An off-duty firefighter who is accused of going into an Agua Dulce fire station and opened fire Tuesday, killing one colleague and wounding another, is the latest to commit an act of violence in a workplace setting.
Last week, there was a deadly mass shooting at a railyard in San Jose, where an employee at the Valley Transit Authority is accused of killing nine coworkers before turning the gun on himself.
In April, authorities said a former FedEx worker killed eight people at a ground facility in Indianapolis. In Texas, a worker at a cabinet manufacturing facility killed one coworker and injured four others.
Seamus McGraw, author of “From a Taller Tower,” has studied recent shootings in the workplace and says he sees a pattern, including in Tuesday’s firehouse shooting.
“It’s hard to determine whether we’re seeing a significant uptick in them in over the long term, but we certainly are in the short term,” McGraw told KTLA. “A lot of anger, a lot of rage that has been stoked, and an awful lot of weapons were sold during that period of time too. You add those things together and you got a recipe for atrocities, large and small.”
Carlos Saucedo reports for the KTLA 5 News at 10 on June 1, 2021.