It’s been more than eight years since James Huberty ran screaming into the San Ysidro, Calif., McDonald’s on July 18, 1984, shooting 21 people to death and injuring 19 more in the nation’s second-worst single-day massacre.
Two months later, McDonald’s razed the building in the middle of the night. Joan Kroc, the company’s major stockholder, turned the lot over to the city and set off a six-year battle over its fate. There were those who thought there shouldn’t be any reminder of the tragedy. Others wanted a park or a chapel. Business leaders said the valuable commercial site shouldn’t be wasted.
Eventually, a stymied City Council sold the land to Southwestern College in Chula Vista for a fraction of its appraised value. The college put up a building and, in 1990, erected a marble memorial in one corner as part of the purchase agreement.
A McDonald’s in California, a cafeteria in Texas, an apartment building in Milwaukee. Places where people die violently become, for many, symbols of horror. These sites exert a disturbing power, often attracting grieving survivors, gawkers, and others with more macabre motives.
A week ago, a chicken franchise in Palatine joined the roster of buildings marked by murder. Since the Jan. 9 discovery of seven bodies, the Brown’s Chicken & Pasta on Northwest Highway now exerts a disquieting hold on some.
“Every time you pass by, you envision it,” said Palatine resident Kim Branch, 25, who drives past Brown’s on her way to work. “You wonder what happened. It’s eerie.”
The future of the Brown’s building is uncertain. The three daughters of murder victims Lynn and Richard Ehlenfeldt, who owned the franchise, have said they hope the restaurant will reopen to carry on their parents’ dream, but they have not decided if they would run it themselves.
That prospect is painful for others.
“Tear it down,” said Emmanuel Castro, whose 16-year-old son Michael is among the seven dead. “I don’t want to see it because it reminds me of my Michael.”
Erasing the building, though, won’t obliterate the memories, as those who have lived through similar tragedies can attest.
College officials in San Ysidro say people still bring flowers and candles to the old McDonald’s site, but the memorial remains a bitter reminder for some in the largely Latino community south of San Diego.
“Marble is hard. Marble is cold,” said Bertha Alicia Gonzalez, who lost six friends in the massacre. “It doesn’t mean anything to us. We needed a quiet place where you could be sad, where you could start reflecting and wondering why this happened, where people could reach within themselves to find something strong to avoid any more tragedies.”
In some cases, surviving the tragedy and returning the building to its original use is a source of strength to survivors.
Most days, John Marr, an associate manager at the Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, spends the hectic lunch period trucking out trays of food to the serving line. That’s what he was doing at lunchtime on Oct. 16, 1991, when George Hennard drove his pickup truck through a glass window and began shooting in the crowded dining room. Hennard killed 23 people before shooting himself.
Marr and a number of other workers managed to escape through a rear door. In March 1992, Luby’s Cafeterias Inc., reopened a remodeled version of the restaurant after Killeen residents sent the San Antonio-based company more than 300 letters of support. Marr and all but four employees, who had subsequently moved, came back to work.
“Every once in a while I think about what happened,” Marr said. “It would be abnormal not to. But you just have to put it behind you. You can’t let it trouble your mind.”
Business remains about the same as it was before the massacre, although there was an upsurge in the first few months after the restaurant reopened, according to senior vice president Bill Robson. He said the company has “absolutely no regrets” about the move.
“You know, we had decided we just weren’t going to make a decision until the emotions subsided,” Robson said. “The community approached us.”
Marr said he regularly sees customers who lived through that day of horror; he knows of others who refuse to return. Luby’s also attracts tourists who ask him about the tragedy and take pictures of the restaurant.
“Most people have a natural curiosity about it,” Marr said. “I don’t blame them.”
Few places have attracted attention as feverish as the Milwaukee apartment building where Jeffrey Dahmer killed most of his 15 victims. Tourists came from as far away as Japan to see the Oxford Apartments, and some people offered guards there as much as $75 for a piece of brick from the site.
Campus Circle, a public and private partnership that bought the building last August, spent more than $50,000 on three guards and a barbed wire fence to protect the building from threats and other unwanted attention, said president Patrick LeSage.
In November, it demolished the 49-unit building and cleared away the rubble.
“I was there when they first swung the crane,” said Shirley Hughes, whose son Tony was murdered in Dahmer’s apartment. “And I rejoiced. There needs to be something positive there, something that won’t be looking so sad or make you feel so sad.”
LeSage said the group hasn’t decided what to do with the site, although they are working with the victims’ families, some of whom are hesitant to suggest a memorial, fearing it might refuel the morbid parade.
“We’d like flowers and running water at least,” said Jeannetta Robinson, director of Career Youth Development Inc., who has been working with the victims’ families through a support group. “We hope the type of people who want a rock from a tragedy aren’t the same people who will come to see a flower bloom.”
But it’s difficult to control the attraction to these places, particularly in residential neighborhoods, where people have little choice but to put up with it or move out.
The lot at 8213 W. Summerdale Ave. in Norwood Park Township, an area near Chicago’s Far Northwest Side, sat empty for nine years. But it was not unnoticed.
Once, a model of an electric chair showed up, neighbors say. Another time, a couple of tombstones were erected among the weeds. People even drove their cars in circles on the tract where John Gacy buried the 33 young men and boys he killed in his home.
“It got so you wouldn’t know what you would see when you looked out the window,” said a neighbor who asked that her name not be used.
In 1988, a new house was built on the site and the owners changed the street number in an apparent attempt to deflect attention.
A woman who answered the door at the home last week said, “We had nothing to do with that (the Gacy case),” before closing it again.
These places of death are not easy to forget.
Michael Bigler went back to work at the Edmond, Okla., post office the day after Patrick Sherrill killed 14 people, then himself, in a rampage on Aug. 20, 1986. He was the only one of the six wounded by Sherrill who was well enough to do so. But Bigler, who was shot in the back, couldn’t escape what he calls the “fog of evil” and he quit two months later to start his own ministry.
“When my wife and I used to live in Kansas, our house caught fire,” Bigler said. “We redid it, but it was never the same. There still was this smell of black smoke. The post office was the same way. There was a spiritual black smoke, it seemed.”
The decision about what to do with the Palatine murder site is expected to be made jointly by company officials, the Ehlenfeldt daughters and the building’s owner, identified by Brown’s officials as John Gregornick.
What many hope for the building is that it is forgotten.
“We want people to come to Palatine,” said Ed Smith, a friend of the Ehlenfeldts who owns a nearby business, “but not to see the Brown’s massacre site.”
