herney said the memorial was designed by Roberto Valdes Jr., a former architecture student at the college. She said his design, which depicts pillars pointing to heaven, was selected in a competition among Southwestern architecture students.

A series of benefits was held last month by the school to raise money for the memorial fund, Neves-Perman said. Donations from private donors and businesses, such as Catellus Development, whose $15,000 donation was the largest, paid for about half of the construction cost, she said.

“This will be the final, finishing touch to a very tragic circumstance. I feel it’s an appropriate commemoration to the victims, along with the living memorial of the college being there,” Filner said.