doc_text: Children whose families escaped the horrors of the Vietnam War saw their schoolyard turned into a killing field, the target of a silent gunman armed with a rifle and a pistol bearing the word "victory."
  After the massacre at recess, the bodies of three Southeast Asian children were outlined in blue on the playground of Cleveland Elementary School where they died.
  Two others had been dragged by teachers inside to a classroom, but also died.
  Twenty-nine other pupils were wounded, along with a teacher.
  "There was shooting all over.
  ...
  I was scared," said sixth-grader Binh Hoang, who was born in Vietnam in 1975 in the final days of war and had never before heard gunfire.
  "Everybody was crying in my class."
  Police said a drifter identified as Patrick Edward Purdy, 26, armed with two handguns and an AK-47 assault rifle, entered the school grounds around noontime Tuesday and fired about 60 rounds before he shot himself to death.
  Afterward, a large handgun and the assault rifle lay on the ground near a pool of blood and the gunman's body.
  The word "victory" was written on the pistol handle.
  Binh said she was sitting in math class when the shooting began outside the wood-and-stucco school building.
  Her teacher told students to get under their desks.
  The gunfire startled Michael Cuevas, whose first thought was that the University of the Pacific fraternities near his house were firing their miniature cannon again.
  But the shots repeated too rapidly for a cannon, and the scream of sirens that followed told him this time was no prank.
  "I never thought a tragedy of this magnitude could happen in Stockton," said Cuevas, a 29-year-old marine clerk at the Port of Stockton who lives down the street from the elementary school.
  "It's always in some other town, some other place.
  It's a shock to my senses.
  I don't think it's even hit me as hard as it's going to.
  You don't know whether to be excited, or confused or what."
  Police cars and news reporters crowded the street, which typically is busy only when parents pick up and drop off their children.
  "Why here?" said Jeff Russell, 37, who was born and reared in the neighborhood.
  "This has always been a sleepy little town.
  (The shooting) put us back on the map."
  Lutheran and Baptist churches border the school in a neighborhood of ranch-style homes, postage-stamp lawns and streets lined with sycamore and oak trees in this agricultural city of 150,000 people 60 miles southeast of San Francisco.
  The 40-year-old neighborhood near the University of the Pacific is still home to many retired couples who raised their familes there.
  But the city has been changing with the influx of Southeast Asian refugees.
  When school officials called clergy to console grieving families, Buddhist priests in sandals and saffron robes arrived along with their white-collared Christian counterparts.
  About 60 percent of Cleveland Elementary's students are of Southeast Asian descent, said John Klose, spokesman for the Stockton School District.
  The five children who were killed were Vietnamese and Cambodian.
  "This is one of our best neighborhood schools," Klose said.
  "Of all of our schools that I would think of something like this happening, this would be the last one I would think of."
  Across the street, Sarah Abbott stood astride her bicycle and gazed at the school where she graduated "many years ago."
  The professional nanny said she was at the house of her 97-year-old grandfather about a block from the school when the gunman set his car on fire before starting to shoot.
  "When the car exploded, my grandpa's house just shook," Abbott said.
  "It scared me. ...
  It was just too close."
summary_text: The children of families who fled the horrors of the Vietnam War saw their schoolyard turned into a killing field by a gunman armed with a rifle and a pistol.
  When the shooting was over, five children of Vietnamese and Cambodian descent were killed and the gunman, Patrick Edward Purdy, lay dead from a self-inflicted gun shot wound, the rifle and the pistol, with victory written on it, lay on the ground beside him.
  Residents of Stockton, the 40-year-old community where the shooting occurred, were stunned by the shooting and questioned why such a tragedy had to happen.