McDonald's & Luby's

Called the "San Ysidro McDonald's Massacre," the mass shooting incident resulted in 21 deaths and 15 injuries at a McDonald's restaurant in the San Ysidro section of San Diego, California, on Wednesday, July 18, 1984. The "rampage murders" were carried out by James Oliver Huberty, a 41-year-old former welder from Canton, Ohio. In January 1984, Huberty had moved to San Ysidro with his wife and children, where he worked as a security guard until his dismissal one week prior to the mass shootings.

Despite the media at the time telling us that Huberty used a 9mm Uzi semi-automatic (the primary weapon fired in the massacre), a Winchester pump-action twelve-gauge shotgun, and a 9mm Browning HP in the restaurant, to kill 21 people and wound 19 others, such details didn't change the gun laws; instead they created immediate and long-term copycats.

Huberty's victims were predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American and ranged in age from 8 months to 74 years. The massacre began at 4 p.m. and lasted for 77 minutes. Huberty had spent 257 rounds of ammunition before he was fatally shot by Chuck Foster, a SWAT team sniper perched on the roof of a nearby post office.

Now in 2007, we see a seemingly coincidental mirror of this July 18th date has surfaced in a situation in which a McDonald's employee died after being shot at a drive-through window.

On Wednesday, July 18, 2007, Shawnee M. Koch, 40, of Reading, Pennsylvania, an assistant manager at a McDonald's restaurant was shot in the head while working at the drive-through window, and later died at a hospital.

Koch was the second person to be shot dead while working in the drive-through window of the McDonald's restaurant at Ninth and Spring streets in Reading, Pennsylvania. The previous one was a man killed in 2004.

No suspect has been identified or caught. Sgt. Guy S. Lehman said: "It doesn't appear there was any dialogue between the two. She was standing at the cash register, the car pulled up and 'bam.'"

The copycat effect regarding the case of San Ysidro McDonald's Massacre and the Luby's Cafeteria Massacre has been discovered to be rather apparent and clear.

On October 16, 1991, George Hennard drove a 1987 Ford Ranger pickup truck into Killeen, Bell County, Texas’ Luby's Cafeteria. He jumped out and screamed: “This is what Bell County has done to me!”

Hennard shouted this while opening fire with a Glock 17 and then a Ruger P89, shooting to death 23 people, and finally killing himself with a shoot to his head. At the time, this was the worst mass murder in US history, only to be surpassed by the Virginia Tech shootings of April 16, 2007.

On Hennard's dead body police found a ticket for The Fisher King, a 1991 Robin Williams movie. The film stars Jeff Bridges as a shock radio DJ Jack Lucas, who has a fan that takes the character Lucas's rants literally and goes to a restaurant with a gun, murdering guiltless diners. The motion picture’s massacre resembles the one carried out by Hennard.

Before George Hennard crashed his truck into Luby's cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, on October 16, 1991, he had watched a documentary (on videotape) at his home about a similar mass murderer, James Huberty, who killed 21 people at the San Ysidro California McDonald's on July 18, 1984. Some reports indicate Huberty viewed the tape several times.