Post Office to Check All 750,000 Employees in Wake of Killings

The Postal Service will review the backgrounds of all of the nation’s 750,000 postal employees, the postmaster general announced Friday, one day after a fired mail carrier killed four bosses and then himself.

In addition, Postmaster General Anthony Frank established a national hot line for employees to report threats and ordered a thorough review of the screening and hiring process used by the agency.

Frank said it is difficult to stop a person intent on murder but that the Postal Service must search for ways to avoid dangerous situations.

Since 1985, 28 U.S. postal workers have died in five separate shootings--all by embittered post office colleagues who used weapons to settle old scores. On Thursday, former Royal Oak letter carrier Thomas McIlvane opened fire with a sawed-off semiautomatic rifle, killing four supervisors and wounding five other former co-workers. He then killed himself.

Postal employees said McIlvane had threatened to return to his workplace with a gun, and they told of arguments between other postal workers and their bosses at the main office in Royal Oak.

“When you look at each one of them, you don’t find the threat,” Frank said at a news conference. “Let me be brutal. If we had a police officer at the back dock in this case, we would have had one more dead.”

McIlvane, a 31-year-old ex-Marine, died early Friday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and doctors removed his organs for transplants. His fourth victim also died Friday.

McIlvane apparently was enraged by news that an arbitrator had upheld his July, 1990, dismissal for falsifying his time card.

Postal officials said they had been aware of lingering friction between management and employees at the Royal Oak post office, about 10 miles northwest of Detroit, and were investigating.