Write a summary and personal reaction
chapter_6.pdf

Unformatted Attachment Preview

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 semiautomatic 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 people 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
97
98
Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream
right arm. Berman and Sposato were killed outright, and O’Roke received head, chest, and arm wounds. Near the conference room, a legal 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 between 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 others 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 ostensible 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 Administration concerning the food additive monosodium glutamate
(MSG).
Workplace Violence
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 potentially 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 oftentimes not well enough.
The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health has identified workplace homicide as a “serious” public health problem. An average of 1.7 million people were victims of violent crime while working 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 additional 19% were aggravated assaults. For the same period, more than
800 workplace homicides per year occurred. In 2005, assaults and violent acts accounted for 13% of workplace fatalities. Within this category, 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 relative stalks employees at work, 3) violence is committed during a criminal act such as robbery, 4) violence is committed against people in
dangerous jobs, such as law enforcement personnel, and 5) acts of terrorism 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 bystanders are frequently killed or wounded during such outbursts. In any
case, the deaths of perpetrators of such violence are usually swift, either 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 harassment of employees. In a survey of 20,314 federal employees, 42%
of the women and 15% of the men reported having been sexually harassed. 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. Because most of us work, we feel threatened by this sort of violence even
100
Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream
when it is not directed against us. Many people have cause to feel disgruntled because of changes in the workplace due to automation and
bad economic conditions. Old-style family and community cohesiveness, no less than employer-employee good relations and loyalty, have
gone by the board, with deleterious effects. The availability of rapidfire, military-style assault weapons has made it possible for a disgruntled 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 category 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 themselves. 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 committing 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 classified 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 coolingoff 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 minutes. 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 violence, but thankfully there are only a few who turn their anger into actual outbreaks of violence. Yet the number of mass murders is mounting. 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 majority 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 (feelings of persecution) and depression. They feel despondent and hopeless while at the same time they blame others for their plight. Their fantasies tend to be straightforward: revenge against the perceived
persecutors. They do not entertain the intricate, baroque sexual fantasies of the serial sexual murderer. Nonetheless, they do kill, and, beyond 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 terrifying, 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 coroner’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 relationships 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
102
Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream
by a research team from Stanford University School of Medicine. Immediately 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 PTSD 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 injuries resulting from violence, as reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, are, in descending order, recreational workers, bartenders, cab
drivers, retail sales clerks, food service workers, police officers, parking attendants, auto mechanics, security guards, social workers, cashiers, 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 associated 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
West.
Types of violence in the workplace have also been studied. In a
1993 survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, 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 workplace are at special risk. Rejection of ardent suitors, or, worse, of workplace 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 instance in convenience stores. Alone and unprotected in such establishments, they are particularly vulnerable and at risk for becoming victims of violence.
Murders at the Post Office
In recent years, certain workplaces have become known as increasingly dangerous locations for workers, patrons, and passers-by because of the killings that have occurred there. The most obvious location, perhaps because of the extensive media coverage, has been the
post office. “Going postal” has become a slang phrase for having a psychotic 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 incidents 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 threatened his supervisors. In San Juan Capistrano, California, Mark Hilburn was fearful of losing his job. Their rampages left four people
dead.
On August 10, 1989, John Merlin Taylor, a model post office employee with 27 years of award-winning, exceptional service, went on a
rampage in Orange Glen, California, that eventually left four dead, including 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 Edmond, 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 workplace violence, but their rampages can be terrifying. A 35-year-old mail
clerk, Joseph Harris, lost his job in the Ridgewood, New Jersey, post office because he threatened a supervisor. Eighteen months later he went
104
Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream
to her home and killed her and her fiancée. He then went to the Ridgewood 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 answering 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 threatened 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 Edmond, Oklahoma, post office massacre look like Disneyland. His supervisors 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 McIlvane, but the request was turned down. Coworkers established an escape 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 raincoat. 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 employees. 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 supervisor-employee difficulties—1 out of every 12 employees is disciplined
annually, and 2 out of every 11 file grievances against their supervisors. 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 revenge 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 significant 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 patients’ exquisitely detailed fantasies of extreme sadistic torture of their
bosses. One of my patients rel …
Purchase answer to see full
attachment