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Originally Posted by Dave Guru
you got a link to the article?
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actually, here it is. I found it
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...home-headlines
Ex-Postal Worker Kills 5, Commits Suicide in Goleta
By Steve Chawkins and Michael Muskal, Times Staff Writers
A former postal employee went on a rampage in a mail sorting facility Monday night in Goleta, where she killed five people before turning a weapon on herself and committing suicide, authorities said this morning.
Police from several local and federal agencies were investigating the scene of the carnage, a 20,000-square-foot mail processing plant on Storke Road in Goleta, a bedroom suburb of Santa Barbara.
No identifications were immediately available nor was there any motive for the incident that began before 9:15 p.m. Monday. It was the latest in a string of shootings over the past decades that have made the phrase "going postal" a synonym for murderous anger.
In a statement issued in Washington, Postmaster General John E. Potter said the families of the victims were being notified and counselors would be available to the families and employees at the plant.
"Our heartfelt prayers and condolences go out to the families of the victims and to our employees who have suffered through this tragic incident," he said.
The former worker approached the plant on a commercial street in Goleta as the night shift was inside. Francisco Torres, a high-rise dormitory at the UC Santa Barbara, is about a quarter-mile away.
Two bodies were found outside the plant, presumably killed as the shooter made her way inside. About 300 people are employed at the plant, but there were fewer working on the night shift when the woman entered.
Once inside, the woman began firing at employees, according to investigators. Two wounded women were taken to a Santa Barbara hospital. One died and the other was in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the head.
During their search in the early hours this morning, authorities, accompanied by a SWAT team, recovered four more bodies, including one believed to be the shooter. Some postal workers escaped to a nearby fire station and huddled in small groups, shell-shocked.
Police set up a command post in a nearby shopping shelter. Dozens of agencies, including the FBI and the postal police, were present.
One group of people, apparently a family, kept asking "Can we walk here? Do you know what is going on?"
They explained to anyone who would listen that they hadn't heard from their relative all night, that she hadn't come home and that she didn't answer her cell.
"We don't know," said one. "We just don't know."
Monday night's shooting was one of the deadliest since a series of high-profile cases in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, including one in which a part-time letter carrier killed 14 people in Edmond, Okla., then killed himself.
In 1993, fired postal employee Mark Richard Hilbun killed his mother, then walked into a post office in Dana Point and shot two workers, killing one. He was convicted of murder, attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison.
In August 1989, postal worker John Merlin Taylor of Escondido, Calif., killed his wife at their home, then drove to the Orange Glen post office, where he shot and killed two colleagues and wounded another before committing suicide.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.