Shortly after nine on the evening of Monday, January 30, 2006, a car followed an employee's vehicle through the security gate into the parking lot of the Postal Service's processing and distribution center at 400 Storke Road in Goleta, California. The driver knew the place; she had worked there. In the lot Jennifer San Marco, forty-four, took a worker's key card at gunpoint and let him go. She was armed with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol and a spare magazine. About eighty people were on the night shift.
Arriving deputies found two bodies in the employee parking area and a third just outside the door. Inside the building she shot three more people and then herself. The dead were Ze Fairchild, thirty-seven; Maleka Higgins, twenty-eight; Nicola Grant, forty-two; Guadalupe Swartz, fifty-two; and Dexter Shannon, fifty-seven. Charlotte Colton, forty-four, who had been shot in the head, died at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital two days later. A former co-worker, Jeff Tabala, told the Associated Press that all six were members of minority groups, three Black, one Chinese American, one Hispanic and one Filipino, and that San Marco, who was white, had made racist remarks at the plant and seemed especially hostile to Asian co-workers. Investigators declined to discuss a motive.
It was the next day before anyone connected a second scene. Beverly Graham, fifty-four, was found shot in the head at her condominium, in a complex where San Marco had once lived. Neighbors had heard gunfire between about a quarter past seven and a quarter past eight that Monday evening, and investigators matched the 9mm casings at her door to those at the plant. "The beginning of this rampage," Sergeant Erik Raney of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department called it. The two women had argued years before over San Marco's habit of going outside and singing loudly; Graham's brother said she had complained about a woman who "used to come out and rant and rave in front of her building." The standard account has San Marco flying in from New Mexico that morning, driving up from Los Angeles, climbing a fence, and entering through an unlocked sliding door. Graham's home is placed in Santa Barbara in the wire reports and in Goleta in a later account by the Santa Barbara Independent.
San Marco's trouble at the plant had been visible for years. The sheriff said deputies took her out of the building on February 5, 2001, because she was acting irrationally, and that she was held for three days at a psychiatric hospital. By the Independent's account, deputies dragged her out from under a sorting machine and wheeled her out on a mail cart, and she was held at a facility in Ventura; that account dates the episode to 2003, the year she was placed on medical leave for psychological reasons and later on disability retirement. Tabala said she came back to work some months after the first removal, screaming and making racist comments, until management escorted her out for good.
She set out to drive across the country to relatives in the East and got no farther than Milan, New Mexico, where her car broke down. She stayed there, in an isolated desert house, from late 2003 or early 2004, and became known locally for harassing store clerks. A deputy clerk for the city said she once applied for a business license for a publication she called The Racist Press and did not qualify. By one account she once took off some or all of her clothes at a gas station. When it is not known she returned to California.
Counting Graham, eight people died, San Marco among them. The Associated Press called it the deadliest workplace shooting by a woman in the United States and the bloodiest at a postal installation in nearly twenty years. The chief postal inspector for the Los Angeles division said the Goleta plant had passed a safety review within the previous two months. Its security was tightened afterward.