Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (17 page)

Protecting Yourself

Laws aside, the reality is that stalking victims are and must be responsible for their own safety. Here are some techniques to decrease the risk of being psychologically or physically harmed by stalkers:

• Take the stalker seriously.
• Inform family and friends about the stalker.
• Improve home security with deadbolts and outside lights.
• Establish workplace security.
• Have coworkers screen your calls.
• Obtain witnesses to any stalking.
• Vary your driving routes.
• Do not get out of your car when next to a van.
• Limit the time you spend walking.
• Unobtrusively take pictures of the stalker.
• Make a record of the stalker’s patterns.
• Use telephone caller identification devices.
• Do not respond to the stalker’s calls, e-mails, letters, or invitations to meet.
• Remain in public places, and try not to travel alone.
• Maintain a continuing relationship with the police.
• Call police immediately if you are physically threatened by the stalker.
• Consider obtaining a restraining or protective order.
• Couple the protective order with the pressing of criminal charges whenever possible.
• Obtain legal counsel.

No one wants to move and take up a new identity. Total protection is too expensive and restrictive. But careless disregard can be fatal. A balance must be struck between the freedom of one’s lifestyle and adequate security. With the enactment of laws making stalking a felony and public understanding of the dimensions of the problem, help for stalking victims and potential victims has arrived. Police everywhere are now listening seriously to women who complain of being harassed and stalked. Law enforcement agencies are revising their training procedures to take this crime into account. In some cases, arrests are required in cases of domestic violence to prevent the most common form of stalking, which arises from domestic violence. With regard to this particular crime, which is usually directed against women, society finally appears to “get it.” Kristin Lardner’s death and the violent maimings and deaths of thousands of other stalking victims have galvanized our legislatures and law enforcement agencies to finally face the epidemic of stalking and its related violence.

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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 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
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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 (M SG).

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 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 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 FB I 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 FB I 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 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 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 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 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.