Opinion

Whack job

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Dying on the Job

Murder and Mayhem in the American Workplace

by Ronald D. Brown

Rowman & Littlefield

On Sept. 9, 2010, after an argument with three co-workers led to her suspension, 43-year-old Kraft Foods employee Yvonne Hiller called a friend to say that she had had enough. Ten minutes later, she grabbed a .357 Magnum, returned to her workplace, told a fourth employee to leave, then shot the three people she’d been arguing with, killing two. When the SWAT team came to take her away, they discovered that Hiller had not used up all her ammunition.

In committing this murder, not only did Hiller become one of this country’s growing number of workplace killers, but she also personified the vast differences between how men and women commit these crimes.

For “Dying on the Job,” veteran attorney Brown examined 350 workplace murders — almost 14% of which were committed by women — and uncovered significant differences in the way the genders approached these crimes.

HOW THEY ARMED

While men often brought “all the guns and weapons they could physically carry,” including a mixture of handguns and semiautomatic weapons, when women used a gun, they always — without exception — carried just one gun. And that gun was always a handgun.

“Not a single rifle, carbine, AK-47 or shotgun was ever used by any women who murdered in the workplace,” writes Brown, who also notes that unlike men, women occasionally used other killing methods as well.

The second-most-popular weapon for women was poison, which was used in almost 20% of the cases involving female murderers but never by any of the men.

TIMING

This was perhaps the most incredible finding in the book. In cases where the murderer was a woman, the criminal act came almost immediately after the act that provoked it.

Brown reels off numerous examples of this, including LA school-bus driver Cathline Repunte, who killed a co-worker immediately following an argument, and Florida supermarket worker Arunya Rouch, who killed a co-worker as he took a smoke break just minutes after he taunted her for being a perfectionist.

This reaction time was typical of women but couldn’t have been more different for men.

“With few exceptions, men took their time and were far more likely to wait for weeks, months, even years before they finally struck back in revenge,” writes Brown, noting cases where men waited as long as two years after being fired to kill an ex-boss.

“Men seeking revenge returned to the job on average eight weeks after they were fired,” he writes. “Women returned, on average, after about 45 minutes.”

THE ‘THELMA & LOUISE’

PHENOMENON

Of the female murderers Brown studied, about a third had recruited a partner (a circumstance even more likely with younger women). In all the cases involving men, this happened only once.

Brown calls this “the ‘Thelma & Louise’ phenomenon.”

“More than a search for an accomplice,” he writes, “it was more often a grasp for companionship, support and communal trust by someone plotting a serious crime.”

His examples include the 27-year-old waitress who brought two teenage acquaintances along to help kill her boss, and two strippers in El Paso in their early 20s who strangled a co-worker because their manager “always let her dance on the ‘good’ pole.”

WHO/HOW MANY THEY KILL

When men kill in the workplace, it usually involves racking up points; not just killing those who wronged them, but taking out as many people as possible.

Women, on the other hand, are far more focused and efficient.

“Women always — without a single exception — returned to their jobs with a single handgun, usually with no extra bullets or the thought of the need to reload. And they killed the person they were looking for.”

Brown notes that while men in the study fired more bullets and killed more people, the women had a far higher ratio of success in bullets shot/people murdered, as women “shot and killed more than three times as many co-workers as they shot and wounded.”

THE VICTIM’S GENDER

Not only did the gender of the murderer matter in regards to how murders were committed, but so too did the gender of the victim, as women were often killed using more “genteel” or intimate means than the cold steel of a gun.

“In cases where a male murdered a male co-worker, the murder weapon was a gun about 94% of the time,” Brown writes. “When a male murdered a female co-worker, the murder weapon was a gun almost 45% of the time. In almost 70% of the cases in which a female was murdered on the job, the murder method was not a gun or other firearm, but a knife, a makeshift weapon, strangulation/suffocation or the killer’s bare hands.”

Whatever the gender differences, Brown — who notes that workplace homicides have risen from just 15 in 1982 to a current annual average of between 750 and 800 — provides little good news for hopes that they’ll decrease, citing economic uncertainty and declining worker empowerment plus one other interesting tidbit.

Despite elaborate attempts by human-resources departments to weed out the violent or mentally ill before they’re hired, most workplace murderers don’t start out violent, but are driven to kill by the indignities and pressures of their specific workplace.

“The employee most likely to arrive at work tomorrow morning with a 9-millimeter handgun and kill the supervisor has already been hired,” he writes. “That employee is already working at the company, already in the office, already sipping coffee in the company cafeteria.”