Mass Murders at Home and Work

Mass Murders at Home and Work: When Will It Ever End?

It started Christmas Eve 2008, when Bruce Pardo rang the doorbell at the home of his ex-wife’s parents in Covina, CA. Wearing a custom-made Santa Claus suit and holding a gun and his own homemade flame thrower, Pardo began a rampage that lasted less than two minutes.
When he was done, he had shot an eight year-old girl in the face, killed nine other people in the home, including his ultimate target, his ex-wife. When he sprayed the family room with gasoline from his pressurized device, flames from two fireplaces ignited the walls and burned the two-story house to the ground. Pardo’s subsequent suicide left the usual unanswered questions. Why? What could have been done to stop him? Who did he tell or what did others know prior to his actions?

If T.S. Eliot said that “April is the cruelest month,” then this past March 2009 was certainly been one of our deadliest.

It began on March 8, not with a mass murder, but with the death of a man of faith. Rev. Fred Winters was preaching to the congregation of his Maryville, IL Baptist church, when a gunman walked up and killed him with four shots.

On March 10, Michael McLendon killed 10 people, across two rural Alabama counties, including his mother and four other relatives. After a running gun battle with police, he shot himself inside a factory where he had once worked.

On March 11, 17 year-old Tim Kretschmer returned to his former high school in Winnenden, Germany, and started shooting. By the time he had fired 112 rounds from the 9mm pistol taken from his father’s collection, 16 were dead (including nine women), and then his final target, himself.

On March 21, four Oakland police officers were shot to death by parolee Lovelle Mixon, following a traffic stop and a subsequent SWAT mission. Mixon was a suspect in the February rape of a 12 year-old who lived in his neighborhood. He was wanted for a parole hold and may have known the police had tied his DNA to the child rape.

On March 24, San Diego Transit employee Lonnie Glasco shot and killed a foreman and a fellow mechanic in the early hours of the morning, just after his shift had ended. Glasco was killed by San Diego Police after he called his father, apparently to say goodbye, and then pointed his gun at the responding officers.

On March 29, Robert Stewart shot and killed seven patients and a nurse at the Pinelake Health and Rehab Center in Carthage, NC. Police believe he was looking to kill his wife, who worked at the facility. The lone officer on duty in the town of Carthage killed Stewart before he could kill more people.

On that same day in Santa Clara, CA, Devan Kalathat shot and killed his two kids, three other relatives, wounded his wife, and killed himself.

And a few days into April 2009, a man went into the American Civic Center in Binghamton, NY and killed 12 people and then himself.

So 57 people died in March at the hands of gunmen who felt helpless and hopeless, sad and angry, and so in need of revenge, that this was their only viable choice.

Both the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service have researched previous similar cases of mass murder, domestic violence “familicides,” and workplace violence homicides. They conclude that it’s not so-called “profiles” that are useful in understanding these horrific crimes (as if we ever really could), but the simple equation of motive plus opportunity.

But it’s not that easy, is it? Motive is not always visible before or after the event. These people rarely leave a diary, a note, or any (rational or otherwise) explanation that allow their own humiliated families and the victims’ relatives much opportunity for real closure.

Motive is not much of a concern for the violence-beleaguered nation of Israel. Friends who live with the threat of bus bombings and coffee shop explosions tell me they really don’t care about why the suicidal and homicidal men or women did what they did. “They’re crazy and they hate us,” is their world-weary refrain.

Interrupting the opportunity, it seems, might allow those around the potential mass murderer to put a stop to his or her evil actions at the planning stage. This includes concerned (and often estranged) family members, friends, or acquaintances, family physicians or mental health clinicians, security professionals, or law enforcement members who have occasional or frequent contact with these people over a span of time, and who may be able to put their behaviors into context.

We will never understand the motive of a school, church, mall, workplace, or family murderer. And even if we know the motive in the aftermath, what good does it do us in terms of preventing a similar “copycat” event in the future?

School officials, police, and violence prevention professionals cringe throughout the month of April every year anyway, thinking back to the number of campus shooting incidents that have occurred during our fourth month, including the Virginia Tech murders and the touchstone for school violence, Columbine High School.

Like many matters of life and death, the solutions to the problem of mass, family, or unthinkable murderers (as with the death on the pulpit of Rev. Winters) are many, complex, and not always viable in a society that respects its freedoms, civil liberties, and ownership of firearms.

Is it about more restrictive gun control laws or more freedoms for the public to arm themselves against predators? Is it about more and better mental heath care, screening, and intervention tools or protocols? Or is it about families or friends having the absolute courage to report suspicious behaviors to law enforcement officials, who will then act on them?
Or is it about more restrictions on our freedoms, like metal detectors at the mall, armed security at your church, or ID badges at your child’s daycare center?

Or is it really about the perpetrators themselves, choosing a better option for what they must see as living miserable lives? Does a heart of darkness live in every human? Perhaps. But when the few can take up arms and frighten the many, in search of their own version of peace, we are all affected. If we’re afraid to go to our workplaces, our malls, our churches, our restaurants, send our kids to their schools, or attend holiday parties, then these gunmen have taken something precious from all of our lives, even if we never knew them at all.

Dr. Steve Albrecht, PHR, CPP is a San Diego-based author and security consultant. He can be reached at drsteve@drstevealbrecht.com