Going Postal, 23rd Anniversary of Edmond OK Postal Shooting
It happened as I was preparing to start my sophomore year at the University of Oklahoma in the Oklahoma City suburb of Norman. On the other side of the region, in Edmond, postal employee Patrick Sherrill killed 14 & wounding others before killing himself:
He was a relief carrier. He would carry different routes on different days, and was making delivery errors. He also delivered mail later than the customers were used to getting it. When people called to complain, they spoke to supervisors. On the afternoon of Aug. 19, 1986, Patrick was reprimanded by two supervisors in a glassed-in office.
On the afternoon before the killings, he approached a female clerk who had been kind to him (while most people ignored him or hassled him) and asked her if she was coming to work the next day. She replied, “Of course.” He told her she should stay home. (Source: Wikipedia)
Locally and nationally, everyone was in shock. Such shootings have become too commonplace over the last 23 years. Security measures have increased.
A few months shy of nine years later was the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (Wikipedia). By that point I had been living in St. Louis for nearly four years.
Every region has tragedy. I think we tend to forget about older tragedies as new ones happen. So today I remember those who died in Edmond Oklahoma 23 years ago today.
– Steve Patterson
I remember Columbine. And the Murrah bombing and the Charles Whitman shooting in 1966 (in Texas) had much bigger impacts on me than the Edmond shooting ever did – just different perspectives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman
Thanks for sharing this, Steve. I actually lived in Edmond at the time. I was only five years old so of course I couldn’t have understood it when it happened, but years later it shook me how something like this could have happened in such a small, friendly town. I remember my elementary school playground shared a fence with a cow field. It just didn’t seem like something that could happen there.