In a scene similar to more than a dozen deadly outbreaks of violence in post offices across the country, a U.S. Postal Service clerk walked into a crowded mail distribution center in Palatine on Tuesday morning and opened fire with a gun, authorities said.
As terrified employees stampeded for the doors, the gunman shot a fellow clerk in the jaw and chest as the clerk stood at the time clock. He then strolled downstairs into the lobby and shot another clerk twice in the chest.
The suspect, identified as Dorsey S. Thomas, 53, a 23-veteran of the Postal Service with a clean work record but possible mental problems, led police on a car chase to his Northlake home before he was arrested on charges of attempted murder, authorities said.
The shooting victims were Mike Mielke, 41, of Round Lake Park, who was in critical condition Tuesday evening at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights, and Steve Collura, 45, of Schaumburg, who was in stable condition at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge.
The shootings came just one month after Postal Service officials announced a crackdown on violence, vowing to fire any employee bringing a gun to work.
That edict was prompted by the July 9 fatal shooting in California of a Postal Service supervisor by a disgruntled employee. In the past 12 years, 35 supervisors and co-workers have been killed by postal employees.
In the shooting in Palatine, Thomas apparently had known the two victims well. Authorities did not offer a motive Tuesday.
“I can’t understand it. They talked to each other every day, and you’d never think there was anything wrong between them,” said Willie Little, 46, who worked with Thomas for several years.
While postal authorities tried Tuesday to downplay the seriousness of the problem, pointing out that there are 800,000 postal workers, critics said many long-standing problems continue to fester within the Postal Service, creating a fertile ground for such violence.
The workplace stress is caused by many factors, experts say, including enormous hostility between management and workers, pressures from competing private delivery services, and a strong union system that prevents the firing of incompetent or lazy workers.
Last year, the congressional General Accounting Office called the Postal Service a “dysfunctional organizational culture” in which autocratic managers battle adversarial employees and unions.
“The violence reflects the frustrating work environment, where you cannot hire the best workers and fire the worst-that’s the root of the evil,” said Van Seagraves, a former postal employee who published a newsletter about the Postal Service for 15 years.
“Supervisors engage in harassing tactics to enforce a modicum of discipline, and that only engenders more frustration and anger,” Seagraves said.
Other experts have linked the violence to the Postal Service’s paramilitary-style hierarchy, which relies heavily on a top-down system based on an elaborate structure of rules.
Employees and union officials in Palatine complained that there was a lot of animosity, not enough security and too many armed co-workers at the huge mail distribution center, which employs 1,600 people. The local branch of the American Postal Workers Union recently filed a grievance over the lack of security there.
Palatine police received reports of six fights or disturbances in the past year at the center, 1300 E. Northwest Highway, one in which a worker received a death threat, another in which a supervisor elbowed an employee in the chest and another in which a supervisor shoved an employee out a door, according to police reports.
“The fact that there was a shooting here doesn’t surprise me; it’s a dog-eat-dog kind of place to work,” said Wendell Smith, 33, a post office truck driver. “There is a lot of stress around here, a lot of tension between the management and the workers.”
Tony Collins, 33, a mail handler, shrugged his shoulders at the fact that his co-workers bring weapons to work to protect themselves.
“I think it’s ridiculous that we don’t have any kind of police on full-time security duty here,” Collins said. “Because you always hear about things like this happening at the post office.”
Stanley F. Slupik, president of the local chapter of the American Postal Workers Union, said employees had been asking for 24-hour police presence and tighter security at the facility since it opened about three years ago.
U.S. Postal Inspector Michael Duffy said the security arrangements at the Palatine mail processing center will be reviewed.
More Top Picks Best Anti Theft Travel Backpacks
“Is security adequate here? Certainly that is something that is going to be discussed whenever there is a tragedy like this,” Duffy said.
Frank Brennan, a postal spokesman in Washington, D.C., said the violence within the Postal Service reflects the violence in society as a whole.
“It’s not a postal problem-it’s everywhere,” Brennan said. “With 800,000 people, you are going to have a percentage of irrational people.”
In the Palatine incident, Thomas showed up for work at 6:54 a.m., just as the shift was changing, according to witnesses.
Thomas, who lives with his wife and three children in Northlake, had worked as a mail clerk for 23 years with no blemishes on his work record, according to neighbors and postal authorities.
Thomas walked up to the second floor and into a huge gymnasium-size room filled with hundreds of employees and dozens of clattering mail-sorting machines, witnesses said.
Thomas worked in a locked caged-in room sorting registered mail, which demands a higher security environment because it often contains checks, postal workers said.
The victims, Mielke and Collura, also worked in the huge room, sorting piles of mail into dozens of bins bound for different locations, witnesses said.
Instead of getting to work, however, Thomas approached Mielke at the time clock outside his supervisor’s office, according to witnesses and authorities.
Thomas allegedly drew a semiautmoatic handgun and fired five times, hitting Mielke twice. One bullet entered Mielke’s right jaw, passed through his head and exited from his left temple, authorities said. Another slug entered through his right upper chest and exited through his back, according to a hospital spokeswoman.
Postal worker James W. Jefferson said he heard the gunshots and saw Thomas walking past the area where he was working.
“Everybody was looking around to see what happened, and then everybody started running,” recalled Jefferson, a 20-year veteran of the Postal Service.
Authorities said Thomas then walked downstairs into the first-floor lobby of the mail processing plant.
Postal worker Elizabeth Repple, 51, said she was only a few feet behind Thomas when she saw him pull the gun from his clothes and point it at Collura, who was walking about 10 feet away.
“He just pulled out the gun and shot him, just like that,” Repple said.
“I ran and yelled at my supervisor to call 911 because there had been a shooting,” Repple said. “At first he was very skeptical, and he said, `Are you sure?’ “
Thomas left the building and climbed into his Lincoln Continental and drove about 20 miles to his Northlake home, authorities said.
Police arrested Thomas at his home about 7:30 a.m. Police said they found a handgun in the car. At a hearing Tuesday afternoon in federal court in Chicago, Thomas was charged in a federal criminal complaint with attempting to kill two federal employees.
Thomas was ordered held in the Metropolitan Correctional Center by U.S. Magistrate Arlander Keys until a detention hearing at 10 a.m. Thursday.
Defense attorney Terence Gillespie told the judge that Thomas is under doctor’s care for severe depression and other physical ailments. Keys ordered a physical and mental examination for Thomas.
Gillespie said the family was shocked and indicated Thomas had no previous history of violence.
“This is totally out of character,” Gillespie said.