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San Diego Sniper Is Denied Parole

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Times Staff Writer

A state parole board on Tuesday rejected a bid for freedom from Brenda Spencer, who killed two adults and wounded eight children in a 1979 sniper attack on a San Diego elementary school.

Spencer, 43, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison in 1980; this was the third time her bid for parole has been rejected. The two-member parole board at the California Institution for Women in Chino ruled that she could not request parole again until 2009.

“It’s a very good result and we’re very happy,” said Richard Sachs, the San Diego County deputy district attorney who argued for Spencer’s continued incarceration.

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Spencer was 16 on the morning of Jan. 29, 1979, when she fired 36 shots from a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle that her father had just given her as a Christmas present.

Spencer fired her rifle, fitted with a scope, from her home in the San Diego community of San Carlos across the street at Cleveland Elementary School, just as students were arriving for class.

When Principal Burton Wragg, 53, ran to tend to a wounded child, Spencer shot and killed him. Custodian Michael Suchar was killed trying to assist Wragg. A San Diego police officer was wounded.

When contacted by a San Diego Evening Tribune reporter by telephone during the six-hour police standoff, the freckle-faced Spencer said: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.” The comment later was the inspiration for a hit song by the Irish rock band the Boomtown Rats.

The San Diego County district attorney said Spencer had told prison officials she felt unwanted, and envied children who had someone to protect them.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Spencer apologized for the shootings and said the board should consider a history of sexual abuse. Spencer said in a 1993 parole hearing that she was under the influence of drugs, although prosecutors say toxicology tests showed otherwise.

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“She expressed remorse, but she came across as fragile, someone who’s not all together,” Sachs said. “She says she doesn’t remember the crime and she provided no insight into what happened.”

Sachs said Spencer mutilated herself by branding her body with a heated paper clip after her breakup with another prisoner.

“That demonstrates she can’t handle the bad things that happen to her,” Sachs said.

Attorney Carrie Hempel, who represented Spencer at the hearing, did not return phone messages seeking comment.

Wragg’s widow made a videotaped plea seeking to stop Spencer from being paroled, and Charles Miller, a 9-year-old student on the day of the shooting and now a San Diego County probation officer, testified how being shot had altered his life.

Miller “spoke of losing his sense of security and well-being seeing his principal and custodian gunned down, and then feeling himself being shot, and his body going numb,” Sachs said.

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