Torres Hears Demands for Safety From Survivors : Oxnard: The lawmaker solicits ideas from witnesses to EDD rampage. He plans to incorporate them in a bill to beef up security at state offices.

Dozens of survivors of a bloody shooting rampage earlier this month at the Oxnard unemployment office met Sunday with a Sacramento lawmaker seeking to beef up security at state offices.

State Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) organized the morning meeting at an Oxnard restaurant to solicit ideas and suggestions about how to provide a police guard and implement other safety measures at state facilities.

Before it ended, however, the round-table discussion also served as an impromptu group therapy session for many survivors, who tearfully recalled the Dec. 2 shooting spree that left three people dead at their office.

“I hear his footsteps and I think I’m next,” said an employee who declined to give her name. “I lay there very still and he continues shooting, shooting, shooting.”

Unemployed computer engineer Alan Winterbourne killed three people and wounded four others at the Oxnard Employment Development Department office. While being pursued by police, Winterbourne shot and killed an Oxnard police detective before being killed by police outside the Ventura unemployment office.

Torres, a member of the Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee, said he will ask his colleagues to approve funding for armed guards at every office of the state Department of Motor Vehicles and the EDD when the Legislature convenes after the holidays.

Last week, state officials assigned private security patrols to permanently guard the Oxnard and Ventura EDD offices. But several workers at the Oxnard office, which is scheduled to open this morning for the first time since the killings, requested that state police be assigned to their workplace.

“It’s not just the employees who are being traumatized,” said Mary Helen Torres, program director at the Ventura office. “The public is being traumatized, too. Some of these claimants are scared to death.”

State employees told Torres that they also want metal detectors installed at each entrance, bulletproof glass put atop counters and steel doors to replace existing glass doors.

“We don’t get combat pay,” said Mary Ramirez, a state employee who was in the Oxnard office when Winterbourne began firing. “We need every single office separated (from the public), so that no one can get into the work areas.”

Witnesses to the shooting said Sunday that Winterbourne singled out office employees, deliberately passing by people seeking unemployment benefits.

The day before Thanksgiving, state officials received a request from the Oxnard office asking for better security.

“We know we’re dealing with a public that is hostile,” said David Flores, whose sister, Darlene Provencio, was wounded by Winterbourne. “There doesn’t seem to be any contingency plan.”

Flores suggested that a “panic button” be installed so that employees could immediately alert authorities to emergencies.

Torres said he would include the employees’ requests in a bill he plans to introduce next month. The senator also said his bill would seek more severe penalties for those convicted of violent assaults at state offices.

The armed guards at state offices could be funded from the half-cent sales tax extension approved by voters last month, Torres said, adding: “People should not fear for their lives to get a driver’s license.”