Armed and Angry

Acts of violence in the workplace--many committed by disgruntled current or former employees--have been alarmingly frequent over the last decade. Here are incidents of deadly rage in Southern California workplaces:

1997

June 5: Daniel S. Marsden, a quality control inspector who had gotten into an argument, opens fire inside Omni Plastics in Santa Fe Springs, killing two and wounding four other employees. After fleeing, he kills himself.

1996

March 5: Sgt. Jessie A. Quintanilla, angry at his superior officers after his name surfaced in connection with gang activity, shoots and kills a fellow Marine and wounds another at Camp Pendleton. He is later convicted and sentenced to death.

1995

July 19: Los Angeles city electrician Willie Woods, upset over a poor performance evaluation and fearing that he might be fired, hunts down and shoots to death four of his supervisors at the city’s C. Erwin Piper Technical Center downtown. Woods is later sentenced to life in prison.

July 9: Bruce William Clark, a 22-year veteran of the U.S. Postal Service, shoots and kills his supervisor after an argument at a 24-hour mail processing facility in the city of Industry. Clark is serving a 22-year prison sentence.

1994

March 15: Ex-employee Tuan Nguyen of Extron Electronics in Santa Fe Springs, who had been dismissed a few weeks earlier for “unsatisfactory performance,” shoots and kills three former co-workers and wounds two others before fatally shooting himself.

1993

Dec. 2: Unemployed computer engineer Alan Winterbourne breaks into the state Employment Development Department office in Oxnard, shooting and killing five employees and wounding four others before being shot to death by police outside another jobs office in Ventura.

July 8: Douglas Frederick Stanley, apparently depressed that his brother and sister-in-law planned to move to Arkansas without him, opens fire at the Design It embroidery shop in Fountain Valley, leaving his sister-in-law and a co-worker dead behind the counter.

May 6: Fired letter carrier Mark Richard Hilbun shoots and kills his mother before opening fire at his former workplace--the Dana Point post office--and killing a co-worker during a two-day rampage that leaves seven others wounded.

Feb. 2: Janitor Jonathan Daniel D’Arcy of La Habra, angry over a late $150 paycheck, allegedly walks into a Tustin building maintenance company, pours gasoline on a bookkeeper, then sets her on fire.

1992

Jan. 24: Robert Earl Mack, a General Dynamics Convair Division employee in San Diego fired for habitual tardiness and absences, shoots to death a labor negotiator and severely wounds his former supervisor.

Jan. 29: Jose Luis Maldonado of Oceanside, a factory worker at Professional Care Products in San Diego County, shoots and kills his supervisor during a work break.

1991

July 30: Michael E. Rahming, a painter at Fairview Developmental Center in Costa Mesa who was angry with administrators for allegedly ignoring tensions in his division, shoots and kills a facilities supervisor and injures two others.

June 4: Larry Hansel, a laid-off worker at the Elgar Corp., a Miramar electronics firm, shoots and kills two executives.

1990

Jan. 10: A mechanic at the El Gato Repair shop in Santa Ana who had just been fired--identified by witnesses as either Rolondo or Alejandro Salazar--sprays the shop with gunfire, killing his boss, wounding the boss’ wife and killing a customer before a bystander shoots him to death.

1989

Feb. 21: Robbyn Sue Panitch, a 36-year-old mental health worker, is stabbed to death at the county’s Santa Monica clinic by a homeless patient, David Scott Smith.

Aug. 10: Postal worker John Merlin Taylor shoots and kills his wife at their Escondido home, then drives to Escondido’s Orange Glen post office, where he shoots and kills two colleagues and wounds another before killing himself.

1987

Dec. 9: David A. Burke, whose ex-boss had refused to give him back his job at USAir in Los Angeles after he was accused of stealing money, opens fire during a Pacific Southwest Airlines flight to San Francisco. The jetliner crashes near Paso Robles, killing Burke, his ex-boss and 41 others.

Source: Los Angeles Times files