murder in the workplace

The testimony of a former prison guard who knew David Berkowitz, "Son of Sam" is an interesting commentary on American life, murder, satanism, and male bonding. I ended up at David's personal website because last night Sara asked if there was any more information on Susan Berkovitz, who shot two people here at work yesterday. I thought she asked "were there any Berkowitz type information on the case?" referring to the Son of Sam, and implying there was some Satanic connection. My mishearing her intriqued me with the similarity of names (homophones, to the technical.)

A person was murdered in this building yesterday.

I wasn't in the building, since I slept in to fight off a cold, and came in an hour or so after the fact. There were camera crews on the public service level of the building, but no uniformed guards or police. When I asked the woman in the information booth what the big news story was, she said there had been a shooting on A-17. It sounded like a bus route number to me, and I coudn't understand why the news media were in our building over a bus shooting. Then it became clear the shooting had occurred upstairs in the building, in fact, it had occurred on the floor where our own offices had been temporarily housed a few years ago. I had climbed the 17 flights of stairs twice a day before my rheumatism got out of control.

In the office we had a debriefing with the building security chief. He was articulate, educated, and had recently been through a thorough evaluation of our building security by Sandia National Labs. We also had recently passed a building policy prohibiting the posession of illegal guns in the building, which was an exercise in "taking a position" among members of the county board more than anything else.

Our staff talked about the logistics of getting emergency information around during a crisis of this type. It turned out the woman at the information desk became a kind of defacto communication center, relaying information between security, law enforcement, building and county administration, and the PA staff and media. It was an unusual outcome, to say the least.

The gunwoman was a woman in her fifties who felt that the person in charge of her father's estate and the person's lawyer had been physically intimidating her, preventing her from seeing her father in his last years, and misappropriating funds from the man's estate. No simple news story could do justice to the convoluted values, motives, issues of mental health and personal justice, aging, etc that were pinged by this event.

County staff on the floor of the shooting were sent home, others offered counselling. I was involved in trying to get updated info to the County web site, which was a circus of erros and territorial nonsense, as usual.

I went home to a nice warm dinner with Sara, and despite our both feeling a little under the weather I was suddenly struck with a great happiness after dinner in our new house. I was alive.