Thirty-five years ago Wednesday, 6-year-old Rob Young walked with his mother to Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton on an overcast, slightly foggy morning.
Since Young’s family only had one vehicle to use, walking to school every morning together was a typical routine.
Young would be dropped off and his mother would walk to St. Joseph’s Medical Center where she worked in the cancer unit.
However, that particular morning, Young’s mother had an odd feeling when dropping her son off but didn’t know why she felt uneasy.
“She walks me up to the back gate … and she’s like ‘I just don’t want you to go to school today,'” Young recalled his mother saying. “But I was too young to stay home, and she didn’t really have a valid reason to keep me home.”
Young’s mom kissed him on his forehead and left for work as he excitedly headed to his classroom thinking about a big kickball game that was planned for recess.
At recess time when Young and his friends were playing their game on the blacktop, he suddenly heard gunfire.
In that moment, Young along with everyone else on the elementary school campus became victims of a mass school shooting.
That afternoon on Jan. 17, 1989, Patrick Purdy, 24, lit his station wagon on fire with a Molotov cocktail after parking it behind the school, causing the car to explode.
The gunman then walked onto the playground area and set himself up behind a portable building where he started firing rounds of gunfire with a semi-automatic rifle.
In three minutes, he shot 106 rounds.
‘That’s when the fear started setting in’
“I didn’t grow up in a household that had firearms, the only thing I knew about guns was what I’d seen on TV,” Young said. “We were probably 70 percent Southeast Asian student population back then, so we had a lot of refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam, who understood what gunfire was, they were used to it. I wasn’t.”
Although Young didn’t quite comprehend what was taking place, he knew that something bad was going on and ran toward a wooden handball wall.
“I felt a slap against my chest … and then when I hit the ground, another bullet hit the pavement in front of me and broke apart. I still have a large piece of that bullet in my chest to this day.”
Rob Young, shooting survivor
While trying to escape and looking around for one of his childhood friends, he said he remembered seeing a boy get shot and killed.
“I’m almost to the wall and I remember turning around, I wanted to see where my friend Scottie was and when I turned around, my feet were swept up,” Young said.
Young had been struck in the right foot by a bullet, causing him to hit the pavement and then he felt a slap to his chest.
“I felt a slap against my chest and what that was was a bullet had traveled to my right foot, took my foot up in the air and then when I hit the ground, another bullet hit the pavement in front of me and broke apart,” Young said. “I still have a large piece of that bullet in my chest to this day.”
He hobbled toward the handball wall seeking safety but felt the wood exploding around him from the gunshots.
“I look up and I see my substitute teacher, she’s standing in the doorway as the gunfire is going on and she’s waiving for us to come in,” Young said. “So, I remember thinking that’s the closest thing that I have to home. That’s where I need to go.”
After making it about 60 to 80 yards to a classroom, Young reunited with his friend Scottie, who had also been shot in the leg.
Young said there was an entry wound on one side of Scottie’s thigh that was bullet-sized and an exit wound the size of a golf ball.
“That’s when he (Scottie) told me, ‘you know, Robbie, I think we’ve been shot,'” Young said. “That’s when I started connecting the dots and going, ‘This is not supposed to happen … I’m at school’ and that’s when the fear started setting in.”
An eerie calm
Young said while inside his classroom, bullets were still flying through the walls, leaving drywall dust floating in the air when suddenly a last shot was heard.
Purdy, the shooter, had shot and killed himself while first responders arrived at the scene.
“As crazy as it was, it was eerily quiet,” Young recalled. “People were screaming, people were messed up, people were bleeding.”
Although it seemed like forever to Young, paramedics and police had started making their way onto campus.
“I vividly remember just the look on people’s faces, the look of shock, and the look of like, ‘What is going on here?’ Because these things didn’t seem to happen back then,” Young said.
Young was taken to a hospital in Lodi due to his injuries and his mother, who had been working a shift at the hospital, heard about the shooting from her supervisor.
Young said his mother was told that a shooting had happened at Cleveland Elementary and that her son had been injured.
“I remember how good it felt to see my parents because I knew that I was going to be OK at that moment,” Young said about his parents arriving to see him at the hospital.
About a month after the shooting, Young returned to attend school again and years later joined the Stockton Unified School District’s Department of Public Safety.
“Having gone through the shooting and remembering how safe I felt when the police officers got there, they meant something to me and I wanted to be that person,” Young said.
Five children — Rathanar Or, Ram Chun, Sokhim An, Oeun Lim, and Thuy Tran — had been killed.
Thirty others, including a teacher, were wounded in the shooting, including many who were Cambodian and Vietnamese immigrants.
School shooting survivor becomes teacher at same school
Survivor now teaches at same school
Just a few days before the 35th anniversary, Rann Chun, now a fourth grade teacher at Cleveland Elementary School, sat in his classroom and for the first time in a long time recounted the day of the shooting.
Chun’s family was originally from Cambodia, but they came to the United States when Chun was about 2 years old after the Khmer Rouge regime. During the regime, mass violence occurred, leaving millions of Cambodians dead.
“We arrived here in Stockton, about ’85, I believe, because I started school about ’86 here at Cleveland Elementary School,” Chun said. “But I always consider myself to be a (Stockton) native because I basically was practically a baby when I was here.”
Chun, a second grader at the time of the shooting, was on the playground during recess time anticipating his turn playing tetherball.
“At that very moment, there’s this loud noise like ‘kaboom,'” Chun said.
The loud noise heard was Purdy’s car exploding before he entered the campus and opened fire.
“I learned later on it was the car that was set on fire that was as a way to, I guess, attract more kids to the sound, to the flame, to the fire, to the smoke and all that,” Chun said.
He said he remembered staying in place despite the booming noise because he was determined to have his chance at playing tetherball, but also he hadn’t been taught at school about the possibilities of a school shooting.
“My mom asked, ‘Did you know your sister was shot?’ and being naive and young at heart I didn’t know that when people are shot they’re hurt or that they could die.”
Rann Chun, shooting survivor and Cleveland Elementary teacher
Chun decided to start moving from the area after seeing someone on the ground.
He was lost and confused with rapid questions going on in his head, “What’s going on? Why is everyone panicking? Why is no one here anymore? Why are they not playing or whatnot?”
With the dazed state of mind he was in, Chun saw another girl shot and kids running in different directions from the shots being fired.
Many of them were running toward a hallway — the same hallway Chun 19 years later continues to walk through to get to his classroom.
But I walk, not run. I walk towards the flow of where everyone was heading towards the main hallway. I didn’t come to the hallway yet. I was confused,” Chun remembered. “At one point, I cover my ears because of the loud noise, the confusion. Right near the restroom I entered the boy’s restroom again, lost and confused.”
The small boy did not have time to even consider his young sister, Ram Chun, who was also out at recess at the time the shooting took place.
He ultimately came to the double doors of the main hallway to enter his classroom and saw one of his classmates wounded. Trying to be a gentleman, Chun said he held the door open for his classmate.
Upon entering the classroom, he still was unsure of what was happening but saw many kids crying saying words like “I wish” and “I hope” and speaking in Cambodian about how worried they were for their parents.
Minutes later, teachers had been directed to walk their students to the cafeteria.
“I was in the cafeteria, sat on the benches … the cafeteria benches and waited there,” Chun said. “The room was noisy.”
The Worst News
While sitting inside the cafeteria, Chun didn’t know that his mother and he would soon be sat down to receive tragic news about his younger sister, who Purdy had shot and killed.
“My mom asked, ‘Did you know your sister was shot?’ and being naive and young at heart I didn’t know that when people are shot they’re hurt or that they could die,” Chun said.
The words that he proceeded to respond with haunted and guilted him for the next 30 years of his life.
“I said to my mom in Cambodian, ‘Well, let her die because she enjoyed playing so much.'”
At the time, Rann believed that just like characters on television, his sister would come back to life as well.
But for years, he held onto those words and blamed himself.
“I blame myself for saying those harsh words until about 20 years afterwards … I sort of let go … I realize that, hey, you were just a kid yourself. You were confused, you were lost. You didn’t know what was going on,” Chun said.
He said that although he lost his sister, he is grateful that his parents did not lose two children the day of the shooting.
When Chun returned back to school, he saw that the tetherball pole where he had been playing had a bullet hole.
“I could have been shot that day had I stayed there any longer or that bullet could have been for me too,” Chun said.
It was not until the 30th anniversary and during the COVID-19 pandemic that Chun truly began to forgive himself for the remark he had made and decided he could only focus on what is in his control now.
“There are things that you can control, like, coming back to be a teacher here at Cleveland school is something that was within my control,” Chun said.
He said when he first came back to teach at Cleveland as an adult, he thought he would be OK because time had passed, but when he stepped onto the playground, the shooting memories came back.
“All of a sudden, the moment you are on that playground, everything just sort of starts streaming back in like you just relive it at the moment,” Chun said. “I didn’t expect that to happen. I thought that I could have overcome that when I came here.”
Despite the constant reminders of the shooting and the day he lost his sister, Chun said he made the decision to come back to Cleveland Elementary School because it’s where he feels grounded and where he feels at home.
“I came back and everyone here, it’s no different from when I was a student here, open arm welcoming, warm and cozy,” Chun said.
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