order description
write a summary an personal reaction
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6
Workplace Violence
Is Your Job a Dead End?
Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
—
Romans 12:18
G
ian Luigi Ferri, a 55-year-old mortgage broker, entered the lobby
of 101 California Street, a granite and glass skyscraper in downtown
San Francisco. He was carrying a black canvas satchel of the sort that
attorneys use to hold legal documents. Wearing a dark business suit,
he fit in well with the professionally clad attorneys and clients. He took
the elevator to the 34th floor of the 48-story building and got off at the
law firm of Pettit and Martin. In his bag, rather than legal documents,
he carried two legally purchased 9-mm Intratec Tec-9 pistols capable
of firing 50 times without having to be reloaded, a .45-caliber semiau-
tomatic pistol, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Ferri ambled
slowly toward a glass-enclosed conference room. Inside, Jody Jones
Sposato, a 30-year-old mother, was the center of a small group of peo-
ple involved in a deposition for Sposato’s sexual discrimination suit
against her former employer. With her was her lawyer, 35-year-old
Jack Berman, who was advising her while she was being questioned
by Sharon O’Roke, also 35, of Pettit and Martin, on behalf of the
former employer. The deposition was being recorded by 33-year-old
court reporter Deanna Eaves.
Ferri began to spray the conference room with bullets from outside,
shattering the glass. Eaves dove under the table but was struck on the
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Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream
right arm. Berman and Sposato were killed outright, and O’Roke re-
ceived head, chest, and arm wounds. Near the conference room, a le-
gal secretary dialed 911 and then Ferri came face to face with her. She
was frozen in fear, but she saw his face. It was blank. He moved on.
Attorney Brian Berger yelled at the secretary to run, then he ran to
warn another attorney, Allan J. Berk. Ferri shot Berger critically in the
arm and chest. Ferri then went in and killed Berk, a prominent labor
lawyer, at his desk.
Ferri then went down a stairway to the 33rd floor, fatally wounded
law intern David Sutcliffe, and ran into a husband-and-wife pair,
attorneys John and Michelle Scully. The gunman pursued them into
an empty room. John Scully shielded his wife by taking Ferri’s bullets
into his own body. As he was dying, he told his wife how to dial for
help.
Emergency vehicles arrived and SWAT teams entered the tower.
Ferri descended to the 32nd floor, the offices of the Trust Company of
the West. There he killed 64-year-old widowed secretary Shirley
Mooser and 48-year-old investment manager Donald Merrill, mortally
wounded 33-year-old legal secretary Deborah Fogel, and wounded
vice-president Vicky Smith and Pettit and Martin attorney Charles
Ross, both 41. Then his two Tec-9 pistols overheated and jammed.
He headed down the fire stairs and soon found himself trapped be-
tween two teams of police. It was just 15 minutes since he had entered
the building. Shoving the third pistol under his chin, Ferri fired a fatal
round. The carnage left nine people dead, including Ferri, and six oth-
ers wounded.
It was later learned that Gian Luigi Ferri had been a client of the
Pettit and Martin law firm and that this connection constituted the os-
tensible reason for his deadly rampage in their offices. A letter found
on his body also contained a rant against the U.S. Food and Drug Ad-
ministration concerning the food additive monosodium glutamate
(M SG).
Wo r k p l a c e V i o l e n c e
I am a psychiatrist. My job can be very dangerous unless I take certain
precautions, and I try to take them. How about you? Is your job po-
tentially dangerous, and are you vulnerable at the workplace in some
as-yet unexamined way? Most of us spend more time at work than at
Workplace Violence: Is Your Job a Dead End?
99
home or anywhere else. We get to know our fellow workers, but often-
times not well enough.
The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health has iden-
tified workplace homicide as a “serious” public health problem. An av-
erage of 1.7 million people were victims of violent crime while work-
ing or on duty in the United States, according to a report published
each year from 1993 through 1999 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
An estimated 75% of these incidents were simple assaults. An addi-
tional 19% were aggravated assaults. For the same period, more than
800 workplace homicides per year occurred. In 2005, assaults and vi-
olent acts accounted for 13% of workplace fatalities. Within this cate-
gory, 9% were homicides.
Although there are many variations, mass murder in the workplace
usually takes one of five forms: 1) a disgruntled employee or former
employee kills or injures other employees, 2) an angry spouse or rela-
tive stalks employees at work, 3) violence is committed during a crim-
inal act such as robbery, 4) violence is committed against people in
dangerous jobs, such as law enforcement personnel, and 5) acts of ter-
rorism or hate crimes are carried out, such as the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, against the World Trade Center in New York
and, earlier, the attack by others against Oklahoma City’s Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building. Workers, customers, and unlucky bystand-
ers are frequently killed or wounded during such outbursts. In any
case, the deaths of perpetrators of such violence are usually swift, ei-
ther at their own hands or at the hands of law enforcement officials
who kill them to prevent more killings. Very few workplace killers
walk away from their killing grounds.
On a less overtly violent scale, workplace violence can take the
form of sabotage against property or of psychological and sexual ha-
rassment of employees. In a survey of 20,314 federal employees, 42%
of the women and 15% of the men reported having been sexually ha-
rassed. Although more than 90% of the sexual harassment charges
filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
have been filed by women, there is an increasing number of charges
being filed by men. Moreover, as more women gain power in the
workplace, it is likely that the reported sexual harassment of men by
women will increase further. Power corrupts, regardless of gender. But
it is the workplace mass murders that have caught the public eye. Be-
cause most of us work, we feel threatened by this sort of violence even
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Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream
when it is not directed against us. Many people have cause to feel dis-
gruntled because of changes in the workplace due to automation and
bad economic conditions. Old-style family and community cohesive-
ness, no less than employer-employee good relations and loyalty, have
gone by the board, with deleterious effects. The availability of rapid-
fire, military-style assault weapons has made it possible for a disgrun-
tled person with a private arsenal to kill a lot of people.
The FBI arbitrarily defines
mass murder
as murder involving four or
more victims in one location during one event and subdivides the cat-
egory into classic mass murder and family mass murder. The classic
mass murderer was Charles Whitman, the University of Texas
“Tower Killer” described later in this chapter. Another example is the
killing of 13 students and faculty at Columbine, Colorado, by Eric
Harris and Dylan Klebold before they turned their guns on them-
selves. In 2007, at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
in Blacksburg, Virginia, student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students
and teachers before committing suicide. He became infamous for com-
mitting the worst mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history.
Family mass murderers kill four or more family members and may
or may not commit suicide themselves. When suicide occurs, it is clas-
sified as a murder-suicide. Without suicide, the murder is classified as
a family mass murder. On November 9, 1971, John List, an insurance
salesman, killed his wife, three children, and mother, then disappeared.
His car was found in an airport parking lot. Seventeen years later, a tip
was received from a viewer who had seen an age-enhanced clay bust
of List on the TV program
America’s Most Wanted
. List was arrested in
Richmond, Virginia, where he was found to be married and working
as an accountant. More recently, in 1999, Mark Barton, a stock market
day trader in Atlanta, killed his wife, son, and daughter before going
to his former workplace and killing an additional nine people.
There are also
spree murderers
and
serial murderers
. Spree murder is
defined as killing at two or more locations with no emotional cooling-
off period occurring between the murders. On September 6, 1949,
Howard Unruh moved through his neighborhood as he fired his
handgun, killing 13 people and wounding 3 others in about 20 min-
utes. His morbid deed has therefore been classified by the FBI as a
spree murder rather than a mass murder. The distinction between the
two seems of interest mainly to experts. More recent examples include
Martin Bryant of Tasmania, Australia, who in the course of several
Workplace Violence: Is Your Job a Dead End?
101
hours killed 35 people with various automatic weapons in a half-dozen
locations in the township of Port Arthur.
The typical mass murderer is as ordinary as many people’s next
door neighbor, a white male in his late twenties to mid-forties. But he
is atypical in that he is frequently a loner who drifts from job to job,
existing without close family, neighborhood, or community ties.
There are thousands of angry men among us who seek revenge for
real or imagined grievances. They also make threats of wreaking vio-
lence, but thankfully there are only a few who turn their anger into ac-
tual outbreaks of violence. Yet the number of mass murders is mount-
ing. Two or three of them occur each month.
Public perception has it that something snaps and these persons go
off and kill the nearest people at hand. That does happen, but the ma-
jority of mass murders are planned. Moreover, media coverage of any
mass murder is now thought to contribute to the next mass murder
—
a predictable clustering phenomenon.
Mass murderers tend to have a lethal combination of paranoia (feel-
ings of persecution) and depression. They feel despondent and hope-
less while at the same time they blame others for their plight. Their fan-
tasies tend to be straightforward: revenge against the perceived
persecutors. They do not entertain the intricate, baroque sexual fanta-
sies of the serial sexual murderer. Nonetheless, they do kill, and, be-
yond the actual body count, there are many physical and psychological
victims of workplace violence. No statistics can capture the immense
psychological harm seared into the minds of survivors of this sort of
violence. In the Pettit and Martin rampage, John Scully died trying to
protect his wife from Ferri’s bullets. The Scullys had been married less
than a year and were very close. Now his wife must live with the terri-
fying, agonizing memories of his final moments in the forefront of her
mind. Jody Jones Sposato was also killed by Ferri. Her husband
Stephen Sposato told a reporter, “They invited me to go to the coro-
ner’s office [to identify the body of my wife] and my life was shattered.”
Many survivors of workplace violence are scarred by symptoms of
posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), some for many years afterwards.
Terrifying flashbacks that have the clarity of video images, hellish and
sweat-drenched nightmares, numbed feelings, and withdrawal from re-
lationships are some of the symptoms that result from life-threatening
trauma in the workplace. In fact, a psychological study of 36 employees
who were in the building at the time of Ferri’s rampage was conducted
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Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream
by a research team from Stanford University School of Medicine. Im-
mediately after the shooting, a wide range of acute stress responses was
noted. Reevaluation 7 to 10 months later revealed that one-third of the
employees who initially met the criteria for an acute stress disorder had
significantly more symptoms of PTS D at follow-up.
Violence against workers has also been charted by occupation,
showing that most of the violence is directed at people who interact
with the public. The top occupations at risk for a range of physical in-
juries resulting from violence, as reported by the Bureau of Justice Sta-
tistics, are, in descending order, recreational workers, bartenders, cab
drivers, retail sales clerks, food service workers, police officers, park-
ing attendants, auto mechanics, security guards, social workers, cash-
iers, bus drivers, fire fighters, and service station attendants. The rate
of injury for the top-ranked category, recreational workers, was 118.5
per 1,000 persons, whereas social workers, ranked much lower, had a
rate of 8.5 per 1,000 persons. Many injuries and deaths were associ-
ated with robberies and attempted robberies.
As compiled from reports of victims, the following are reasons
given by workplace attackers for their violence: irrational behavior,
26%; dissatisfied with service, 19%; interpersonal conflict, 15%; upset
at having been disciplined, 12%; criminal behavior, 10%; personal
problems, 8%, firings or layoffs, 2%; prejudice, 1%; and unknown
causes, 7%. Some of these categories reflect the occasion rather than
the reason for underlying rage to explode. Firearms are the weapons
of choice used in three-quarters of the deaths. Half the deaths occurred
in the southern region of the United States and another quarter in the
We s t .
Types of violence in the workplace have also been studied. In a
1993 survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Manage-
ment, 75% of violent incidents were fistfights, 17% were shootings,
7.5% were stabbings, 6% were rapes or other sexual assaults, and less
than 1% were explosions. Those who are killed are 3.5 times as likely
to be female as male. Homicide is a leading cause of death for women
in the workplace. Even though the leading instrument of death on the
job is firearms, females were six times more likely than males to die of
strangulation. These statistics reflect the fact that women in the work-
place are at special risk. Rejection of ardent suitors, or, worse, of work-
place harassers, brings with it the increased risk of severe injury or
death to the women at the hands of these men. When romances out-
Workplace Violence: Is Your Job a Dead End?
103
side the workplace go awry, the rejected male usually knows where the
woman is employed and generally has ready access to her workplace.
Although the fact has not received much media attention, women who
work in retail settings are at high risk of being injured or murdered at
their jobs. More women than men work in the retail industry, for in-
stance in convenience stores. Alone and unprotected in such establish-
ments, they are particularly vulnerable and at risk for becoming vic-
tims of violence.
Murders at the Post Office
In recent years, certain workplaces have become known as increas-
ingly dangerous locations for workers, patrons, and passers-by be-
cause of the killings that have occurred there. The most obvious loca-
tion, perhaps because of the extensive media coverage, has been the
post office. “Going postal” has become a slang phrase for having a psy-
chotic episode and wreaking violence on people in one’s current or
former workplace. There are 40,000 postal service locations and more
than 825,000 postal workers in this country. Dozens of deadly inci-
dents in the past decade have had postal workers or facilities as their
focal points. On the same day, May 6, 1993, in two different locations,
postal workers lashed out. In Dearborn, Michigan, Larry Jason had
been known as a “walking time bomb” who had graphically threat-
ened his supervisors. In San Juan Capistrano, California, Mark Hil-
burn was fearful of losing his job. Their rampages left four people
dead.
On August 10, 1989, John Merlin Taylor, a model post office em-
ployee with 27 years of award-winning, exceptional service, went on a
rampage in Orange Glen, California, that eventually left four dead, in-
cluding himself and his wife. In May 1989, mailman Alfred Hunter
stole an airplane and strafed the Boston city streets with an AK-47. On
August 20, 1986, Patrick Henry Sherrill showed up at work in Ed-
mond, Oklahoma, in full postal uniform but with three handguns in
his mailbag. He murdered 14 workers and injured even more before
killing himself.
Former workers account for only a small fraction of overall work-
place violence, but their rampages can be terrifying. A 35-year-old mail
clerk, Joseph Harris, lost his job in the Ridgewood, New Jersey, post of-
fice because he threatened a supervisor. Eighteen months later he went
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Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream
to her home and killed her and her fiancée. He then went to the Ridge-
wood facility and shot dead two mailmen who had just arrived for work.
On November 13, 1991, 37-year-old ex-Marine Thomas McIlvane
found a message from his post office union shop steward on his an-
swering machine, telling him he would not be rehired, that his appeal
for reinstatement at a suburban Detroit post office had been turned
down. He had been fired for insubordination, cursing a supervisor,
fighting with patrons, and for making obscene, threatening remarks to
coworkers as well as to supervisors. For months, McIlvane had threat-
ened that if he was not rehired, he would come back and kill. He had
been heard voicing the threat that his revenge would make the Ed-
mond, Oklahoma, post office massacre look like Disneyland. His su-
pervisors had described McIlvane as a “ticking time bomb.” A former
professional kickboxer who also held a black belt in karate, McIlvane
had been drummed out of the Marine Corps for deliberately crushing
a fellow Marine’s car with a tank.
At the post office, a supervisor had requested protection from McIl-
vane, but the request was turned down. Coworkers established an es-
cape route that they could use if McIlvane turned up. And turn up he
did, the morning after the answering machine message, arriving at the
Royal Oak Regional Mail Center in Michigan at 8:15 a.m. with a
sawed-off Ruger .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle tucked under his rain-
coat. He killed four supervisors before turning the gun on himself and
committing suicide.
Why has the postal service experienced so much violence? No one
knows for sure. For one thing, a continuing automation process has
been placing great stress on postal employees, who are hard pressed to
keep up with the pace of the new equipment. Another major part of
the problem seems to come from inadequately careful selection of em-
ployees. Lack of tact and management skills among postal supervisors
is another contributing factor. Each year, in the postal service, there
are 150,000 grievance proceedings and 69,000 disciplinary actions in
the army of 825,000 employees. This is a very high index of supervi-
sor-employee difficulties
—
1 out of every 12 employees is disciplined
annually, and 2 out of every 11 file grievances against their supervi-
sors. On the other hand, a report by the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention found post offices have a lower homicide rate than
many other industries. Programs aimed at reducing violence in the
postal service have led to fewer violent incidents.
Workplace Violence: Is Your Job a Dead End?
105
In media interviews, an alarmingly large number of postal workers
admitted that they strongly identified with the killers in the violent
post office events, stating that they themselves harbored similar re-
venge impulses but did not act on them. In this instance especially, the
bad men did what the good ones dreamed about doing. The difference
between the two groups depends on many factors
—
among the signif-
icant ones, the degree of depression and paranoia.
Work problems have been common complaints among my patients
over the years. I have listened for countless hours to some of my pa-
tients’ exquisitely detailed fantasies of extreme sadistic torture of their
bosses. One of my patients relished her fantasy of beheading the boss’s
children in front of him, boiling their heads, and then forcing the boss
at gunpoint to drink the concoction. As with my other patients who
could examine their fantasies, there was very little likelihood that she
would act on any of her violent urges. This patient was a very high-
functioning, competent executive who was scrupulously law abiding.
Perhaps the ability to fantasize and verbalize terrible violence against
others helps preempt the need to put violent motives into action.
Not So Ivory Tower
The image of the college campus as a sleepy, peaceful refuge from the
world was shattered on August 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman, a
25-year-old architectural engineering student, mounted the 307-foot
clock tower atop the University of Texas. Before leaving home for his
rampage, Whitman had killed his wife and his mother. Atop the tower,
he killed 13 more people by sniper fire and wounded 31 before being
killed himself.
Whitman set the pattern for the next 40 years of campus-related
killings that seem to have increased the risk of both teachers and stu-
dents being harmed, as in the actions of Gang Lu, a brilliant but dis-
gruntled astrophysicist at the University of Iowa. During a student-
faculty meeting, Lu shot 47-year-old physics professor Christopher K.
Goertz twice in the head, killing him instantly. He then whirled and
killed 27-year-old Linhua Shan, his perceived rival, who had received
a prestigious university award that Lu had coveted. Before Lu was fin-
ished, he killed 5 faculty members and seriously wounded another.
Then, his mission completed, Lu removed his heavy coat, folded it
neatly onto a chair, and fired a .38 slug into his own head.
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Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream
The cases go on and on, and they involve high schools and grade
schools as well as colleges and universities. Inhabitants of Massachu-
setts, California, Louisiana, a half-dozen other states, and Montreal,
Canada have all seen such murders and murder-suicides. Marc Lepine
mounted a well-planned aggressive armed assault at the school of en-
gineering (École Polytechnique) at the University of Montreal. Venting
his rage principally against women, he killed or injured 14 people with
a rifle. After a wounded victim cried out for help, Lepine pulled out his
knife and stabbed her repeatedly in the chest until she was dead. He
then put the muzzle of the rifle against his head, said “Oh, shit,” and
shot himself. It was the worst mass murder and hate crime against
women in Canadian history. Lepine left a suicide note that said:
Please note that if I kill myself today 12/06/89 it is not for economic
reasons (because I waited until I used up all my financial means, even
refusing jobs) but for political reasons. Because I decided to send Ad
Patres [meaning gathered to the fathers, or, simply, dead] the feminists
who have always ruined my life. For seven years my life has brought
me no joy, and, being utterly weary of the world, I have decided to
stop those shrews dead in their tracks.
Six months later, Lepine claimed his last victims
—
Sarto Blais, an
engineer who had been at the same school and who could not rid him-
self of his memories of the killings of his classmates and friends,
hanged himself. Then, his parents, themselves seeing no reason to go
on living, also committed suicide.
There have been killings at high schools, junior high schools, grade
schools. Incredibly, a loaded revolver was discovered at a church pre-
school in an affluent Virginia neighborhood.
One of the worst cases is the April 16, 2007, killings at Virginia
Tech in which a 23-year-old loner from South Korea, Seung-Hui Cho,
shot and killed 32 students and faculty, and wounded 17 more, before
killing himself. This has been classified as the worst peacetime shoot-
ing in United States history. Later investigation revealed that Cho
had several times earlier been identified as troubled, but had refused
treatment.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School killers,
had planned to set off bombs as well as execute students and faculty
with automatic weapons
—
to kill hundreds and hundreds of people
—
and be remembered as the most prolific mass murderers of all time.
