For the students of Cleveland Elementary School, January 17, 1989, started out like any other Tuesday. Then, around lunchtime, the children flocked outside for recess. Sinath “Mike” Vann, who was in second grade at the time, remembers being on the playground when he heard the gunshots. “I was confused because I didn’t know what was happening, but I remember also being excited,” the Stockton, California native told Teen Vogue. “I thought the gunshots were fireworks.”
As kids played, 24-year-old Patrick Purdy parked his car behind the school, approached the playground, and spent the next several minutes firing 105 shots into the crowd of children with a semiautomatic assault rifle, killing five and injuring 30 others, including a teacher, before killing himself.
All of the victims — Sokhim An (six), Ram Chun (eight), Oeun Lim (eight), Rathanar Or (nine), and Thuy Tran (six) — were Southeast Asian: four Cambodian, one Vietnamese, and all children of refugees who had escaped violence in their homelands only to experience unthinkable tragedy in the United States. The last words Purdy reportedly uttered were exchanged with another guest at the motel he was staying in, just an hour before the shooting: “The damn Hindus and boat people own everything.”
The Stockton schoolyard shooting, as it’s often referred to, was considered one of the nation’s worst school shootings at the time. While it initially drew national attention, inspiring TIME’s “Armed America” cover story and a school visit from Michael Jackson, as well as helping to pave the way for the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, not many Americans outside of Stockton are familiar with the shooting today. Even fewer know the shooting was a racially motivated attack against Asians.
Patrick Blanchfield, an academic and journalist whose forthcoming book Gunpower: The Structure of American Violence covers the Stockton shooting in its first chapter, remarked on how relevant the shooting feels today: “I think what makes reading about the shooting so strange is its uncanny familiarity,” Blanchfield told Teen Vogue. “It happened in ‘89, but it could be something that happened yesterday. You’ve heard this story before.”
Teen Vogue’s interview with Blanchfield took place just weeks before the horrific mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 children and two adults were killed.
In 1989, Stockton had one of the largest populations of Southeast Asians of any California city; about 1 in 6 current residents was born in Southeast Asia, according to the report. The communities consisted mainly of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees who had fled the violence of the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.
“I wasn’t born in the United States, but the strange thing is that I only remember Stockton,” said Vann, who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand before immigrating with his family. “We grew up in a rough area, low-income, with the majority of the neighborhood being Asian people just like us coming from similar backgrounds, all refugees from war-torn countries.”
Because of the large population of immigrants, the school district designated three schools to provide bilingual services to students, one of which was Cleveland Elementary School. At the time of the shooting, 70% of the school’s population was Southeast Asian.
Years earlier, Purdy had attended the same school. Purdy, a white man who grew up in Stockton and lived there for much of his adult life, had a troubled childhood. His father was absent early in his life, his mother neglected him, and he had told coworkers she was an alcoholic. As he got older, he built an extensive rap sheet that included arrests for drug possession, prostitution, and vandalism, along with other crimes.
When Purdy set foot onto the Cleveland Elementary School playground, he was dressed head to toe in paramilitary garb: camouflage shirt, green flak jacket, blue jeans, and black boots. Authorities searched his motel room afterwards and found, among other things, several dozen plastic toy soldiers standing guard, including one on the TV stand, another on the bathroom curtain rod, and one waiting inside the motel’s fridge-freezer.
“At the time there were analysts saying Purdy wasn’t any more racist than other white people living in post-Vietnam War Stockton,” Blanchfield said. “But we can read it. It’s legible. There is no excuse for Purdy’s actions. He’s clearly part of a seething undercurrent of anti-Asian racism. But he’s also a victim of white male patriarchy and of war.”
Blanchfield says the police call for gun control in the aftermath of the Stockton shooting, with a special emphasis on banning Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifles like the one Purdy used, took precedence in the media over highlighting Purdy’s anti-Asian racism and violence. “Instead of talking about the actual dead Asian refugee children killed by an actual white supremacist, almost immediately the police and then the media and politicians start talking about hypothetical victims and cops that could be killed by this powerful weapon,” Blanchfield said. “When these events happen, instead of talking structurally about the factors that led to this event, there are other issues relevant to powerful groups they bring up, like, ‘let’s find ways to assert more police forces.’”
In October 1989, nine months after the shooting, the office of California attorney general John K. Van de Kamp released a 99-page investigative report that seemed to confirm what many community members and advocates already knew: Purdy’s actions were motivated by racial hatred against Southeast Asians. According to the detailed report, in 1988, “Purdy expressed to coworkers that he did not like competing against the Southeast Asians for jobs” and that the United States “was letting all the Vietnamese and communists into the country.”
Just six years earlier, similar language was reportedly used by two white men just before they beat Vincent Chin, a Chinese American celebrating his bachelor party, to death. In that case, the perpetrators’ racism was also exacerbated by economic competition, as the two Chrysler workers mistakenly associated Chin with the booming Japanese auto industry.
The Van de Kamp report also noted that weeks before the shooting, Purdy visited a bar and complained about the Vietnamese receiving compensation from the government before saying, as he left, “You’re going to read about me in the papers.”
The report concluded with recommendations pulled from the Final Report of the Attorney General’s Asian and Pacific Islander Advisory Committee, a 129-page document published in response to the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes just weeks before the Stockton school shooting. The Van de Kamp report echoed the recommendation that the California State Board of Education should encourage schools to adopt ethnic studies curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade. California became the first state to require ethnic studies in high school only last year, in 2021.
But by the time the report came out, much of the American public had moved on from Stockton. Those who lived in the city, however, did not — could not. Vann remembers growing up “with a lot of hate and darkness in my heart” and internalizing his feelings. “Even though I went through a shooting at a young age, I’d look at [my parents] and think, How can I say I’m struggling when my parents have been through worse?” Vann said. “And I think that’s what happened to a lot of people at my school. A lot of us have the same background, have parents who walked through landmines and saw family members blown up and killed. There’s nothing that can compare to that.”
But after volunteering at the local YMCA as an adult and discovering his passion for working with at-risk youth, he began opening up and sharing his story. Vann was offered a job at the YMCA and began his nonprofit career, moving up to become the senior director of community development. He’s now a community service officer with the Stockton Police Department, where he specializes in training new recruits to build relationships with the community. “Over time, building connections with others has taught me that racism doesn't have a place anywhere, and just because one person does something to you doesn’t mean everyone is the same,” Vann said.
Today, there are some in Stockton who are committed to honoring the memories of the five children who were killed. Six teachers who survived the shooting officially formed Cleveland School Remembers after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 and hold memorials to honor the lives lost.
Vann says some of his classmates moved away over the years and never returned home. And while he understands the sentiment, he’s told his own kids about the shooting as a way to impart an important life lesson. “Patrick Purdy was a racist, but I know he wasn’t born that way,” Vann said. “There’s imperialism there; there are things in this country that are set up for people to become that way. And if they’re in the right type of setting, it can become reality. But I tell my kids the biggest thing we can do is talk to people. Maybe if someone approached Patrick Purdy and spent more time with him, he wouldn’t have come to my playground with an AK-47.”
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