Post Office Tragedy Leads to Some Changes

One year ago today, John Merlin Taylor, a 52-year-old letter carrier, drove to the Orange Glen postal station in Escondido, half a mile from his home, and killed two of his closest friends with a .22-caliber semi-automatic pistol.

Co-workers Richard Berni, 38, of San Marcos and Ronald H. Williams, 56, of Escondido died instantly. Moments later, Taylor turned the gun on himself. His morning rampage made his death the fourth--he had killed his wife, Liesbeth, before leaving their home.

The tragedy at the post office triggered a controversy that has only recently begun to ebb. In the aftermath of the shootings, co-workers and hundreds of other postal employees used the episode to complain about what they called poor working conditions and low morale in post offices throughout the county.

Reaction focused not as much on one man’s homicidal rage but on what might have caused it. Taylor’s death brought to five the number of suicides by Postal Service employees within eight months.

Margaret Sellers, the 60-year-old postmaster of San Diego County, came under immediate fire for scheduling and management practices that employees said contributed to worker stress.

One of her primary critics was Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego), who set a precedent--calling the first field hearing ever conducted by a congressional subcommittee into the operations of a local post office.

One by one, disgruntled postal employees appeared before Bates and Rep. Frank McCloskey (D-Ind.), chairman of December’s hearing in San Diego, to complain about Sellers and her methods of operation, citing heavy workloads, severe time constraints and management insensitivity. The panel reached no formal conclusion on the complaints, but committee members publicly criticized Sellers for not being more receptive to suggestions by employees.

A year after the shattering events in Escondido--and four years after a part-time mailman killed 14 people and wounded six others in an Edmund, Okla., post office--Bates and others involved say the situation has improved in San Diego and nationally.

Officials say “Step 3” grievances--considered the most serious in postal procedures--have dropped by 19% when from the previous 12 months.

Gary Pryor, president of Local 2525 of the National Assn. of Letter Carriers, the union John Merlin Taylor belonged to in Escondido, agreed that life is better for postal workers.

“And it’s not just my opinion,” he said. “I’ve canvassed a good number of the carriers in Orange Glen, and all say the situation is better. There’s been turnover in management personnel, which accounts for less tension. Routes have been adjusted and (deadline) times improved, so that most carriers are more comfortable with their jobs. The atmosphere is definitely better.”

Bates mentioned the same kinds of changes.

“There’s been improved communication between workers and management,” he said. “They’ve looked at re-evaluating and restructuring routes to lessen the work load; but at times, it’s still very stressful. With all of that bulky, third-class mail and the growth of the county, it just isn’t easy.

“As far as management goes, the worst thing was attitude. It was terrible, and, in some ways, still is. To work with people, you’ve got to have the right attitude. But we (the congressional subcommittee) shook them up, and no question about it, it did get better.”

Bates established a task force of a dozen workers to keep him apprised of postal issues. One perception they relay is that, in Bates’ words, “Sellers is a pretty good postmaster. She’s trying to change things. Her strength is keeping the trains running on time. And her weakness? Being insensitive.”

Pryor also said that insensitivity is still a problem with Sellers and top management officials, despite the improvements made.

“She’s driven to achieve high production numbers for the Postal Service, and that’s her No. 1 concern,” Pryor said. “Although she says she’s concerned with the welfare of employees, we feel that, in her mind, employees always take a back seat when it comes to production and statistics.”

Pryor said he knew Taylor, as well as each of his victims, including co-worker Paul DeRisi, 31, who was wounded in the upper left arm. (Postal officials say DeRisi was given early retirement and has left the area.)

“I think John had a problem with paranoia,” Pryor said. “He thought the authorities were after him for all sorts of imagined things. He felt the Postal Service was going to fire him.

“As a person, he was a fine man, and almost everyone felt that way. We all had a high degree of affection and respect for John. He was a model carrier; the post office regarded him highly. But what he did is such a hard thing to accept.”

Sometime after the tragedy, relatives of Taylor disclosed that, during his teen-age years, his father came home drunk one night, beat Taylor’s mother, then was shot to death by Taylor’s sister. The incident happened in the mid-1950s at the family’s small farm in central Missouri.

Sellers declined to be interviewed, deferring to spokesman Mike Cannone. He pointed out that in this, her 11th year as postmaster, Sellers has increased the number of employees by 333, rounding out the county postal payroll at 6,769.

Since Taylor’s rampage, she has instituted 48 employee-involvement units in the county’s 139 post offices to to ferret out problems before they escalate, Cannone said.

He said supervisors have been sent to “Dale Carnegie-like, human-awareness” workshops to figure out how to reduce--rather than exacerbate--stress.

He said the department had sponsored 35 “coping skills” seminars for letter carriers, clerks and other personnel.

Cannone said greater sensitivity toward labor came about “as part of an evolution . . . a direct result of what happened before and after the Taylor killings. We could see that human relations and coping skills needed to be improved, so, we improved.”

The most devastating impact on the post office, he said, has been the growth of the county, which he called unparalleled.

“In the last 10 years, our mail volume has doubled,” he said. “Nationwide, it doubles every 20 years. The Gramm-Rudman (Budget Reconciliation Act) killed us. It chopped $1.25 billion off the postal budget, which meant we couldn’t build the post offices we needed. We’ve got so many employees working in tiny, cramped, outdated facilities that are half the size of what we need. We’re still playing catch-up.”

Escondido Postmaster Gary Williams first met John Merlin Taylor in 1975. From then until the last day of Taylor’s life, he remembers him “as always wearing a smile and being the most positive person you could meet. He never had an unpleasant or undesirable comment about anybody.”

Williams said Taylor’s rampage had made him and co-workers realize “how incredibly fragile life is. It was totally devastating to everybody here. We still haven’t come to terms with it, and in some ways, we never will.”

He said that a “trauma team” of psychologists and psychiatrists is still on retainer for the benefit of employees who cannot forget the slayings that happened before their eyes. He said none of the workshops or seminars or changes in schedules and workloads--all of which have helped--would take away one unerasable fact, that three people died and another was wounded where they worked each day.

“We have to remember it,” he said, “because none of us will ever put it behind us. As to why John did what he did. . . . We all talk about it, and we wonder, but none of us has an answer.”