Help building the largest human-edited directory of the web Suggest URL - Open Directory Project - Become an editor

directopedia.org uses links and structure from dmoz Open Directory Project.
The contents has been generating using technology developed by scientec.

Brenda Ann Spencer (born April 3, 1962 in San Diego, California) wounded eight children and one police officer and killed two adults in a shooting spree at Cleveland Elementary School in the San Carlos section of San Diego, California, on January 29, 1979.

The school was across the street from her house. She used a rifle she had recently been given for Christmas. When the six-hour incident ended and the sixteen-year-old was asked why she had committed the crime, she shrugged and replied, "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day." She also said: "There was no reason for it, and it was just a lot of fun", "It was just like shooting ducks in a pond" and "[The children] looked like a herd of cows standing around, it was really easy pickings."

She pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon, and was sentenced to prison for 25 years to life, currently being served at The California Institution for Women in Corona. Since she was jailed she has been up for parole four times and has been turned down each time, the last in 2005. Spencer will be eligible for parole again in 2009. She has claimed that she was drunk and under the influence of PCP at the time of the shootings.

Spencer's crime, lack of remorse, and inability to provide a serious explanation for her actions when captured inspired the song "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats, written by musician Bob Geldof. This was played regularly on Monday mornings by album-oriented rock format radio stations in the United States throughout the 1980s. It got to No.1 in the UK charts in July 1979, and was also covered by Tori Amos on her 2001 album Strange Little Girls.

The chorus includes the lines:

Tell me why

I don't like Mondays.

I want to shoot the whole day down.

At a concert in London in 1995, just before the tenth anniversary of Live Aid, Bon Jovi covered the song after being joined on stage by Geldof. Geldof himself performed an impromptu version of the song while hosting one of the Live 8 concerts, in July 2005 (the 20th anniversary of Live Aid).

In the second episode of Series 4 of The West Wing, the song featured during a fictional high school shooting.

External links

• Urban Legends Reference Pages Writeup
• "I Don't Like Mondays" Lyrics

This article is based on the article "Brenda Spencer" from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License. Here you find the list of authors of this article. The article can only edited within Wikipedia. Edit this article in Wikipedia.