Post office shootings
Post office shootings refer to violent incidents that have occurred in U.S. postal facilities, notably escalating during the 1980s. The context surrounding these events includes a backdrop of declining postal service performance, financial losses, and increasing job pressures on employees. Notable incidents include the tragic 1986 Edmond, Oklahoma shooting, where a disgruntled postal worker, Patrick Sherrill, killed thirteen individuals before taking his own life, highlighting concerns over workplace violence.
Throughout the 1980s and into the following decades, various shootings were reported, often involving former employees or individuals with documented issues related to job stress and mental health. Discussions emerged regarding the role of postal management in these tragedies, with some union leaders attributing the violence to an oppressive work environment. Despite the alarming nature of these incidents, statistics indicated that the rate of violence in the USPS was comparable to other professions. The legacy of these events continues to resonate, raising ongoing questions about workplace safety and mental health support within the postal service.
Post office shootings
The Event Several mass shootings in post offices related to job anxieties
In the 1980s, violence in post offices seemed to illustrate the new stressful relationship between employees and supervisors, as well as increased job demands for postal workers. After a mass shooting in 1986, violent eruptions in post offices were nationally reported and scrutinized.
Congress assumed in 1971 that the newly organized US Postal Service (USPS) would pay for itself by 1984. In 1973, the USPS lost $13 million. It lost $438 million in 1974 and $1.2 billion in 1975. Stamps cost 6 cents in 1971 but 13 cents by 1977, despite 55,000 fewer postal workers. In 1977, Congress voted a billion dollars to keep the USPS solvent. Worker productivity was low. Mail volume declined due to competition from United Parcel Service (UPS) and private mail carriers. There was talk of ending Saturday mail delivery. The Jimmy Carter administration and Congress increased the work expectations of USPS employees, and USPS job pressures grew.
Post Office Angst in the 1980s
In 1980, a New Orleans postal worker named Curtis Collins killed his supervisor with a .30 caliber carbine. Amid the media scrutiny of the incident, Hugh Bates, president of the National Association of Postmasters, said threats of violence were common in post offices across the nation. Bates said that two postmasters in Alabama had been killed in the last ten years. In August, 1986, Patrick Sherrill, a part-time letter carrier in Edmond, Oklahoma, walked into his post office and murdered thirteen people, then killed himself. An ex-Marine and member of the National Guard, Sherrill had been repeatedly censured by superiors for bad job performance and may have been close to being fired. He was verbally reprimanded the day before the shootings. Sherrill brought three pistols to work and killed whoever he saw, chasing some victims down. Sherrill was a loner, described as “weird” and “angry” by fellow workers. He was fascinated by guns and peeped into neighbors’ windows at night. He was unhappy in Edmond and twice passed tests to be transferred, but these tests had not been acted upon.
Two weeks after the Sherrill killings, six Dallas-area postal workers were suspended and ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluations after they made threats. There were similar occurrences in Oklahoma and Arkansas. In May 1987, an Oklahoma City mail carrier threatened several people, mentioned the Sherrill massacre, and was arrested by federal agents for possession of three mortar grenades. In December 1988, mail handler Warren Murphy shot three fellow workers with bird shot in New Orleans, then held a woman hostage for thirteen hours. None of the victims sustained life-threatening wounds. Murphy had recently been promoted.
In August 1989, postal worker John Merlin Taylor shot his wife to death, then drove to work in Escondido, California, where he killed two coworkers and wounded another, then shot himself in the head. Taylor had worked for the post office for twenty-seven years and had won work awards. He had talked about the Sherrill shootings two days earlier. Two weeks later, another twenty-seven-year veteran postal worker from Escondido hanged himself in his garage; after amassing twenty-five hundred hours of sick leave, he had been reprimanded for taking a sick day just before he left on vacation. The USPS said that the rate of violence within the postal service was no greater than it was in other professions. From 1958 to 1989, there were 355 instances of assaults on supervisors and 183 instances of supervisors assaulting employees in post offices across the country.
War of Words
Vincent Sombrotto, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers until 2002, told reporters that Patrick Sherrill had no doubt been pushed over the brink by the management style of his superiors, which had been irresponsible and coercive. Beryl Jones, president of the Oklahoma City Postal Workers Union, agreed, saying there was intimidation and pressure and Sherrill just snapped. The USPS’s communication administrator said Sherrill had not been close to being fired but was only given an elementary counseling session. The president of the National Association of Postal Supervisors said Sombrotto’s comments blamed postal supervisors for the actions of a disturbed individual. Letter carriers around the country wrote to newspapers, agreeing with Sombrotto that employees were routinely harassed by supervisors. Arguments of this sort erupted with each post office shooting.
Impact
In 1987, lawsuits totaling $166 million were filed against the Edmond post office, the Air Force, the Army, the City of Edmond, and the Edmond Police Department, by families of Patrick Sherrill’s victims. Most of these lawsuits were dismissed by 1989. In 1988, a General Accounting Office investigation found that the job histories of 63 percent of those hired by the USPS were not checked, a violation of government rules. The USPS replied that, under government rules, it was almost impossible not to hire veterans such as Patrick Sherrill for civil service jobs regardless of their work history. Spree killings of all sorts continued in the United States into the 1990s and even the twenty-first century.
In 1991 alone, two post-office related shootings occurred. After one former worker shot and killed his supervisor before proceeding to the post office in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and killing two mail carriers, Thomas McIlvane, who had recently been fired from his position at the Royal Oak, Michigan, post office, gunned down four people in the facility using a rifle. One of the worst post-office related shootings of the early twenty-first century in the country occurred in 2006, when Jennifer San Marco, a former postal employee who had been out of work due to psychological issues, shot and killed six former colleagues at a mail-processing center in Goleta, California.
Bibliography
Archibold, Randal C. "Ex-Employee Kills 5 Others and Herself at California Postal Plant." The New York Times, 1 Feb. 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/us/health/exemployee-kills-5-others-and-herself-at-california-postal-plant.html. Accessed 4 Aug. 2017.
Douglas, John, and Mark Olshaker. The Anatomy of Motive. Pocket Books, 1999. A famous FBI profiler, Douglas gives insights into post office killers in his chapter “Guys Who Snap.”
Lasseter, Donald. Going Postal. Pinnacle Books, 1997. Study of post office violence in the United States. Blames USPS practices for creating a stressful work place.
Pantziarka, Pan. Lone Wolf. Virgin Books, 2002. A British mystery writer describes and explains real-life spree killings in the United Kingdom and the United States in a readable style.
Withers, Charles. The Tainted Eagle: The Truth Behind the Tragedy. Xlibris, 2009.