SAN DIEGO -- Workmen today dismantled McDonald's trademark Golden Arches at the site of a massacre in San Ysidro where 21 people were killed by a demented gunman, and company spokesmen announced the restaurant will be permanently closed.
Workmen stripped the facility in the predawn hours. The restaurant's corporate trademark, the Golden Arches, were placed on a flatbed truck and driven away.
Dick Starmann, a McDonald's vice president, said at the firm's Oak Brook, Ill., headquarters the company had decided to go along with a local Hispanic-led effort to close the restaurant.
The demonstrators want it converted into a memorial park and most San Ysidro residents had called for razing the restaurant.
'After talking with our franchisee and considering the sentiment of the community, we believe this decision to be in everyone's best interest,' Starmmann said.
'Being McDonald's, we always have been and always will be very sensitive to the feelings of people in the community as feelings of the general community.'
All but one of the massacre victims were Hispanic.
A candlelight parade by 300 people Monday night had called once again for the park to bed built on the site of the killings.
Starmannsaid today, 'There are no plans for the site because, basically, the first decision to be made was whether we were going to reopen or not. That was the major decision that was made and that's the only one made at this time.'
Among flowers and votive candles outside the restaurant this morning were two hand-lettered signs. One read, 'We want a memorial park.' The other said, 'We hold nothing against McDonald's.'
Laborers worked through the predawn darkness in stripping down the restaurant. Its franchisee, Robert Colvin, a San Ysidro resident, said he agreed with the decision.
The massacre brought a renewed call for gun control in the United States.
Newspaper advertisements asked San Diego residents to lobby Congress for tough weapons laws. They were placed by Pete Shields, chairman of Handgun Control, a national citizen's lobby.
'If you cared enough to cry on Wednesday, please care enough to help today,' said the ads, which also urged support for 'a common sense law to ban cop killer bullets, to ban privately owned machine guns and to try to keep guns out of the wrong hands.'
Shields said the massacre by James O. Huberty, 41, 'is not just an isolated incident' because 'more people are killed by handguns every day.'
Huberty blasted the restaurant with a handgun, a shotgun and an Uzi-type submachine gun which he had purchased legally.
Huberty was cremated Monday and his ashes placed in an urn for a final trip home to Ohio with his wife, Etna, and daughters Zenia and Cassandra.
The Hubertys moved to San Ysidro from Massillon, Ohio, last September.
Near the massacre site a mile from the Mexican border, the largely Hispanic community maintained a vigil, and continued to demand the building be replaced by a memorial park that would satisfy the Mexican tradition of commemorating the place where people die.
'The place where one dies, where the soul separates from the body, is sacred to Mexicans and must be commemorated,' said anthropologist Abraham Iszavich.
McDonald's spokesman Chuck Rubner said the company would decide 'in the next couple of days' whether to reopen the outlet, which is privately owned under a franchise.
'We're trying to take everything into consideration,' added Dick Starmann from corporate headquarters in Oak Park, Ill.
'It's not right for people to walk where bodies were,' said Blanca Arrena, a community organizer. 'We want a memorial park.'
McDonald's and the widow of its founder, Mrs. Joan Kroc, have contributed $1.1 million to a survivors' fund.
Mrs. Kroc said Monday, '... nothing is more important than to restore our faith in one another and to do everything within our power to help those who have been caught up in this incomprehensible tragedy...'
