The Connecticut Appellate Court this week threw out the harassment and breach of the peace convictions of a postal employee who, five days after the Goleta shootings in California, suggested she might do the same thing:

On February 4, 2006, the defendant placed a telephone call to the Salem Turnpike post office in Norwich. The defendant, a letter carrier, working out of the Salem Turnpike branch, was on leave from her job at that time. Deborah Magnant, the branch’s supervisor of customer service, answered the telephone. Magnant recognized the caller’s voice, and the caller identified herself as the defendant. Magnant testified that she had spoken with the caller over the telephone at least two other times over the previous four to five weeks and recognized the voice to be that of the defendant but had never met her. The defendant asked to speak to David Ravenelle, the postmaster, but Magnant told her that he was not working that day. The defendant then asked to whom she was speaking, and Magnant identified herself. The defendant said: “Oh, I know you. I have talked to you before.”

At that point, the defendant started talking about when she would be returning to work, “[a]nd then she said something about the shootings.” Specifically, she said: “[T]he shootings, you know, the shootings in California. I know why she did that. They are doing the same thing to me that they did to her, and I could do that, too.” The defendant was referring to an incident that took place approximately five days prior when a postal employee in California shot and killed several postal workers inside the postal facility where she worked.

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Fears that the news media would bring back the ‘going postal’ stereotype in the wake of the Goleta killings have so far not, for the most part, come true.

A Google news search for ‘going postal’ the day after the incident turned up a large number of hits, but the vast majority came from an Associated Press story that was carried on many sites, often more than once as it was updated with new developments. The AP dispatches mention, fairly deep in the story, that a series of killings in the 80′s gave rise to the phrase.

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Nothing, really. It helps, of course, to talk about tragedy, but nothing anyone can say will make sense of last night’s tragedy in California. What hit me when I saw the pictures of the shooting victims in the Link today was how ordinary they looked- how normal. They look no different than the people you or I work with every day. And then, in an instant, before most of us had ever seen their faces or known their names, they were gone forever.

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