Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast where on this week's episode, we are continuing our look at mass shootings of the 20th century, just as this epidemic was beginning to gain a foothold in American culture. In the intro to our previous episode, I talked briefly about the late 20th century phenomenon of going postal and the spat of so-called disgruntled postal workers that spawned this term and
In fact, going postal reached such wide use that pack and ship stores began using this as their business name. Late night talk shows and sketch comedy programs would invoke the disgruntled postal worker as a punchline. And I guess there is something inherently funny about the phrase. A lot of people had never heard the word disgruntled before it was used in the context of disgruntled postal worker. But
But the word disgruntled sounds like an almost perverse understatement when describing an active shooter. And what is it about working for the U.S. Postal Service that so disgruntled some of its workers?
Over half a million people work for the U.S. Postal Service in America. It's one of the largest employers in the U.S., and it's also a government job. U.S. postal employees are government employees, and most of those half million employees are, I'm sure, normal, well-adjusted people who have the tools to manage workplace stressors and other everyday challenges. But a small subset of those people aren't.
And an even smaller subset of that subset has been populated by some deeply troubled individuals whom you could describe as ticking time bombs waiting to explode. The deadliest postal shooting of all remains also the deadliest workplace shooting in American history to date.
And I hope that's a record that's never broken. But this was the rampage that first made going postal a thing. Like I said, I referenced it briefly in last week's intro, and that's the story you're hearing about today.
So it was on the morning of August 20th, 1986, around 6.45 a.m. The Edmond, Oklahoma post office branch, which was a large brick building that had been recently built, hadn't opened its doors for business yet.
But it was bustling with employees. 73 postal workers, carriers and supervisors alike, were already fed, caffeinated and busy with their jobs, sorting the mail, casing it or getting the mail ready for delivery. One of the workers who had just shown up was Patrick Sherrill. He was a 44-year-old part-time mail carrier known as a relief carrier.
This means that he didn't have a regular assigned route and that his routes varied from day to day whenever the regular carrier on that route had the day off. Patrick had been at work for about 20 minutes at this point, working his mail case, periodically checking the supervisor's office like he was looking for or waiting for his supervisors. And he was at his desk when one of those supervisors approached him, 38-year-old Rick Esser.
Rick had been one of two supervisors, along with Bill Bland, who just the previous day had taken Patrick into a closed office and reprimanded him for poor performance. This wasn't the first time Patrick had been criticized by his supervisors at the Edmund branch, but we'll get to that later.
Rick was approaching Patrick this morning to let him know he'd be delivering a different route that day. Shortly after this interaction, Patrick walked to the east doors of the building and dropped the metal pins in the door that then locked into the concrete floor. He's essentially closing up the building, at least from that side. And he was carrying his mailbag, the mailbag he used to perform his duties. Patrick was walking to the east doors of the building and dropped the metal pins in the door that then locked into the concrete floor.
But on this morning, the bag did not contain mail. What it contained was two .45 caliber Colt government-issue semi-automatic firearms, a .22 caliber pistol, and several hundred rounds of ammunition. These bullets were slugs, wad cutters, also known as man-stoppers, so-called because they're designed to be ideal for self-defense knockdown power.
and for target shooting, because the holes they leave in paper targets are more visible and round than other bullets. But Sherrill chose these bullets not for self-defense, but for offense. He intended to inflict maximum lethal damage on his targets that morning at the post office.
Patrick Sherrill wasted no time. As the doors were bolted shut, he walked back towards Rick Esser, his supervisor. He reached into his mailbag, clicked off the safety mechanism on his colt, pulled it from the bag, and pointed it toward the ceiling.
He pulled back the slide loading around into the chamber, aimed his gun at Rick Esser and fired at point blank range. Rick was knocked back by the blast, which ripped through his insides and left him with only a few moments of life as he fell to the floor and died. The force of the gun being fired also knocked Patrick Sherrill's hand upward for just a moment. And when he lowered it again, he then aimed it at Mike Rockne.
Rockne was like a deer in the headlights, and this gave Cheryl the advantage of an easy shot. Like the shot that killed Rick Esser, this one sounded like a firecracker to everyone else in the building who had yet to see what was going on. Rockne dropped to the floor dead. He was 33 years old.
He had been working as a mail carrier for only five years, but he had been so beloved by the residents on his mail route that they'd get him gifts for the holidays and bake cookies for him. He was also the grandson of Knute Rockne, the legendary football player and Notre Dame coach who was played by Ronald Reagan in the 1940 biopic Knute Rockne All-American.
In a way, Mike was everything Patrick Sherrill was not. Charismatic, sociable, healthy, and liked by all. Sherrill was not liked by all.
Not to claim 20-20 hindsight here, but Patrick Sherrill's going postal, in retrospect, seemed hardly out of character for this middle-aged man to anyone paying attention, which was probably nobody. He ticked many of the now classic boxes for the now all-too-common phenomenon of becoming an active shooter. Though he had been reprimanded just one day earlier, he didn't just snap out of nowhere one day after a single supervisory finger wag.
Since he had begun working at the Edmond, Oklahoma post office, there were many reprimands, letters of warning, complaints, poor evaluations, notices of suspension. In fact, when he had been hired for the job, he had a scant employment background and only barely gotten the door on the virtue of being a veteran. And he claimed in his job application that he had served in Vietnam, but
But those records would later reveal that he had been stationed in the United States for the duration of his Marine Corps service. And in the wake of his rampage, none of his neighbors would speak kindly of him. According to them, he would pedal around the neighborhood on a tandem bicycle, but alone. So alone on a two-seater. He would stare at people in a creepy way and children in the neighborhood would taunt him by calling him Fat Pat or Crazy Pat.
He would prowl their yards at night dressed in camouflage fatigues. He was a known peeping Tom. He kidnapped neighborhood pets and tied them to his fence so his Dalmatian dog Freckles could mutilate them. Neighbors also complained that he would steal various parts of kids' bicycles and put them on his own. There was one time when his elderly mother, whom he lived with, fell on the front steps and he was seen standing behind the screen door and ignoring her cries for help.
Just two months before his rampage, Cheryl had entered the garage of one of his neighbors and threatened her young son, who then chased him away with an axe. That same neighbor complained that Cheryl would stand outside her house and look into her windows. He would talk about Vietnam endlessly, even though, you know, he never actually served there. Some of his neighbors outright hated him and others felt sorry for him.
He didn't always seem quite with it, one neighbor said of him. He had difficulty finding and keeping a job, that neighbor recalled. Among the many jobs he had and left was one with the Black Radio Company where he abruptly quit one day after a customer addressed him as young man. He told his boss, I have a given name and that name is Pat Sherrill before abruptly walking out.
So what exactly was Patrick Sherrill's problem? And what even landed us in the post office with him firing at everyone? Okay, most beauty brands don't understand fine color treated hair, but Proz does. They have a formula that can address my specific type of hair needs, which makes sense because it's based on me.
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He was socially awkward and failed to connect with peers despite showing promise for activities like band, football, and wrestling. He graduated high school and attempted college at the University of Oklahoma, but he dropped out or flunked out after only seven months. So that's when at age 22, Pat enlisted in the Marines and that's where he found a place for himself. He excelled in a military environment, but
In boot camp, he attained expert status with firing the M14 rifle. By the time of his honorable discharge three years later, he qualified as an expert rifle marksman. But there is no record that he was ever overseas at any time during his enlistment, so his tour of duty remained domestic and presumably combat-free.
And maybe that was disappointing to him, to become this expert marksman while harboring this growing grudge toward his fellow man, but then never getting an opportunity to fire at one. At completion of his military term, Sherrill gave college another try, and it was as abortive as his first. After nine months, he dropped out again when his stepfather died.
Eventually, he returned to school to give the university one more shot, but he became a three-time loser when he failed to maintain good academic standing and once again left with a 1.91 grade point average. Now, over the next decade, Sherrill bounced around from job to job, sporadically taking junior college classes while waiting and failing to make a permanent landing, all the while living with his mother.
Cheryl likely expected the many jobs he cycled through to lean harder on skilled labor and less on social aptitude.
Those jobs included assembly work at a bicycle shop, electronic technician, letterpress operator, radio technician, and laborer at various places like Tinker Air Force Base and the VA hospital. Unfortunately, just about all jobs seem to require a level of basic social ability that Cheryl just couldn't get the hang of.
During this time, his mother struggled with Parkinson's disease, and when he was only 37, he lost her to pneumonia, leaving him alone in the house. Now, it's hard to say how this affected him beyond speculation, because we have very limited information about his family relationships. But we do know that Patrick seemed to avoid any kind of social interaction that might leave him vulnerable or open him up to hurt or attack.
He generally didn't have romantic relationships. He didn't pursue relationships with women. And he once explained to a friend that this was because his biological father had serious mental issues and he feared he had inherited them. This was a fear that plagued him for years right up until he snapped.
Cheryl began working for the Edmond Post Office branch in April 1985. This would be just 15 months before he would go on to commit that rampage. And interestingly, the postmaster at the time of Cheryl's application, Bill Shockey, had explicitly protested Cheryl's suitability as a postal employee and
But Shockey was told by the Oklahoma City Division of Employees and Labor Relations that Cheryl could not be passed over for hiring because of his veteran status. So Shockey's recommendation was ignored and the personnel office failed to conduct any investigation of Cheryl's past employers.
As would make sense, new post office employees have a 90-day probationary period after which permanence is granted. So once you're in, you're in. And it's very hard to get you out. It's like advancing from dating to marriage. And somehow, Patrick Sherrill slipped through cracks of a normally guarded and measured system.
Regular U.S. post office procedure calls for an employee probationary period evaluation report to be completed by a supervisor at 30 days, at 60 days, and again before the end of the 80th day. Cheryl's 30th day report was normal enough for a new guy. It said, quote, too slow on the street, no sense of urgency.
But his 60-day report was worse. He failed four out of the five categories he was being evaluated on. The supervisor recommended a special 75-day evaluation report. And then that report documented zero improvement from the 60-day report. But for some reason, there was no final evaluation report by the end of the 80th day. What happened?
And then, after 90 days, it was too late. The USPS and Patrick Sherrill were already married, so to speak. Sherrill was established as a career employee by some overlooked default, and now he could only be removed from the Postal Service for cause. By law, one's position with the Postal Service cannot be taken from them by the government without due process.
Pat Sherrill felt that he did his job well and took it seriously. So he didn't understand why his supervisors were constantly criticizing him. Even some of his coworkers would later report that he'd been unfairly badgered by his supervisors.
So this was quite possibly an explosive intersection of a deranged mind with a toxic work environment. Like I said, it was August 19th, 1986, the day before the shooting, that Patrick arrived at work and was escorted into an office by his supervisors, Bill Bland and Rick Esser.
They once again went over his performance and all the reasons it fell short. He was late too frequently, they said. Mail on his routes was being misdirected too often. If his work did not improve, they warned him they'd be forced to fire him. Now, later in the afternoon, Cheryl phoned his steward at the local postal workers union headquarters and asked if he could be transferred to maintenance. I got to get out of here, he said. They're mistreating me.
The next morning, he came to work in his blue uniform with a mailbag full of firearms and ammunition slung over his shoulder. And then he began shooting. So now returning to the shooting. With two postal employees dead, everyone in the branch began scrambling either for shelter or for the closest exits.
Pat Sherrill pursued some of them through a side entrance, shooting them as they fled into the parking lot. He then bolted the side door shut and continued his rampage, moving through the building in a circular manner, going from exit to exit, sealing the building. He found fellow postal workers hiding in gurneys and under letter cases, firing into them without mercy, killing them in their hiding places.
Some of them were people Patrick knew and wanted dead. Others were virtual strangers to him. And all throughout, Cheryl remained totally silent, saying nothing. For 10 or more endless minutes, the building vibrated with the screams of postal workers and sharp, deafening pops of gunfire.
Within 15 minutes of the first shot, 14 employees lay dead and seven were badly wounded. At this point, the building was quiet. A majority of the 73 employees in the building that morning were able to get outside within the first five minutes of the rampage.
Another bit of luck was that delivery supervisor Bill Bland, who was the other supervisor who reprimanded Cheryl and was thought to have been Cheryl's main target, just so happened to have overslept that day for the first time in his postal career. That anomaly saved his life as Cheryl had checked for him specifically several times before beginning the massacre.
By 7.18 a.m., Cheryl was running out of targets, and the motivation began to drain from him. As the SWAT team converged on the post office, escaped workers gave them a layout of the building inside and which doors were open and which had been locked.
Meanwhile, inside, Cheryl wandered over to Rick Esser, the supervisor who reprimanded him the day earlier, who was the first to die. He looked down at Esser for just a moment, took a look around, and without giving the carnage around him the sum of his life on earth, too much more thought, he raised his pistol to his head and fired his last round. He was the 15th and final person to die that morning.
But the SWAT team had no idea he'd taken his own life. They thought there might be hostages inside and it took them over an hour
to finally enter the building. This delay was one of many safety complaints made by the staff after the fact, as several of the wounded that survived were told by their surgeons that they only just made it to the hospital in time to live by a matter of minutes. I mean, you have wounded people laying inside for over an hour.
Once the SWAT team was inside, employees who had locked themselves in vaults and closets were finally rescued.
Ironically, it was postmaster Bill Shockey, the very man whose advice to not hire Cheryl was ignored in the first place, who was given the grim task of identifying the dead. And the aftermath of the shooting was just about as rocky. Consider, for example, the statement of Dorothy Pyle, the widow of Jerry Pyle, who was a 25-year veteran mail carrier killed in Patrick Cheryl's rampage.
In it, she complains of mixed signals she received from USPS officials regarding compensation, delayed benefits, and insensitive treatment.
It seems that Shockey got to be the friendly political face and voice to express all due politeness and good intentions, whether promises could actually be kept or not. Many aftermath testimonials of surviving employees talked about insensitive treatment from postal supervisors and insufficient precautionary measures even after the incident. A policeman placed on guard was canceled after only three weeks because it was said to have cost too much.
There was a bomb threat not taken seriously by management and tornado take cover warnings that were ignored.
A memo was sent out that no personal calls could be made by employees and incoming calls would not be honored. For example, if a family member became ill and the hospital called to inform the employee, a message would be taken and the call would not be transferred to the employee. Just harsh work environments. Imagine no one having cell phones in the workplace and not being allowed to ever use the company landlines.
Only two weeks after the massacre, employees were told to use the payphone for any personal calls they needed to make. Another memo basically warned to not get caught opening sympathy cards and letters on company time.
Not only that, but beyond a certain grace period, management was going to just throw out any condolence mail. So they're getting these cards saying sorry about the shooting and they're not even allowed to read them. In fact, they are ordered to throw them out. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out.
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Other things that were banned in the wake of the shooting were coffee at personal workstations. Imagine beginning your shift at three in the morning as some of these shifts did and being prohibited from drinking coffee. Another clerk at this post office later described being barred from talking about the tragedy while at work. Directives like these were signed by Postmaster H. Del Foulkes. As far as he was concerned, neither rain nor snow nor gloom of mass murder would
would stop these couriers from optimal productivity. Fulks criticized employees for sloppy work and warned that thousands of applicants for postal service work were ready to take their jobs if they didn't improve. Eventually, he was transferred and not punished, but he even claimed that this transfer was voluntary and a job move he was excited about.
The Edmond incident was one of 15 homicide incidents by postal employees from 1986 through 1999, in which 34 postal workers and six non-employees were killed.
As a result, the study of workplace violence began to be taken seriously by federal agencies. New hiring, employee management, and safety practices continue to evolve with the input of criminologists and psychiatrists. Of course, this can only help so much when mental health issues are at stake.
Like Jennifer San Marco, whose history of bizarre and offensive behavior, which included talking to imaginary friends, stripping nude in public, making racist remarks, culminated in 2006 when she entered a post office in Goleta, California, where she'd previously worked as a mail processor, and she gunned down six people before turning the gun on herself.
And now, two decades later, we're almost numb to it. In this past week alone, there's been mass shootings. And we don't even really talk about it the same way now. But there's a reason it's happening. And I can't help wonder that mass shooters are seeing it as they're waging war. They're making a statement. But what are these acts of war accomplishing?
What's the end game, especially when the majority of mass shooters end up taking their own lives? There is no end game other than fear and chaos and an endless list of seemingly unanswerable questions. And this case really brought up the question, is it the fault of industry for mistreating workers to a breaking point? The fault of society for creating such stark divisions and pushing people to the margins?
What did Patrick Sherrill's parents or guardians do to him to warp him this way?
Was Patrick just one of life's inevitable bad apples that will occur like natural disasters no matter what we do? At the time it happened, this mass murder was the third deadliest in U.S. history, second only to the University of Texas shooting of 16 people from a tower on campus and the 1984 McDonald's shooting of 21 people. But in the years since then,
There have been so many mass shootings in America that Patrick Sherrill's systematic execution of 14 human beings has been knocked down from the third deadliest to the 15th deadliest. And it also honestly feels uncomfortable to even rank these like it's some kind of contest.
By the time this episode drops, there probably will have been another mass shooting somewhere in America. The most recent one as of this recording was the Allen Premium Outlets mass shooting in Dallas that left eight dead.
According to Time Magazine, that was the 199th mass shooting so far this year. Last month, five were killed at a bank in Louisville. And the month before that, six were killed at an elementary school in Nashville. Before we even jumped into this subject, I told you that we will probably never tell these stories on Binged. You're already seeing them unfold on the news each week. It would be like covering war. And that's what this is in a way.
It's people among us waging war against their fellow citizens in the spaces that we traditionally regard as safe. Shopping malls, movie theaters, elementary schools, safe spaces are getting harder and harder to come by. It's said that America lost its innocence when JFK was assassinated.
It's really quite relative. It's a slow boil. America lost even more of its innocence with the Vietnam War, with the Columbine High School shooting, with 9-11, with the pandemic, with the hundreds of mass shootings we've seen since the 1990s, just as the Edmund Post Office lost its innocence when Patrick Sherrill went postal. Well, that'll do it for this week's episode. But before we leave, I want to give you a hint at next week's.
Is anyone hungry for waffles? We'll see you then with a brand new theme on next week's binged episode. Get that side of pop. My intrusive thoughts are winning right now. Yes. I just let my intrusive thoughts win for a second. I wonder if I should go to the doctor for like how often my nose runs because it's bad. After nine months, he dropped out again with his step. No, my son. Is anyone hungry for pancakes? Is anyone hungry for waffles?