Survivors in Post Office Killings Tell of ‘Insensitive Management’

Survivors of the Edmond, Okla., post office massacre last summer suffered further pain from “an utterly cold and insensitive management,” including a postmaster who banned reading of sympathy mail on the job, a House panel was told Wednesday.

“At first we were attacked by Pat Sherrill and now we were under emotional attack from management,” said Steve Brehm, a postal clerk at Edmond.

Edmond postal worker Patrick Sherrill shot and killed 14 fellow employees and seriously wounded six others before he committed suicide on Aug. 20, 1986.

May Never Know Cause

“We did not know the reason for the attack then and we will never know why it happened,” Postmaster General Preston R. Tisch told a joint subcommittee hearing of the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee.

The emotional aftermath of the massacre was described by Brehm and Carla Phillips, whose husband, Lee, was killed in the attack. They were backed by Moe Biller, president of the AFL-CIO’s American Postal Workers Union, who said survivors encountered a “bureaucratic stone wall” in trying to obtain death benefits.

Tisch agreed that “we have made some mistakes along the way” but said all surviving employees and families “now are receiving or have received the benefits to which they are entitled.”

David H. Charters, senior assistant postmaster general for human resources, said that Sherrill should never have been hired as a postal worker. However, Charters said, “mass murder is not a consequence which can reasonably be expected to flow from a faulty hiring decision.”

Difficult to Get Benefits

Phillips, who also worked for the Postal Service, told of months of frustrating efforts to obtain survivors’ benefits. She said her husband’s funeral expenses were not paid for nearly seven months.