Researchers have found that workplace killings like yesterday’s Atlanta massacre follow a pattern: The suspect is usually a white male in his 40s, a loner with access to guns who has years of frustration behind him.
Others appear to be simply random.
Here’s a rundown of workplace shootings in the past few years:
*June 11, 1999 – A Michigan psychiatrist is killed by a former patient, Joseph Brooks, 27, who also gunned down a 45-year-old woman and injured four other people before fatally shooting himself.
*April 15, 1999 – A 71-year-old gunman, described as schizophrenic, kills two and wounds four in the Mormon church’s Family History Library in Salt Lake City. He was shot to death by police.
*March 18, 1999 – Walter V. Shell, 71, allegedly killed his lawyer and one of his clients in Johnson City, Tenn., before turning himself in to cops. Shell blamed the lawyer for losing $100,000 in a dispute over his ex-wife’s will.
*Jan. 14, 1999 – Carrying a grocery sack of bullets, Di-Kieu Duy, 24, walks into a Salt Lake City office building and opens fire, killing one and wounding one.
*Jan. 13, 1999 – The owner of a Camarillo, Calif., software company is killed, allegedly by Mikhail Khaimchayev, who had been fired several weeks earlier.
*March 6, 1998 – Four executives at Connecticut lottery headquarters are shot to death by Matthew Beck, 35, an accountant with a grievance about working overtime without extra pay. Beck then killed himself.
*Dec. 19, 1997 – After being turned down for a promotion to the day shift, postal worker Anthony DeCulit, 37, shoots and kills a co-worker and wounds a supervisor before taking his own life at the Milwaukee post office.
*Dec. 18, 1997 – Arturo Reyes Torres, 43, upset about getting fired, walks into a maintenance yard in Orange, Calif., with an AK-47 and kills his former boss and three others. Torres was later shot by police.
*Oct. 7, 1997 – Charles Lee White, 42, opens fire with a rifle at the San Antonio paging company where his ex-girlfriend worked, killing her and another woman before shooting himself to death.
* Sept. 15, 1997 – Arthur Hastings Wise, 43,allegedly opens fire at an Aiken, S.C., manufacturing plant, killing four and wounding three. Wise had been fired two months before.
While rampages like yesterday’s get a lot of press, federal studies have found that the most dangerous occupations are those in which workers handle cash late at night.
Taxi drivers, liquor-store workers and gas-station employees are most likely to be killed on the job, says a study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.