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.

Magnant testified that the defendant’s tone of voice was angry and agitated and that the statement about the shootings caused her alarm, so she began taking notes of the conversation. Magnant stated that the defendant continued to talk, “just sharing whatever was on her mind.” She discussed her post-traumatic stress disorder and when she would be returning to work. She also asked for her union steward. The defendant seemed to be upset that she was out of work and talked about how her direct supervisor and the prior postmaster harassed and bullied her and how her supervisor was incompetent. The defendant also mentioned other postal employees by name. The call ended after the defendant told Magnant that she would be calling back on Monday, when she could speak to Ravenelle, and Magnant assured her that she would make sure that Ravenelle knew she would be calling.

Magnant notified Ravenelle about the telephone call as soon as he arrived at work Monday morning, at approximately 6 a.m. Ravenelle contacted his supervisors and the postal inspection service, which acts as an internal police force for the postal service. Magnant spoke with postal inspectors that morning, who asked for her notes of the conversation and instructed her to call the local police. She contacted the police and filed an official report at that point.

The defendant was arrested and charged with breach of the peace in the second degree in violation of § 53a-181 (a) (3)[ 1 ] and harassment in the second degree in violation of § 53a-183 (a) (3).[ 2 ] A trial was held on December 5, 2007, and the jury returned a verdict of guilty on both counts on that date. On January 29, 2008, the defendant was sentenced to six months incarceration, execution suspended, and two years probation on the breach of the peace charge; ninety days incarceration, execution suspended, and one year probation on the harassment charge, to be served consecutively.

The appeals court found that the harassment charge was based on an incorrect interpretation of the law, because the law is intended to punish the use of telephone calls to annoy or harass others, not the content of the calls. It found that a single telephone call made during business hours could not be considered harassment, regardless of the content of the call.

On the breach of peace charge, the court found that the trial judge had failed to instruct the jury properly regarding the severity of the threat. The judge should have told the jurors that they needed to find that a “true threat” had been issued- one that a reasonable person might believe was actually going to be carried out.

The court ordered a new trial on the breach of peace charge, and entered a not guilty verdict on the harassment charge.

Connecticut Appelate Court: State v. Moulton

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.

One version of the AP story says “The term has been part of popular culture since 1986″, which is not true. In fact, it was not until well into the 90′s that the phrase started appearing in print. The first citation I could find was in December 1993, in a newspaper article describing a symposium on workplace violence sponsored by the postal service. A couple of months later, it showed up in an issue of Wired magazine, in the ‘Jargon Watch’ section. That lends some credence to the idea that the first use of the phrase was among techies on the Well, the pioneering online discussion forum, and then spread to Usenet, the loose network of discussion groups that pretty much WAS the Internet in the days before the World Wide Web. (Yes kids, there was a time before the web!) A search of the Google Usenet archives dates the online use of the phrase to February 15, 1994, when it was used to describe a shooting at a Wendy’s. The fact that it was included in ‘Jargon Watch’ is an indication that it was not in widespread use. And it was not a ‘postal massacre’ that made ‘going postal’ a common expression, but the 1995 film ‘Clueless’.

Back to the media: most of the network and cable news reports reviewed were very respectful, and a text search of transcripts turned up no instances of ‘going postal’ or its variants. Instead of rolling out the stereotypes, the reports mostly just accurately portrayed the shock and sadness. Kyra Phillips of CNN closes out one report with “…make a point to honor the five employees that were killed” before reading the names of the employees. Wolf Blitzer says “… our prayers go out. I hope she’ll recover…” after a story on the sixth victim, who at the time was still clinging to life.

There were two examples of postal stereotyping that merit a brief mention- one from a traditional media outlet, the other from a political blog.

The media example is TV station KESQ in Palm Springs. The version of the story posted online starts out:

“Scenes like the one in Goleta bring to mind the pop culture term “going postal.” Just why do our mail carriers kill? NewsChannel 3 went looking for answers about why so many postal employees “go postal.”

And goes downhill from there. No facts, obviously, to support the assertion that “so many” postal employees are killers. (And don’t even bother to tell them that the Goleta incident did not involve ‘mail carriers’.)

The punch line? After a slapdash piece with absolutely no “facts”, frightening or otherwise, the “reporter” reaches the breathless conclusion that “Despite the frightening facts, many postal employees believe the violence has more to do with the individual rather than where they work.”

Imagine that?

There were actually quite a few blogs that had references to “going postal” shortly after the killings took place, but most were from the kind of blogs that make Howard Stern look witty and urbane. The one that surprised me was a posting on TPM Cafe, the companion blog to Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, a leading liberal blog. Let me stipulate that my political opinions are very similar to TPM’s- however:

TMP’s Matthew Yglesias responded to the cold blooded murder of six innocent human beings with this:

“It’s not really funny, but then again it sort of is funny, when a “former postal employee” lives up to stereotype with a little spree killing action, “killing six people and critically wounding another before committing suicide.” It’s enough to make you wonder if there might be some factual basis to the notion that postal workers are unusually likely to go on a rampage (recall that Newman on Seinfeld explained that this happens “because the mail never stops”). Perhaps Mark Kleiman, the blogosphere’s resident criminologist, can enlighten us. While we’re waiting he has a post on a more serious crime control issue that’s worth a read.”

So six people being murdered is ‘sorta funny’? Can you imagine the convulsions of laughter he must have gone through on 9/11? But never mind those wacky postal people dying- read up on “a more serious crime control issue”.

This from a guy who claims to have a Harvard degree in philosophy, and to have written for the New York Times. We’ll leave Matty with the comment one of his own readers posted: “Matt, there’s a certain variety of humor which works when wisecracking with your friends, but makes you look really, really bad when it is forever enshrined in the google cache. Making light of mass-murder pretty clearly falls into that category.”

Those two glaring, but thankfully low circulation examples aside, it does seem that as Bill Burrus said the other day, “by and large, the press has not used this terrible event to portray all postal employees as violent and that the media has refrained from using the term “going postal” in relation to this tragedy.”

Lets hope it continues.

Our brains and our hearts can’t handle this kind of sudden senseless loss. We feel the need to search for a reason behind it. Was there something wrong in that facility? Does it prove that there really is something to the phrase ‘going postal?

I don’t know what might have triggered the tragedy, and neither does anyone else right now. I have the feeling, deeply unsatisfying as it may be, that it really was simply a senseless, horrible tragedy. We will find out more as the investigation develops, and we can only hope that we will learn things that will make us safer, even if we never get the answer to the nagging question: why?

As far as the ‘going postal’ business is concerned, I’m afraid it is back for a while. There’s no reason for it, of course. At least no rational reason. In 2000, the Califano Commission studied the perception that postal workers were prone to violence, and found that they were statistically no more likely to attack their co-workers than the average American. (While it has been 6 years since the report was issued, remember that there had not been any further ‘postal’ incidents until last night.)

That makes it hard to take the casual comments like this from today’s LA Times story, calling the killings “the latest in a string of shootings over the past decades that have made the phrase ‘going postal’ a synonym for murderous anger”.

According to the Associated Press, the last so-called ‘postal’ murder was eight years ago. It involved a Dallas postal employee who killed a co-worker after they had an argument. To the LA Times, that is a ‘string’.

There are about as many postal employees as there are residents of Austin, Texas. Last year there were 27 murders in Austin. Austin is considered an exceptionally safe city by American standards. (Houston is three times as big, but had over thirteen times as many homicides). Including last night’s killings, you would have to go back 15 years to get to the same number of murders among postal employees as occurred in a single year in safe, quiet Austin.

That doesn’t help much in making sense of what happened in Goleta. Nothing will. But I take some comfort in knowing that the community I work in is really not so different than the rest of America whether you’re from  Austin, Boston or Santa Barbara. We’re just 700 thousand or so normal, ordinary Americans. We will be hurting from this for some time- but we will get through it.