Spotting a Troubled Employee Before Mass Murder is Almost Impossible, Law Experts Say

It has become a disturbingly familiar workplace scenario, statistically rare, but occurring often enough to have a ritualistic feel.

A head-case employee, after a series of run-ins with managers, decides to even the score. He - and it almost always is a he - storms the factory floor, guns ablaze, leaving a string of bodies in his wake.

Such was the case last week near Hartford, Conn., when an employee at a beer distributor, caught on videotape by a private investigator stealing beer from his delivery truck, reached into his lunch pail for two 9mm handguns, and shot 10 of his coworkers, killing eight, before taking his own life.

The killer, it was learned afterward, had been viewed by some of his acquaintances as a terrific guy.

And that underscores a central reality for employers and the labor and employment lawyers who advise them on how to handle workplace conflicts: Identifying the one-in-a-million person on the verge of committing mass murder is akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

"It scares the heck out of me every time I advise the employer to go ahead and fire the guy," says Michael Ossip, a partner in the labor and employment practice at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius L.L.P. "I always counsel people: Make sure you know exactly what you are doing, because once you let someone go, you lose control over them."

Fred D'Angelo, a labor and employment lawyer at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney P.C. and based in Philadelphia, said one tragic error made in the Connecticut case was that the employer permitted the dismissed employee to go unescorted to an adjacent room, where he retrieved two handguns concealed in a lunch box.

Even so, D'Angelo, who happens to represent many of this region's beer distributors, says he doubts employers can change much.

That's because horrific workplace killings, though they rivet national attention, are so unlikely that it wouldn't make sense for employers to dramatically reconfigure their workplaces.

Employers seem to recognize this. D'Angelo, who counsels employers on how to deal with workers who are about to be disciplined or dismissed, says he has never been asked by a client about what to do if an employee shows up with a gun.

The worst case of workplace violence he ever dealt with, and he has been at this for 35 years, involved a shop steward who threw a punch at his supervisor and was dismissed on the spot.

So does that mean society must simply accept a certain level of workplace carnage as the cost of doing business?

Read more here and follow us on Twitter!