RAMPAGE IN ESCONDIDO : Suicides Spotlight Problems in Agency

Two weeks before John Merlin Taylor went on a shooting rampage at an Escondido postal station, another veteran San Diego-area letter carrier hanged himself in Ramona.

Like Taylor, whom colleagues described as “mellow and nice as could be,” postal workers said William Camp, 62, was “very well liked and very quiet.”

But on July 28, the retired mailman slipped a noose around his neck in his garage. One of his four sons found the body.

Camp’s colleagues said they could understand--if not condone--his actions. They understood the forces that drove Camp to take his own life: It was the U.S. Postal Service.

Camp’s death was the fourth suicide of a postal worker in San Diego County this year, and there has been at least one other in years past.

On March 25, in a highly publicized incident, 44-year-old letter carrier Donald Mace walked into the lobby of the Poway Post Office, put a .38-caliber revolver to his head and pulled the trigger.

Before he died, Mace had mailed a rambling suicide letter to the news media complaining about his medical and financial problems and had told of harassment by his supervisors.

On March 23, postal clerk Hector Rubio, 40, hanged himself with a leather belt at his Pacific Beach home. His wife, Barbara, found the body. A 20-year veteran of the Postal Service, Rubio reportedly had drinking problems.

In mid-June, Jay Fanum, a letter carrier since 1980 at the Encinitas Post Office, killed himself in his Vista home. Postal Service officials said Fanum was going through employee counseling at the time of his death and indicated that his problems may have been marital.

Several years ago, postal clerk Hector Torres, who colleagues said was having problems at work, jumped to his death off the Coronado Bridge.

The suicides have generated strong criticism of the Postal Service in San Diego and focused attention on employee violence and stress-related problems among workers in the postal agency.

In the past decade, dozens of people--ranging from postmasters to carriers--have been murdered or wounded by their co-workers at postal facilities around the country. In the past 3 1/2 years, the Postal Service has recorded 355 instances in which employees assaulted supervisors and 183 in which supervisors assaulted employees. An untold number of postal workers nationwide have killed themselves.

Critics of the Postal Service say that in its quest to cope with volume that last year totaled 160 billion pieces of mail, the agency has extracted a human toll on its employees and their families.

The agency, while conceding that there is a problem, nonetheless maintains that employee violence--from suicide to murder--is no greater in the Postal Service than in other sectors of the business world.

“We don’t have any more or any less problems than face society today, whether we’re talking about drugs or just plain bad temper,” said Lou Eberhardt, a Postal Service spokesman in Washington.

Once an official part of the federal government called the Post Office Department, the agency was reorganized in 1971 as a semi-private company called the U.S. Postal Service. Most of its employees are unionized but are forbidden to strike.

Faced with mounting expenses and declining revenues, the Postal Service is currently trying to boost productivity while keeping costs down.

Some union leaders complain that in striving to meet these goals, postal supervisors are placing added pressures on workers, resulting in work speedups and employee complaints--and occasionally workplace violence.

Three years ago, the nation was stunned when part-time mailman Patrick Sherrill killed 14 co-workers, wounded six others and then committed suicide at the Edmond, Okla., post office. Sherrill, a man with an unstable personal history, had often talked about getting revenge on his bosses, who considered his work unsatisfactory.

The Postal Service said events like the massacre in Edmond could happen anywhere in society, contending that people with problems in their personal lives often will transfer them to their work.

But the Edmond rampage was not an isolated incident.

Shot Three People

A mail sorter held his ex-girlfriend hostage and shot three people during a 13-hour siege at the main New Orleans post office last December. One co-worker lost an eye in the attack.

Since 1983, there have been repeated murders and, in one case, a beating committed by postal employees against co-workers or supervisors in Chelsea, Mass.; Dallas; New York City; Anniston, Ala., and Atlanta.

In San Diego, Camp’s suicide created such an uproar among his co-workers in El Cajon that all last week some workers wore black armbands in his memory.

“Management didn’t like it, but they did it anyway,” a woman postal clerk said.

Camp, colleagues said, had loved working for the Postal Service. But after amassing 2,500 hours of sick leave, they said he was reprimanded for taking a sick day off just before he left on vacation earlier this year.

“When he came back from vacation, they started hassling him, so he retired,” said John Worthy, a union representative.

Camp’s condition deteriorated, they said. He tried to starve himself and lost 30 to 40 pounds before his sons talked him out of it.

A couple of weeks later, Camp hanged himself.

At the El Cajon Post Office where Camp had worked, there was a bomb threat on Aug. 1. Police evacuated the building for 15 minutes.

Strong Criticism

San Diego Postmaster Margaret Sellers has been the target of strong criticism from some postal workers in recent months.

Sellers’ spokesman, Glenn Krouch, acknowledged in a telephone interview that most critics blame Sellers’ policies for the rash of violent incidents, including suicides, that have plagued postal employees in the county recently.

“We’ve heard the criticism and heard it in a number of different lines,” Krouch said. “Margaret is very upset by things like that.

“She’s a very personable person. Employees are our top resource and asset. We’re definitely a service organization run by people,” he said.

But Preston Chips, a U.S. Department of Labor certified counselor who has counseled San Diego-area postal employees since 1981, said Sellers’ management style and policies have led to countless incidents of harassment in local post offices.

“Any organization reflects the policy of the person at the top,” Chips said. “Margaret Sellers is a much hated person because of her policies.”

Sellers could not be reached for comment.

According to Chips, the Postal Service in San Diego has “an unwritten policy” of discouraging employees from filing and pursuing disability claims when they are injured on the job. Chips said the practice contributes greatly to the stress that overburdened postal employees are already under.

Times staff writers H.G. Reza and Lori Grange contributed to this story.