Patrick Edward Purdy (November 10, 1964 - January 17 1989) was a mass murderer who killed 5 children, all Southeast Asian refugees, and wounded 30 others in the Stockton massacre at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, on January 171989. After perpetrating the shooting, he shot himself to death. He was a drug addict with a long history of criminal offenses and mental disturbance.
Life
Purdy, who was also known under several aliases, among them Patrick West and Eddie Purdy West, was born in Tacoma, Washington on November 10, 1964 as the son of Patrick Benjamin Purdy, stationed at Fort Lewis at that time, and Kathleen Toscano. Patrick's mother divorced after her husband had threatened her with a weapon, and the family moved to South Lake Tahoe and later to the Sacramento area. He attended Cleveland Elementary School from kindergarten through second grade.
Patrick's mother re-married, though was again divorced six years later. Albert Gulart Sr., his step-father, said of Patrick he was an overly quiet child who couldn't cope with things and according to his aunt, he had a drinking problem during his childhood. As a teenager he once struck his mother and therefore was permanently thrown out of her house. Purdy, being 13 or 14 years old at that time, lived in San Francisco for a while, before moving to Los Angeles, became a drug addict and went to high school only sporadically.
Patrick Purdy had a long criminal record, being arrested in 1980 for prostitution, in 1982 for possession of marijuana for sale, in 1983 for possession of an illegal weapon and receiving stolen property and in 1984 for being an accomplice in an armed robbery. In 1986 his mother called police when he vandalized her car, after she refused to give him money for drugs.
In the fall 1987 he attended welding classes at San Joaquin Delta College and complained about the high number of Southeast Asian students there. In early 1988 he worked at Numeri Tech, a small machine shop located in Stockton, and from July to October as a boilermaker in Portland, Oregon, living in Sandy, where he had relatives. He also bought the Chinese-made AK-47 derivative used in the shooting there on August 3. In October he left and drifted between Texas, Connecticut and Tennessee searching for a new job, before finally ending up once again in California where he rented a room at the El Rancho Motel in Stockton on December 26. After the shooting the room was found decorated with numerous toy soldiers.
According to his friends, who described him as nice and never violent towards anyone, Purdy was suicidal at times and upset and mad about the fact that he failed to "make it on his own".[ Steve Sloan, a night-shift supervisor at Numeri Tech described him as a "real ball of frustration" who "was angry about everything", while another one of Purdy's former co-workers noted: "He was always miserable. I've never seen a guy that didn't want to smile as much as he didn't." In a notebook, found in a hotel, where he lived in early 1988, Purdy wrote about himself: "I'm so dumb, I'm dumber than a sixth-grader. My mother and father were dumb."]
Shooting spree
At about noon on January 17, 1989, Patrick Purdy, parking behind Cleveland Elementary School, set his car ablaze with a molotov cocktail and entered the school yard. Armed with a Type 56 assault rifle he began shooting at the children, while hiding behind a group of portable classrooms, and killed four girls and a boy, all of them immigrants from Southeast Asia, and wounded 30 others, including a teacher. When he ran out of ammunition he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a pistol.
Following the shooting calls for regulation of semi-automatic weapons arose, leading to the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.
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