A man who was pushed too far
Patrick Henry Sherrill, like his fiery revolutionary namesake, was a patriotic American.
After lettering in three sports in high school, he joined the Marine Corps and became a weapons expert. Following an Honorable Discharge, he joined the Oklahoma Air National Guard. Never marrying, he lived at home with his ailing mother and spent his spare time contacting fellow ham radio operators.
In l985 Patrick Henry scored high on a United States Postal Service entrance examination and was hired as a letter carrier for the Edmond, Oklahoma post office. He worked hard and passed the tough 90 day probationary period. Proud of his job, proud of his uniform, and proud to be a public servant, Patrick Henry could not understand why his superiors were never satisfied. The harder he worked, the more they expected from him. He was giving 100 percent and they wanted more. There was nothing left to give them but blood.
On August 19, 1986, two supervisors, Bill Bland and Richard Esser, Jr., escorted Patrick Henry into an office and took turns giving him a verbal beating. It was all a well-rehearsed act. They knew Patrick Henry was an excellent worker and figured that a reprimand would motivate him to work even harder. Supervisors were evaluated by how much mail they moved and upper management did not care how they did it. An employee who was "running scared" could be a considerable asset towards motivating the other workers. Mr. Bland was in especially good form this day and ended his harague with a threat to fire Patrick Henry if his performance did not improve.
Patrick Henry left the office a visibly shaken man. That afternoon he phoned union headquarters to ask about a transfer to maintenance. The answer was not encouraging. Driving home, Patrick Henry began to get angry. He knew he was a better letter carrier than most of his co-workers. In high school football, the Marine Corps, and the Postal Service he had always given his best. Now he was going to be fired. It wasn't supposed to end this way in America.
On August 20, 1986, Patrick Henry made his last sacrifice to the system he believed in. Stern-faced and sober, all anger drained from his body and replaced by a determination to do what he knew to be necessary, he dressed in his best summer blue uniform, placed two .45 Colt government-issue semi-automatics, a .22 caliber pistol, and ammunition in his mailbag and drove to work as usual at 6:45 AM.
Entering the large, new brick post office, Patrick Henry strode towards Supervisor Esser. The .45 caliber Colt Model 1911-A1 was a weapon that required concentration. Thumbing off the two safeties, Patrick Henry lifted the weapon from his satchel and pointed it at the ceiling, reaching across with his other hand to pull back the slide and jack a round into the chamber. Coming closer, almost to point-blank range, he extended his arm until his elbow locked and slowly brought it down while he sighted across the barrel. Being careful to squeeze, not jerk, the trigger, he applied the five pounds of pull necessary to fire the weapon.
It discharged with a blast that sounded more like a shotgun than a pistol. Supervisor Esser was leveled by the tremendous impact of the flat-nosed slug as it tore a gaping hole through his body. The recoil knocked Patrick Henry's hand upward. As he lowered it again, he aimed at nearby postman Mike Rockne. Too stunned to flee, he too was gunned down.
Everyone either hid or fled towards the exits. Patrick Henry chased several of his co-workers through a side entrance and shot one, then shut and bolted the door. His victim, mortally wounded, managed to crawl to the parking lot before collapsing from loss of blood.
Methodically going from exit to exit, Patrick Henry began to seal the building. While securing the doors, he noted the location of those who had failed to escape. He started toward the lobby entrance, but had to stop to reload. Seven bullets to each magazine, one in the chamber. It took less than a minute.
Systematically searching the workroom floor, he flushed several employees who were hiding in gurneys or under letter cases. He envisioned a target on their upper torsos and seldom missed his mark. Working fast and efficiently, he took less than five minutes to slaughter everyone in the large work area at the rear of the building. Two undiscovered supervisors who cowered in a broom closet would later sardonically admire the speed and skill with which he performed his grisly task.
All that remained were a few clerks and some office personnel in the front of the building. Most had already fled through the open lobby entrance. Patrick Henry strode past several clerks and shot several others. Not everyone deserved to die.
Having traveled in a circle through the building, Patrick Henry was once again in front of the body of Supervisor Esser. Less than 50 bullets had killed 14 employees and wounded seven in less than 15 minutes. As he stood staring at the carnage, his concentration gave way to a feeling of revulsion.
Would Supervisor Esser now concede that he had worked hard enough? There was only one way to find out. Patrick Henry raised the pistol to his head, sobbed, and squeezed off one final round.
When the body count was tallied, it became the third largest mass murder by a lone gunman in United States history. Publicly the Postal Service feigned shock and outrage, but privately they had expected it for quite some time. Incidents of violence were on the increase and two supervisors had been killed in Atlanta the previous year. In the next three years there would be 355 reported (undoubtedly many went unreported) by workers on supervisors and 183 by bosses on workers. Few of these would ever become public knowledge.
Nothing could be allowed to disrupt the flow of mail. The gore was mopped from the brown linoleum floor and Edmond's post office was open for business as usual the next day. Dick Carleton, general manager for the Oklahoma division of the Postal Service, countered charges of worker abuse by saying, "If there were so many problems, would you have everyone showing up for work on the day after a tragedy?" Bill Shockey, Edmond's former postmaster, commented that everyone who came to work "performed like champions." Although Supervisor Bland originally admitted to police that he had threatened Patrick Henry with dismissal, the Postal Service told the press that he had merely been "counseled".
Psychiatrists who had never met Patrick Henry or visited Oklahoma attributed his behavior to "factitious posttraumatic stress disorder", a fancy term for self-induced battle fatigue. By 1986 many negative articles had been printed in the United States about the problems of Vietnam-era veterans. They had lost the war and were rapidly becoming the scapegoats of a society suffering from moral decay. In contrast "shell-shocked" veterans of previous wars had been the recipients of respect and understanding from a grateful nation.
"Crazy Pat" became the Postal Service's official party line explaining the incident. Postal inspectors circulated stories about "Crazy Pat" dressed in fatigues, peeping in neighborhood windows. He had once rode solo on a bicycle built for two and someone remembered that he had smiled too much at his twentieth high school reunion. By proving his insanity, the Postal Service sought to avoid any question of its own sanity. A one time neighbor, Charles Thigpen, commented that everyone wanted "quick answers. And since Pat's not alive to defend himself, they don't have to be the right answers." http://massmurder.zyns.com/patrick_sherrill_02.htm
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In particular, note the above part in red font that I've also purposely highlighted with yellow. I personally have known certain managers who would make use of this very tactic simply because they didn't have the backbone to responsibly deal with the ones who were actually guilty of waste. What the manager would do is exploit an employee whom the manager had learned to be easily intimidated--an employee who as a rule was a conscientious, hard-working individual. The theory being, that the harder this employee would work, then the wider the gap in productivity between him and those whom the manager felt wasn't performing to the best of their ability. The idea was to hopefully get more productivity out of the "deliberately slow" ones, even if it had to be at the expense of the one who was already doing a sufficient job. There are indeed managers who will stoop to any level in order to acheive a coveted promotion.
Anyone else here ever witness this phenomenon?
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