One of the first school shootings in the nation was in 1969 when 16 year-old Brenda Spencer opened fire on an elementary school across from her home in a San Diego city suburb. She had asked for a camera for her birthday but her father gave her a rifle and 550 rounds of ammunition.

She wounded eight students and killed the principal and a custodian who tried to drag him to safety, as well as wounding a responding police officer.

When asked why she did it, Spencer replied, “I don’t like Mondays.” Bob Geldorf and his band the Boomtown Rats were playing in San Diego and he wrote a song titled “I don’t like Mondays.” It was a No. 1 hit in the U.K. for four weeks, and was popular in the U.S. outside San Diego.

Geldorf later said that she wrote to him, saying, “She was glad she’d done it because I’d made her famous.”

Spencer is still in prison and has been denied parole four times as she keeps giving the parole board conflicting statements. She is eligible for parole again in 2019.

It is tragic to realize that gaining fame is the motivation with many copycats today. They sit in their jail cells relishing all of the TV and print attention they are getting. While in prison, Brenda Spencer used heated metal to brand the words “Courage” and “Pride” across her chest. She is now 65 and will no doubt hear of more school shootings and ask herself if they got the idea from what she did on that long ago Monday.

I was a newbie Public Information Officer for Grossmont District Hospital in La Mesa, Calif., at the time. Three of the children victims were brought to our hospital. Two were taken to Children’s Hospital, two to Alvarado Hospital and one to Kaiser Permanente.

It was a major career event turner for me, as I chose to release the name of the students at our hospital and Alvarado. That was because there were hundreds of parents, grandparents, etc., flooding the phones at all of the area hospitals searching for children. I only did so after consulting with the superintendent of schools, who was at Alvarado with the wife of the principal who had just died.

Only later did I learn this could have been a dangerous decision because of the fact that children can often be in witness protection or hiding from abusive parents.

Up to that point, none of the public information officers at the many hospitals in San Diego County even knew each other. It ended up with about 12 of us creating a taskforce on public relations for San Diego County Hospitals and developing a manual on “The public’s right to know and patient privacy.”

We also created a program to train administrators about “How to Deal with the Media” so they wouldn’t say “no comment.”

(Both programs were picked up and used at hospitals across the nation.)

And we created a chapter of the National Hospital Public Relations Association of which I went on to serve on the national board.

With every school shooting since then I feel emotions which are best described as hallowness and sadness.

Ruth E. Messing is a Sequim resident.