Content warning: this story includes graphic descriptions of violence.
On July 18, 1984, a gunman killed 21 people and wounded 19 others at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro.
At the time, it was the largest public mass shooting in U.S. history.
What the survivors had to learn to live with was unique.
Now, their stories give insight into what a growing number of Americans may be facing.
There is no universal definition of a mass shooting. The Violence Prevention Project uses a more restrictive definition than other groups that track this violence.
Even so, they record 193 mass public shootings in U.S. history through 2023, killing nearly 1,400 people and leaving countless more survivors.
Wendy Flanagan is one of them.
The summer of 1984, she was fundraising for a cheerleading uniform. She had just been chosen for the varsity team for her upcoming senior year.
“I was loud. I was happy. I had never experienced loss,” she said.
The job at the San Ysidro McDonald’s was her first.
July 18 changed everything.
Over 77 minutes, the gunman opened fire.
Flanagan hid with others in a closet down a set of stairs.
She remembers a specific, sharp smell of sweat. She was later told it’s released under extreme distress.
“They told me it was the smell of death,” she said.
By the time the officers escorted her out, she was a different person.
She no longer wanted to be popular or even noticed.
The next day, she went to work at a different McDonald’s.
Everything was a reminder — the beep of the French fry alarm, the pattern of the floor tiles.
“Any little thing” was a reason for fear, a signal that someone could be coming to shoot her.
The manager sent her home.
She switched schools but didn’t find the normalcy she craved.
“They were like, ‘Oh, you're that girl from that shooting.’ I was like, ‘I'm out of here,’” she remembered.
She started ditching classes, switched schools again and tried to catch up at night school but failed. She didn’t graduate with her class.
Instead, she bounced between waitressing jobs for decades.
She was good at being a waitress, but she found it hard to keep to any kind of schedule.
“I would never succeed at anything,” she said. “And I felt like a loser. Like, 'What is wrong with me?’ And, 'It’s been a long time. Like, get over it.’ But I never really could.”
She turned to crystal meth.
“I was just trying to stay alive any way I could,” she said.
She almost never left her mother’s house, where she lived.
“And when I did, I would have to take, like, two-and-a-half hours to get ready,” she said. “I would be full makeup, hair, nails, everything perfect so that I could present myself to the world like, 'Look, I'm okay.’ But the majority of the time, I wasn't okay. So I stayed in my house. I stayed on drugs, just trying to nurture myself into survival.”
When her mother lost their house, Flanagan became homeless.
Still, she fought to appear “normal.”
She lived out of her mother’s car. She got a 24-hour gym membership and would go at 3 a.m. to shower and blow-dry her hair away from the eyes of other gym-goers.
During that time, she said she found Jesus. And astonishing empathy.
“I know that people don't want to hear about the shooter. But I think he was a victim as well. I do. Any person with that much hatred,” she said through tears. “So I prayed for him, too.”
In her 40s, she learned the term for what derailed her life — post-traumatic stress disorder — and that it qualified her for disability benefits.
Caseworkers helped get her into a Section 8 apartment four years ago.
She covered its walls with unicorns and butterflies, and sayings such as: “Love every moment, laugh every day, live beyond words.”
A Bible sits on a side table. Pages spill out of its worn spine. Her favorite verse is highlighted with a heart: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”
“When you say that time heals all wounds, it doesn’t,” she said. “You better have something more than time, and you better have something that’s going to help you, because, look — I don’t want to say I’m not healed, but I don’t think we ever heal. We live through life.”
When she was a little girl and people asked her what she wanted to be, she always said three things: a mommy, a teacher, and a normal girl.
She ended up being none of those things, she said. The things that happened to her kept her from fulfilling those dreams.
But she said she’s not bitter. She believes God replaced what she lost in other ways.
“I’m not like, fun and go out and popular and pretty and everything anymore,” she said. “But I’m at peace, which is much more valuable.”
In the closet with Flanagan that day was her coworker, Al Leos.
He was a defensive back for Chula Vista High School’s football team. They had just won their division’s championship.
He was looking forward to his senior year, defending the title and trying to get a university scholarship.
July 18, he said, wiped all that out.
Leos was shot multiple times, sometimes at point-blank range.
Bullets barely missed his heart and spine. Scars still mark his body.
“I watched a lot of babies, moms, fathers, young kids just have their lives just snuffed right from underneath them. And there was nothing I could do to help them. And it was painful to sit there and watch them get killed and me not being able to do anything about it,” he said.
To this day, that inability to help haunts him the most.
He crawled to the closet, leaving a trail of blood that would later lead the SWAT team to find him, Wendy and the others.
He bit down on a cloth so the others in the closet, already panicked, wouldn’t have to hear him moan.
And he made a deal with God.
“Just give me a chance to see my family one more time before you take me away,” he prayed. “If you don’t take me away, I’m going to do something good with my life.”
Leos’ wounds left him unable to complete even basic tasks.
He didn’t want to ask his mother and sisters to care for him “like a baby.”
So his father, the family’s sole income earner, stayed home from work for half a year to take care of him.
The San Ysidro community rallied, Leos said, putting food on their table and paying their monthly bills.
When his physical wounds finally healed, Leos became a cop in San Ysidro. It was his way of giving back to the community that had carried him.
Nightmares plagued him for years.
Then, one night, he came across a burning car. He heard a man trapped inside.
Protocol is to wait for firefighters to arrive.
But Leos said he refused to be powerless again. He reached into the flames.
“It was like in the movies. I pulled him out,” he said. “And as I'm dragging him away, the car blew up.”
He saved the man’s life, and the nightmares stopped.
The shooting still feels like yesterday. There’s no finish line to healing.
When he sees his scars in the mirror, he said they keep him humble.
A lot has changed since 1984.
Leos is a San Diego police captain now.
His face crinkles with joy when he speaks about his two-year-old son and his carefree, joyful spirit.
“I hope it stays that way. I’m going to do what I can to keep him on that track,” he said.
Now, officers have the same equipment that used to be reserved for the SWAT team — long rifles with scopes, bulletproof vests, body armor and helmets.
They’re trained not to wait for authorization to take down an active shooter but to act immediately.
Still, more than 1,200 people have been killed by mass shooters since that horrific day 40 years ago.
When asked how it has felt to see public mass shootings become so common, Wendy Flanagan said she doesn’t watch the news, but she does think about the other survivors.
It’s why she decided to share her story, even though talking about it takes a big toll on her.
She wants other mass shooting survivors to see that it’s possible to keep going.
Leos doesn’t talk about it much, either. But on the 40-year anniversary, he wants to make sure people don’t forget the people who died.
“They were living a life,” he said. “They had a name to their faces.”
These are their names:
Elsa Herlinda Borboa-Firro, 19
Neva Denise Caine, 22
Michelle Deanne Carncross, 18
María Elena Colmenero-Silva, 19
David Flores Delgado, 11
Gloria López González, 22
Omar Alonso Hernández, 11
Blythe Regan Herrera, 31
Matao Herrera, 11
Paulina Aquino López, 21
Margarita Padilla, 18
Claudia Pérez, 9
Rubén Lozano Pérez, 19
Carlos Reyes Jr., 8 months
Victor M. Rivera, 25
Arisdelsi Vuelvas Vargas, 31
Hugo Luis Velázquez-Vázquez, 45
Aida Velázquez-Victoria, 70
Laurence Herman Versluis, 62
Miguel Victoria-Ulloa, 74
Jackie Lynn Domínguez Wright, 18
