Counseling Failed To Block Fatal Post-Office Rampages

Postal officials practically saw it coming - and responded with a court order, locked doors and counseling - but it wasn't enough to stop two deadly shooting rampages by postal workers in California and Michigan.

The attacks, which left three people dead, came just hours apart yesterday and were blamed on men described as angry loners: one infatuated with a woman co-worker, the other embittered over losing a job to a woman.

In Dearborn, Mich., a postal mechanic, Larry Jasion, 45, shot and killed a co-worker and wounded his supervisor and the woman who got the job he wanted. Then he killed himself in the post-office garage.

In Dana Point, Calif., 50 miles southeast of Los Angeles, police said a fired postal worker wearing a "Psycho" T-shirt fatally shot a letter carrier and wounded a clerk at the post office. The woman he had allegedly stalked for months wasn't hurt.

Police today searched for the former worker, Mark Richard Hilbun, 38. Police said he also stabbed his mother to death before the shootings and may have shot and wounded two other people away from the post office.

U.S. Postal Inspector David Smith said a restraining order barring Hilbun from the building had been issued and security was tightened when the stalking victim returned to work from a leave yesterday.

In Michigan, Jasion, a 24-year postal employee, had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after he lost out on a clerk's job. The complaint was rejected six weeks ago.

"A postal inspector sat down with him at that time and counseled him and told him he had other appeals," Postal Inspector Fred Van de Putte said.

But a former garage supervisor, Robert Fryz, said Jasion threatened him after a mail carrier killed 14 people at an Oklahoma post office in 1986. Fryz said Jasion told him: "You're going to be next."

Dearborn Police Chief Ronald Deziel said officers were called to the post office in March to handle an unspecified complaint against Jasion, but no arrests were made. He said Jasion had 26 guns registered to him.

Hilbun, who was fired last year for disciplinary problems, was diagnosed as manic depressive while committed to a mental hospital after a drunken-driving arrest last summer, said his attorney.

Before yesterday, the most recent U.S. post-office shooting was in 1991 in Royal Oak, Mich., when a former employee killed four people, then himself. The deadliest post-office rampage was the Edmond, Okla., shooting in 1986.

Since 1983, 34 people have been killed and 20 wounded in 12 post-office-related shootings around the nation. Job-related tensions were said to be a factor in all of the incidents.

A congressional investigation last year concluded that some unstable people slip through Postal Service hiring procedures and urged tougher employment screening.

It also urged better training for supervisors. Many critics have cited the poisonous relationship between labor and management in the Postal Service.

Former Postmaster Gen. Anthony Frank said last year that too often the attitude of some supervisors is: "I ate dirt for 20 years, and now it's your turn to eat dirt."

The Postal Service manages the nation's largest civilian work force, with about 729,000 employees. By federal law, the agency must break even, placing great pressure on managers as costs rise and mail volume escalates.

Union officials said the tremendous workload translates into unbearable pressures. "People don't realize the stress postal workers suffer," said Norberta Fullen, secretary-treasurer of a union that represents letters carriers in Southern California. "They work under tremendous time stress. They have time limits that are down to minutes and seconds, and there are also some bad supervisors who make things worse."

Tom Fahey of the American Postal Workers Union says the Postal Service's problem is "a deadly combination of highly stressful work environment and paramilitary management style, which pushes people to the brink and beyond."

Postmaster General Marvin Runyon acknowledged in a news conference in Dearborn today that the work climate can be stressful. He said a survey of postal workers showed "our management style is too authoritarian - something most of us knew already."

"I don't have all the answers now," he said. "I probably never will."