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[Commentary] © 2002 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire™, Box 622 Cambridge MA 02143 USA (617) 623-8080

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Work-Related Suicides from January to June, 2002

6/09/2002  1 work-related suicide and a 2nd mentioned in passing -

• 3 dead in Providence newspaper shooting - Veteran employee attacks co-workers, sets self afire, by Steven Wilmsen & Benjamin Gedan, Boston Globe, front page.
  PROVIDENCE, R.I. - A longtime worker at the Providence Journal who privately wept about taunts he received for years on the job marched calmly into the newspaper's production facility yesterday morning and shot his supervisor dead, police said.... The Providence Journal...was founded in 1829 and is one of the nation's oldest major daily newspapers in continuous circulation.... The paper has won four Pultizer Prizes and had a Sunday circulation of more than 230,000 in July 2001..\..
  Carlos Pacheco, who was in his 30s...entered the the Journal's sprawling facility downtown at about [9:15] am. He approached his supervisor, Robert Benetti, 38, [whose] wife Lora, and brother, Joseph, also work in the production building..\..drew a handgun and fired a single shot....
  Pacheco left the building and allegedly shot another production facility employee, Charles Johnson, who was found in the parking lot in his car with gunshot wounds to the face. Johnson, 30, was listed in satisfactory condition at Rhode Island Hospital yesterday.
  \Pacheco\ then drove to a third co-worker's house in Warwick, RI.... Police discovered the body of Matthew Fandetti, 29...in the modest ranch-style home he shared with his mother on Adrian Street in Warwick..\.. After killing him, police said, Pacheco drove to a spot near T.F. Green Airport...some 25 blocks away from Fandetti's house..\..before setting himself ablaze in his own car....
  Shortly before 10 a.m...firefighters pulled the charred remains of a body believed to be Pacheco's from a burning Nissan Maxima. Pacheco reportedly recently bought the Maxima. "We are...99% positive that one of the victims in Warwick was in fact the assailant," said..\..Colonel Richard Sullivan, Providence's acting police chief....
  Police officials told the Journal that Pacheco made three 911 calls, each time asking for the detective who had pulled him over on Interstate 95 earlier in the week. In the first call, at 9:28 am, Pacheco said he had shot two people. In the second, at 9:40 am, he identified himself as Carlos Pacheco and asked to speak to the detective, James Dougherty [again]. On the third call [five minutes later] he hung up after being transferred to state police..\..according to Walter Brown, duty supervisor....
  [Note also tomorrow's story, "Providence shooter may have sought 4th victim," by Corey Dade & Jack Healy, 6/10/2002 BG, front page. We'd say he sought 4th and 5th victims - Det. James Dougherty (above) and Bob Varin (see below) whom Pacheco had asked to meet "for drinks" on Sat. morning but who overslept and missed the appointment.]
  Co-workers and relatives said Pacheco showed few outward signs of stress in recent days.
  [Was this the calm of deciding on a plan before the storm of carrying it out?]
  At work, where [Pacheco's] main job was to insert advertisements into newspapers as they came off the presses, he was known as quiet and reliable. ...A plant supervisor, Bob Varin [said] "He was one of the nicest kids I've met.... He was a great worker. We never had a problem with him."
  Pacheco's 15-year-old nephew, Jimmy Arruda, said his uncle was single and lived with his mother in a multifamily unit on Alabama Avenue.... "He was the closest person to being a father to me," said Arruda, who lived in an upper apartment of the multifamily home, where Pacheco lived downstairs..\.. "I was surprised when it happened because he was a nice guy," Arruda said. "He was quiet, easy to be around."
  \But\ Pacheco's sister and sister-in-law told the Providence Journal that Pacheco had been tortured by other employees over a union issue. "They pushed people to sign into the union. They kept taunting him and taunting him and wouldn't leave him alone," said Patricia Bogacz, Pacheco's sister-in-law. [She] said that for years Pacheco came home from work angry and depressed, often weeping openly. "He's been tormented for years," Bogacz said. "He's been constantly picked on and constantly harassed. He was off the deep end and we never even knew it."... Pacheco's routine consisted of going to work, watching sports, and listening to talk radio..\..
  The rampage incited intense criticism about the plant's management from union officials and employees, who said a long-prevailing culture of fear at the facility could have caused anyone to snap. "It's a cold, ruthless place," said Anthony Minucelli, a driver who was fired in March....
  [Contrast the centerpiece of Ed Deming's Points for Management, "Banish fear from the workplace." Deming was an American who got a medal from the Emperor of Japan in the 1960s for restoring the Japanese economy after the World War II.]
  Co-workers said frustrations have been high at the Journal's production facility since the new managers took over several years ago. "They're the ones who caused this to happen," Minucelli said. "It was just a matter of time that something like this would happen around here"..\.. The Providence Journal [now] is owned by Dallas-based Belo Corp..\..
  Production facility employees...said a constant perceived threat of layoffs hangs over workers' heads, sparking a volatile atmosphere of stress. They cited the suicide three years ago of Mario Coppa, an employee whose stress level rose to the point he had to take a medical leave. "I think it's just building pressure," said Mark Brasil, a driver for 18 years..\.. Pacheco apparently told his...mother that the teasing had been going on for about three years....
  [Now when exactly was that takeover?]
  David Prendergast, of Teamsters Local 57, said that dispite a new labor contract that gave top workers a $1.50 hourly pay increase, employees still work in very stressful conditions and some of the managers there are very unpopular. "They have been cutting back like crazy," he said, adding there have been unannounced shift and schedule changes recently but no layoffs. "If they weren't so understaffed it would be so much better in there."...
  [Hmm, a city newspaper gets sold out and taken over by primitive-brained Texas CEOs with no inherent interest in the city (compare Compaq's takeover of DEC). There follows obsessive cost-cutting and overloading, a culture of fear and one particular employee targeted as a whipping boy for employee frustrations. Then a spark, possibly triggered by talk radio or being pulled over on the highway, ignites the "nice reliable" but long-abused employee. And what's up with both the perpetrator and one of his victims still living with their mothers? - too poorly paid to get married and move out on their own?   Is any of this mounting disaster really necessary in an age of miraculous work-saving technology whose whole purpose is to make human life easier, not harder? Is outside, narrowly interested management happy now they've "cut" three employees without actual layoffs?   Timesizing, not stress-sizing.]

• Executive of energy firm dies in apparent suicide - 'This is a tragic event for our company - However, the market reaction is unwarranted' - William A. Wise, chairman and CEO of El Paso, AP via Boston Globe, D2.
  HOUSTON - The treasurer of El Paso Corp., one of several energy trading companies facing questions about accounting practices, was found with a fatal gunshot wound to his head in an apparent suicide at his Houston townhome, police said yesterday. There was no immediate indication the death Sunday of Charles Dana Rice was directly related to the company's troubles....
  [If you're getting this name confused with the author of the Tarzan tales, that was Edgar Rice Burroughs.]
  Rice, 47, was a senior vice president at El Paso, where he worked for 25 years. "Dana was a tireless worker, a valued contributor, and will be missed both as a business associate and as a friend," [CEO] Wise said....
  Rice's death comes amid turmoil in the energy sector over allegedly bogus trades and accounting. Federal investigators are investigating simultaneous power swaps between energy traders that artificially boosted trading volume and, in some cases, added to revenue. Last week, El Paso announced it would sharply reduce its energy trading activities and focus on its core natural gas businesses. As part of the restructuring, the company said it would eliminate about 300 jobs within its trading group [see 5/30 #4 below], cut in half its investment in trading activities to $1B and divide the segment into three separate divisions. El Paso also said it would revamp its financial reporting so it is more simple and transparent. Wise said the company was making good progress at implementing the plan, which Rice helped develop..\..
  Houston police spokesman Joe Laud said Rice was found dead at 1 pm Sunday. He "died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound," Laud said.... The Harris County...Medical Examiner Dr. Joyce Carter said..."We cannot confirm suicide...until a full examination is completed."... Wall Street executives who dealt with El Paso said it was widely known that Rice had suffered from heart and kidney problems. A neighbor, Donna Miller, said Rice was undergoing dialysis and she believed he was on a list to receive a kidney transplant..\..
  [In short, as Guy Noir would say, a perfect cocktail for ... suicide.]
  Another energy executive, J. Clifford Baxter, a former vice chairman at Enron Corp., shot himself in his car not far from his home in a southwest Houston suburb Jan. 25, after that company, also based in Houston, collapsed in an accounting scandal....
  [Follow-up - "El Paso senior VP's death ruled a suicide," AP via 6/6/2002 BG, C2, states, "The Harris County medical examiner in Texas has ruled El Paso Corp.'s senior vice president and treasurer {Charles Dana Rice} died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound."   America is getting positively Japanese in its corporate suicides. Or maybe we're just finding out about more of them. A "tireless" worker, eh? Maybe if Rice had lightened up a little. We prescribe Timesizing.]

• [related to the apparently pervasive, covert, clergy job-perk of sexual access to the children of the parish -]
  Accused priest hangs self - Conn. cleric was in treatment unit, by Kranish & Carroll, BG, front page.
  SILVER SPRING, Md. - A [Roman] Catholic priest from the Bridgeport, Conn., diocese committed suicide at a Catholic psychiatric hospital here yesterday, authorities said, 17 days after he was removed from his parish when several men accused him of molesting them two decades ago.... The lawyer for the four men, Jason Tremont, said in an interview last night that six additional men have since contacted him to say that Bierghofer also molested them when they were boys. The victims ranged in age from 8 to 14.... The alleged abuse occurred while Bietghofer was pastor of Blessed Sacrament Church in Bridgeport between 1976 and 1982. The boys were either altar boys or students at the parish's school..\..
  The Rev. Alfred J. Bietghofer, 64, was found hanged in St. Luke Institute, where he had been sent for evaluation after Bridgeport Bishop William Lori removed him on April 29. Bietghofer had been assistant pastor at St. Andrew Church in Bridgeport since last fall.... Bietghofer was found hanging in a dormitory-style room at St. Luke's, a 70-bed facility that has treated many priests who have faced allegations of sexual misconduct, including dozens of priests from the Boston archdiocese since the 19980s..\..
  Bietghofer was the second priest to commit suicide since the priest sex scandal broke in January. On April 4, an Ohio priest facing sexual abuse allegations shot himself to death [see below 4/05/2002 #1].
  On Monday [5/13], a priest was shot and seriously wounded in Baltimore, allegedly by a...man whose assertion that the priest molested him years ago was rejected by the Baltimore archdiocese....
  [Compare another item today -]
  Shell games by two leaders, letter to editor by Robert Schechtman of Kensington NH, BG, A18.
  What do pResident Bush and Cardinal Law have in common? They both seem to believe that simply moving things around makes a serious problem go away.
  Bush claims that putting nuclear warheads into storage, according to the terms of the new weapons treaty with Russia, is the same as weapons reduction ("US, Russia OK broad arms cuts," A1, May 14).... What...if terrorists managed to get their hands on weapons that the Russians put into storage...?
  The damaging ramifications of Law's shell games are now coming to light....
  The press and public choose not to confront Bush about his deceptions. In allowing him to define his own meaning of truth, we give him the same power to continue to do harm that the recipients of the Catholic Church's hush money gave pedophile priests.

• Suicide syndrome? - Six Norwood [Mass.] policemen have taken their own lives, and no one knows why, by Thomas Farragher, Boston Globe Magazine, cover story, 12.
  ...Norwood [is] located 14 miles southwest of Boston [Mass.]..\.. When a Norwood patrolman took his own life 25 years ago, residents wondered why.... Five Norwood police officers have since shot themselves to death.... Studies have consistently found that police officers kill themselves more often than the civilian population. And they are greatly more at risk from their own guns than those carried by outlaws.... The Fraternal Order of Police...found a suicide rate of 22 per 100,000 officers \after studying\ suicide among its members in 24 states in 1995. That compares with a rate of 12 per 100,000 people nationally. \Even so, in Norwood,\ "You're looking at 10% of the police force committing suicide over that period of time," says John Violanti, a former NY state trooper who has studied police suicide for 15 years. "I don't know what sort of work they do, but this is not within the norm of police suicide.... I would almost call it a suicide cluster"..\.. Hal Stern, a professor of statistics at Iowa State University in Ames...estimates that the suicide rate among Norwood police officers is roughly 33 times the national suicide average among civilians [and] roughly 18 times the national average [among police]....
  
  1. As the police cruiser rolled aimlessly down an isolated parking lot's gentle slope...the man behind the wheel, Norwood patrolman Frank L. Walsh...was slumped against his cruiser's headrest. The veteran officer, shot through the chest, was dead. Walsh, 52, was a beloved figure in tightknit Norwood.... He was known as the safety officer.... As word of Walsh's death ricocheted through town in late April 1977, the news was received with shock and disbelief.... Fifty off-duty Norwood officers rushed to the downtown police station, just 300 yards from where Walsh died, to assist in the investigation into his shooting. But...Walsh's .38-calibre snub-nosed service revolver had been found at his side. Ballistic tests showed that it was the gun used in the shooting. ...State Police said his wounds were self-inflicted.... The apparent suicide of a decorated, well-liked police officer in a town of 29,000, and from a police force of about 60, is a devastating event....
     
  2. Walsh's death was considered a heart-rending anomaly. [But] five years later, in late 1982...another Norwood police officer [drove] to a parking lot and ended his life with a gunshot. Christopher W. Mullen, 31, was an Air Force veteran who had joined the Norwood department five years earlier, one of the first officers on the force to earn a degree in criminal justice before getting his badge. "He was serious. He was pretty intense," says Peter Mullen, who shared a house with his older brother. "He was wound tight. But I looked up to him...." Mullen [w]as a bodybuilder with a physique "like a Schwarzenegger."... Mullen had received several commendations for his work.... But as a product of the Norwood public school system, Mullen sometimes chafed at patrolling streets populated by friends and former neighbors.... On Dec. 6, 1982, Christopher Mullen, who recently had returned to duty after several weeks of recuperation from an on-duty arm injury, pulled his car into a parking lot at Nantasket Beach in Hull [Mass.] The medical examiner said the off-duty officer...died there of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
  3. Less than five years later, Mullen's weight-lifting partner, Serg. Dale P. Ekholm, 31, would also turn his gun on himself. Eckholm, on the force for nine years, walked into the police station 45 minutes early for his late-afternoon shift as a patrol supervisor. He slipped into a locker room and shot himself in the left temple with his .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.
     [Hmm, this is becoming a badge of honor and courage, especially if you can follow the pattern of one of the previous honorable suicides.]
     
  4. Just two years later, in September 1989, Officer John J. Wall, 41, the son of a former acting chief and a 15-year veteran of the force, shot himself to death in his home in Norton [Mass.]....
     
  5. William P. Caulfield is the exception.... By early 1995, Caulfield, 38, and his 32-year-old wife, Sandra, were reviewing plans for a new home they planned to build in Foxborough [Mass.] In the meantime, the Caulfields were living in...Stoughton [Mass.] They doted on their 9-month-old daughter.... On...Jan. 11, 1995...investigators say William Caulfield...killed his wife as she lay in bed. Caulfield then called police and asked that a cruiser be sent "right away." Then he stepped into the bathroom and shot himself with his 9mm service weapon....Caulfield left three notes to different people that made it clear he felt severe financial pressure as a result of investments. \The\ baby, unhurt, stood crying in a nearby crib....
  6. ...Last September, just 13 days after 9/11, Det. Serg. William J. Murphy, 51, son of a former Norwood police chief, walked into the town's temporary police station that morning, exchanged pleasantries with his fellow officers, stepped into a nearby bathroom, and shot himself to death. Like Walsh [the first one], Murphy was a former marine. Like Walsh, he had served on the Norwood force for 28 years.... Murphy had recently been promoted to supervise the town's five police detectives, one of whom is his sister Maureen Murphy-Payne. He had also been under a doctor's care for depression, an apparent side effect of a heart medication he was taking....

• Shooting rampage at German school - An expelled student returns, killing 17 and then himself, by Edmund Andrews, NYT, A1.
  ERFURT, Germany...- In a rampage shooting, eerily evoking the likes of Columbine, but even more deadly, a recently expelled student [yester]day entered his former school here and methodically killed 17 people, going room to room with a [pump-action shotgun] and a handgun, [targeting especially teachers,] before turning a gun on himself....
  [So, he was downsized from pre-work alias employment-prep alias education alias makework. Why?]
  According to students, the gunman, Robert Steinhaeuser, 19...had been expelled several months before.... At least part of the reason...was that he forged doctors' excuses to avoid attending class....
  [So let's get this straight. This kid evidently didn't want to go to school because he was cutting classes and forging doctors' excuses for that, but then when they gave him what he wanted and kicked him out of school, he got so mad he came back and killed 17 mostly teachers and himself? Boy, where did this unstable teenager get the guns??]
  It was not known where he obtained his guns.... [Germany is] a society with a comparatively low rate of violent crime and extremely strict gun-control laws. Just [yester]day, before the shootings here became known, Parliament voted to tighten gun-control rules even further.... But gun experts say the real problem is that people can buy weapons illegally imported from places like central Europe..\..
  Robert Steinhaeuser..\..entered a mathematical classroom at about 11 am wearing black clothes and a black mask...and shot the teacher in front of the other students. He then walked from room to room, shooting as many teachers as he could find. ...The extent of the blood bath: 18 bodies. Fourteen of those were adults, most teachers, [one police officer]; three...were students, and then Mr. Steinhaeuser himself....
  Mr. Steinhaeuser's father workers at a local Siemens factory. Students here said they were aware of who he was but had not really known him. Like many others who fall into severe trouble, he did not attract great attention....
  [Thank God we got through highschool before this fad came along!   A week later there's a cover story on the teen suicide situation in the US in the 5/5/2002 Boston Sunday Globe's Parade magazine, "How to recognize a cry for help - One in five teens has seriously considered taking his or her own life - A special report on teen depression," by Dianne Hales & Dr. Robert Hales, BG. The article inside is actually titled "When a teenager is sad, pay attention! - Up to 8% of American adolescents are seriously depressed, but most parents don't recognize the signs," 5/5/2002 BG, Parade 4. A related website is *kidsmentalhealth.org]

1. Tennessee: Suicide in Tyson Foods case, AP via NYT, A13.
   One of six former Tyson Foods managers charged with participating in an immigrant smuggling scheme killed himself with his rifle, the police said. Investigators said Jimmy Rowland, 36, was found on Thursday with a gunshot wound in his chest. Mr. Rowland, a former manager at Tyson's Shelbyville plant, was indicted on Dec. 11 on federal charges of conspiring to smuggle illegal immigrants to work at company plants in 9 states. He was free on $100,000 bond and faced trial next February. The maximum possible sentence was 395 years in prison.
   [When worktime economics comes into its own, with a general understanding of the urgent need to run capitalism with a shortage of labor hours instead of a shortage of employment hours, people will realize how stupid it is to keep pouring in more desperate person-packaged labor hours when we already have so much too many.]

2. Milan plane crash inquiry turns to suicide, by Daniel Williams, Washington Post via Bos Globe, A10.
   [We're going to take the Globe's version because it 'spits it out' better than the NYT version "Pilot's life and crash pose questions," A6.]
   MILAN - Italian officials doubt yesterday that the crash of a light aircraft into Milan's tallest skyscraper yesterday...the 32-story Pirelli building..\..was an accident, as was quickly presumed.... Two women in the building...died along with the pilot Luigi Fasulo, a native of Italy, when his plane hit the 25th floor, exploded, and collapsed walls and ceilings..\..
   Suicide for yet unclear motives became the major line of inquiry here and in Switzerland, where the pilot resided.... Said Transport Minister Pietro Lunardi, "The plane did everything wrong from beginning to end."... Morning rush hour crowds yesterday...wondered aloud how an experienced pilot could accidentally score a bull's-eye at the center of the structure's south side. "Maybe if he had scraped it, or even impacted a little off center [like the second plane that hit the WTC - ed.], you could believe it was an accident," said Guido Silvestri, a businessman.... "But this looks like a laser-guided hit." Said Mirella Guidoni, a homemaker, "...This is the best-known building in Milan, and it was directly hit."
   ...The investigation has has uncovered a series of anomalies.
   • ...Fasulo's errant approach to Linate airport...a few miles outside Milan.
   • ...His report to the control tower of landing-gear problems.
     [Probably just to keep them off guard. Ditto the smoke people saw before the hit = a smoke bomb to make it look more like a plane in trouble until he struck his target?]
   • ...He ignored air traffic controller orders to fly west and instead traveled north, directly toward the building.
   • He was flying well below the 300-meter (984-ft) minimum set for city overflights; the Pirelli tower is 417 ft tall.
   • ...One of his sons told reporters: "It was a suicide, I'm telling you. There were people who wanted to ruin him financially, so he committed suicide."
   • [And the work-related part -]
     ...Fasulo...was a pilot who...ferried not only passengers around Europe, but also large sums of money.
     [= plenty of opportunity for skimming a little, or even just raising suspicions - and thereby gaining some enemies? It all comes back to jobs, and the job desperation many feel, while some are looking at the utterly uncapped accumulation of workhours, income and wealth and thinking, why the hell not me regardless of so-called "rules"? Extreme disparities encourage a huge variety of attempted shortcuts. Beter we should get started leveling the economic playing field with timesizing.]

• Yugoslavia: Official found dead, by Emma Daly, NYT, A4.
  Yugoslavia's Minister for Labor, Health, and Social Policy, Mondrag Kovac, was found hanged by his own belt in the bathroom of his Madrid hotel hours after addressing the United Nations Assembly on Aging, which is being held in the city. The Yugoslav ambassador to Spain, Trivo Indjic, told a Belgrade radio station that Mr. Kovac...had been upset by press criticism; recent reports in Montenegro accused him of financial wrongdoing.
  [Either that or his own speech on aging convinced him Kevorkian is right. Would less stress and more time off have helped? Probably. Compare the story about Vlajko Stojiljkovic yesterday (#2).]

1. Japan: Thousands of workers protest, by James Brooke, NYT, A8.
   More than 13,000 Japanese workers marched through central Tokyo on Wednesday, protesting high unemployment and a lowering of wages through the conversion of full-time jobs into contract jobs. Kiyoshi Sasamori, president of the labor federation known as Rengo, charged Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi with political paralysis. "Kozumi has done absolutely nothing!" he shouted to the demonstrators. "Every day, over 10,000 people lose their jobs, 50 firms go bust and a hundred people are killing themselves in desperation."

2. Milosevic ally shoots himself over law on Hague suspects - A protest against Belgrade's allowing extradition to the war crimes tribunal, by Ian Fisher, NYT, A6.
   WARSAW...- A former aide to Slobodan Milosevic shot himself in the head tonight outside Yugoslavia's Parliament in Belgrade in a defiant protest against a law passed only hours earlier clearing the way for him and other war crimes suspects to be sent to The Hague to stand trial at the international tribunal there.... "With this act," he wrote in 15-page letter released to reporters in Belgrade, "I express protest against all members of the puppet authorities." He went on [to] put the blame for his "death" on eight top politicians in Yugoslavia, including the president, Vojislav Kostunica and the prime minister of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic..\..
   The aide, Vlajko Stojiljkovic, was in critical condition and on a life support system tonight, hospital officials said....
   [Followup - "Milosevic associate dies of his wound," AP via 4/14/2002 Boston Globe, A12, states "Vlajko Stojiljkovic, 65...was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. \He\ died in a hospital yesterday, two days after shooting himself in the head to protest passage of a law that would have allowed his arrest and extradition to the UN war crimes tribunal. [He] was Serbia's interior minister in charge of police under Milosevic." Hm, sounds like a great opportunity to commit war crimes. No wonder he offed himself!]

• New Jersey town hit by a 2nd officer's rampage, by Richard Jones, NYT, front page.
  DOVER TOWNSHIP, N.J...- This blue-collar Jersey Shore town [presumably Seaside Heights, mentioned later] was reeling [yester]day from the second rampage in two months in which a police officer is said to have stormed his neighbors' homes and shot several people to death. [Yesterday] morning, an officer was found shot dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, 12 hours after the authorities say he fatally shot five neighbors here [and] then went to Barnegat Township, where he shot and wounded his police chief.
  [So you know it's gotta be work-related, and therefore suspect as being overwork-related.]
  The shootings jarred this close-knit community, where just weeks ago, on Feb. 21, a retired Newark police sergeant walked from house to house in his neighborhood - only a mile from the site of Tuesday's killings - and fatally shot four people including his granddaughter, the police say.
  [Retirement and neighborhood-only argue against this previous incident's being work-related.]
  After the killings Tuesday, more than 100 police officers searched through the night, for a single suspect, Officer Edward L. Lutes Jr. of the Seaside Heights Police Dept. He was found dead in his car in the driveway of a stranger's Barnegat Township home about 10 this morning....
  [Well, this guy made the front page of the nation's newspaper by doing this, which is not something we really want to reinforce. Here's a case where we wish they had buried this on the inside pages and flouted the standard rule, "If it bleeds, it leads." We have a police officer living down at the end of the our street, and we'd rather not plant any ideas. She's a police woman, so hopefully she would be impervious anyway. To their credit, we haven't had many incidents involving women on this page - none that we remember offhand.]

1. Priest accused of abuse apparently kills himself, by Carol Biliczky & Andrea Misko, Knight Ridder via Boston Globe, A21.
   HINCKLEY TOWNSHIP, Ohio - Facing a meeting with church officials over allegations that he sexually abused a Wadsworth, Ohio resident 20 years ago, the Rev. Don A. Rooney pulled into a drugstore parking lot yesterday and, according to township police, shot himself in the head. Rooney, 48, of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in Parma, Ohio, was dead on arrival at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland. "I don't want to come off that the diocese is drawing conclusions. But you can kind of put two and two together," said Bob Tayek, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland.
   Just two days ago, Bishop Anthony Pilla told reporters that he was aware of at least one more incident of alleged sexual abuse by a priest in the Cleveland diocese. While Pilla did not name names, he already was aware of the allegation by an unidentified Wadsworth woman, Tayek said. Tayek said the woman called the Rev. John Murphy, the diocese's vicar for the clergy and religious, on Monday and told him she have been sexually abused by Rooney in 1980 when Rooney was a newly ordained associate pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus in Wadsworth.
   Church officials tried to reach Rooney by phone on Monday and finally got in touch with him Tuesday. They asked him to come to a meeting at the diocese in downtown Cleveland on Wednesday morning, but didn't tell him the reason for the meeting. Rooney didn't show up for the meeting, and church officials couldn't reach him at the rectory or parish in Parma, Ohio. They notified Wadsworth police, Rooney relatives, and social service officials, and after consultations with them notified Parma police yesterday. Shortly afterward, they learned of the apparent suicide.
   [So despite church doctrine on the afterlife and hell and the sinfulness of suicide, this is one priest who seems to have believed that after death there is just nothing, nada, zilch, Nichts, zip, because otherwise he'd be dooming himself to permanent hellfire by kevorking himself for unbearable mental suffering and...considerable swirling embarrassment if not outright guilt.]

2. Parents of ex-IBJ employee seek compensation over suicide, Kyodo News via AP-NY-04-04-02 0759EST via AOLNews.
   SAPPORO...- The parents of a female employee at the former Industrial Bank of Japan (IBJ) have filed a lawsuit at the Sapporo District Court to seek 98m yen in compensation from the bank, saying overwork and bullying at the office led their daughter to commit suicide, sources close to the case said Thursday.
   The employee joined the IBJ, now under the umbrella of Mizuho Holdings Inc., in 1991, and took charge of five fields, including foreign exchange and brokerage operations. But she began to experience headaches and dizziness in 1993 and took a leave of absence in May and June 1997. The suit said she faced bullying from her colleagues after returning to the office, and took leave again in November 1997 after being diagnosed with depressive psychosis. She hanged herself in September 1998.
   Her parents, who live in Sapporo, said in the suit that she committed suicide as a result of emotional strain from overwork and bullying and that the bank failed to ensure the health of its employees.
   [Timesizing would help a little to de-stress Roman Catholic clergymen in stories like the one above (what they really need is to drop celibacy and admit women to the priesthood), but it would directly help employees like the daughter described in this story from Japan. Why on God's good earth are we still working a 1940-level 40-hour workweek, let alone all the longer ones we're putting in, when we're surrounded by worksaving technology, and making ever more of it?!? And as for the objection that "technology creates more jobs than it destroys," tell that to the millions of rural Americans who left agriculture when it got mechanized by tractors and combine-harvesters and moved to the towns to get jobs in manufacturing, and then to the tens of millions of American factory workers who left manufacturing when it got robotized and moved to the cities to get jobs jobs in the service sector. And what are you going to say to the 100s of millions who are already starting to lose their jobs in the service sector, now it's getting computerized with automated internet reservations and sales (so long, travel agents and retail clerks), product scanning and self-serve cashiering at gas stations, supermarkets and banks (sayonara, cashiers and tellers), and desktop publishing and CAD-CAM (byebye printers, architects and designers). If anything, we today have more technology and less service. Even in the retail outlets that survive - the big box stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot - it's impossible to get help finding something without walking miles. You can't blame it all on the 'giant sucking sound' of jobs fleeing America or on uncontrolled immigration. The root of our dysfunction is our abuse of technology for downsizing rather than timesizing.]

• Gunman kills 4 at Indiana plant, AP via NYT, A11.
  SOUTH BEND, Ind...-
  [or "Around the Bend," Ind.? Isn't this the 2nd this month for Indiana?]
  A man shot four co-workers to death today at an aircraft parts plant and then waged a running gun battle with the police after driving off in a stolen company van. The high-speed chase ended when the man killed himself as the van rolled toward a police roadblock across the Indiana state line near Niles, Mich.... At least two [other] employees were wounded in the shooting....
  The gunman was identified as William Lockey, 54 [who] showed up for his 7 am shift with a grocery bag. ...Mr. Lockey, who worked in the shipping and receiving dept., opened fire during a meeting. He appeared to aim at particular co-workers.... "He was sort of rigid, kind of a lone wolf," \a coworker\ Sharon Zalas, said. "He was afraid of losing his job."...
  [The costs of job insecurity - this is just a tiny taste of the high cost of maintaining our economy with a chronic shortage of jobs and surplus of workers, instead of cutting the workshare per person (that is, the workweek) and creating instead a permanent surplus of jobs and shortage of workers. Meanwhile, as the article above this one indicates, we won't let people die who want to die -]
  Government and Oregon vie over doctor-aided suicide, by Sam Verhovek, NYT, A11.
  [Maybe if we just let people have a little more of what they want, when they want it - you wanna die, fine - you want job security, fine - and quit fighting victimless 'crimes,' then we'd have fewer people killing themselves slowly (or quickly, as here) and dishing out what others do not want.]

1. Illinois: Seeking payment for suicide, by Daniel Dorfman, NYT, A12.
   The widow of a small-town mayor who took his own life has filed a worker's compensation claim, saying that job-related pressures led to his suicide. The widow, Lois Heisner, is asking for $658 a week, saying that her husband, Kirwan, committed suicide in September after negative publicity about a land acquisition.
   [Hooboy. A politician who can't take the heat merits "worker's comp" - heat that he may have brought on himself by abusing his position? What a stretch! And this guy was no rookie -]
   He had been mayor of Pinkneyville, a coal-mining town of 3,500 in southern Illinois, for seven years.
   [We think Lois should just get a job. How would Timesizing help this case? A shorter workweek would have chilled out the job pressures of the mayorship in the first place, and made a lot more attractive jobs available to Lois if the "first place" didn't work. Here's another situation that could have used some chilling out (but not the kind it got in the icy waters of the North Atlantic) -]

2. EgyptAir pilot sought revenge by crashing, co-worker said, by Matthew Wald, NYT, A11.
   A former EgyptAir pilot [Hamdi Hanafi Taha] told American investigators two years ago that the co-pilot of EgyptAir 990 [Gamil al-Batouti] crashed the plane into the Atlantic Ocean to take revenge on a company executive [Hatem Rushdy] who had just demoted him [from the lucrative U.S. route for alleged sexual misconduct] and was riding as a passenger, a person involved in the investigation said today.
   [Well that only leaves the question, was he the co-pilot or just a passenger? This may be answered by the "just demoted"? Maybe the chief pilot was stupid enough to tell him in mid-air and he freaked.]
   American aviation investigators say they do not know whether the explanation given by the [former] pilot, which was first reported today in The Los Angeles Times, is true.
   [He sure suffered for opening his mouth - see below. How much evidence do they need - to overcome certain political pressures to hush up this explanation?]
   Since the crash of the Boeing 767, Egyptian officials have argued that there was no evidence that the co-pilot, Gamil al-Batouti, committed suicide...deliberately crash[ing] the plane into the Atlantic about 60 miles south of Nantucket, killing himself and all 216 others on board.
   The L.A. Times said it conducted nine hours of interviews with...Hamdi Hanafi Taha, who laid out the revenge motive.... Mr. Taha sought asylum in London a few months after the October 1999 crash, saying he feared persecution in Egypt because of his revelations about the state-owned airline....
   American investigators did confirm that Mr. Batouti had been told he was being taken off the route [dumb dumb dumb] and that Captain Rushdy was a passenger on the flight.
   [OOOkay. There are three pilots on this plane. The very first sentence was confusing - should have said, "to take revenge on a company executive who was riding as a passenger and had just demoted him." With those last two clauses in reverse order, it looked like the co-pilot was riding as a passenger (once demoted). So the real stupid one was Rushdy, the not-on-duty chief Boeing 767 pilot of EgyptAir who was riding as a passenger and opened his big mouth in midair to demote the on-duty co-pilot. But then, maybe the sexual misconduct had just happened right on that flight and Rushdy blurted out the demotion trying to stop it. That only leaves the question, how did Taha know - and the only answer is, they must have said something about it over the radio or cellphone and Taha was at the other end of the radio/cellphone, similar to people who heard from passengers on the 9/11 hijacked planes before they crashed.]
   "The thing that was clear was, he did it," said an American official involved in the investigation. "Why, I don't know that we'll ever know."...
   [Yeah, ri-i-ight.]
   Egyptian investigators might have been able to establish a motive but did not seek to do so, the official said....
   [So let's "out" all the crap that EgyptAir is trying to hide. If you ride EgyptAir, you're liable to get "hit upon" sexually by a crew member and another crew member travelling incognito is liable to step forward and demote the guy on the spot and the guy is liable to go back into the cockpit and crash you all. Ya know, is it just our imagination or are Muslims getting more than their share of "incidents" lately? Oh yeah, we forgot about the sexual misconduct of Roman Catholics in Massachusetts, Ireland, other states. Or maybe it's just their preferred "actions speak louder than words" method of birth control since they don't like abortion (understandably) but also don't like contraception (huh?!). Looks like castrati are "in" but no, it's open season on parish pre-pubertals or post-pubertal same-sex. And for that matter, we forgot the backward push of the religious right and "moral" majority in US politics and science education and reproductive rights. Then there was Jonestown.... God, this country's turning into a real disgrace to intelligence! As our old Hebrew professor used to say, "Laddies, there have been more heinous crimes committed in the name of religion than anything else." He used to tell us about the Babylonian fertility cults (musta been when there was still some fertility in the since-desertified "fertile crescent") and then he'd shake his head and say, "Laddies (ol' Bill Staples always called us "laddies," even with a few lassies sprinkled among us), religion was FUN in those days. It isn't any more." It's like religious people can't set limits in their own lives so they need a separate reality. And they're a little weak in the sense-of-humor dept. to boot.]

• Suicide called biggest cause of death among young Chinese, Reuters via Boston Globe, A25.
  ...Research, based on Chinese Ministry of Health data for 1995-99, showed that one in five [20% of] Chinese who died between the ages of 15 and 34 had taken their own life..\.. [That's one way to solve your overpopulation problem, not our fave.]
  ...with women and girls particularly at risk.... The authors, Michael Phillips from Harvard Medical School and Li Xianyun and Zhang Yanping of Hui Long Guan Hospital in Beijing said China is one of few countries where more women than men kill themselves. There are 25% more self-inflicted deaths among females than males.... Among women and girls in the 15-34 age bracket, almost three out of 10 [30% of] deaths were suicides..\.."driven by the very high ratre of suicide in young rural women," they said.... Among males of the same age it was one in eight.
  [Good place not to be reincarnated, especially if you're a guy now and we get to switch sexes each time.]
  In research published [today] in the Lancet medical journal, American and Chinese researchers said suicide is China's 5th biggest killer [all ages], accounting for 3.6% of all deaths.... The research cited the absence of strong religious or legal prohibitions on suicide and a lack of social welfare systems in China.
  [In short, when you've got a population of over a billion, life is cheap.]
  "People with serious mental disorders or chronic life stressors" such as incurable illness "might consider suicide an acceptable method of relieving their misery or reducing the financial and emotional burden they cause their family," the authors said..\..
  The suicide rate in rural areas is one of the highest in the world. Some 80% of Chinese live in the countryside, but account for 93% of all suicides..\.. The availability of strong pesticides and a lack of doctors and nurses in the countryside meant that death often was the result..\..of attempts at self-harm, which are much more common among women than men...even though many female victims may not have intended to die.
  But members of the elderly rural population were the most likely to take their own lives, with more than twice as many suicides per head of population than among young women. "Given the high status accorded to the elderly in Chinese culture, this finding is particularly [surprising]," the authors said....
  [So much for the veneration of age in China. Don't go there to retire. Hey, we always thought the Japanese were the big harikari experts. Seems like it's spread to the mainland. And the big unmentioned factors here are unemployment and over-population. Recall that China has been so desperate to control its acute over-population problem that it instituted a one-child-per-couple law decades ago, and the more recent semi-transition to free markets has left a lot of people unemployed, especially in the rural areas - but then they come to the cities and bunch up there in crowded profusion.]

• Gunman kills ex-bosses, principal, self, by Roland Losch, AP via BG, A9.
  FREISING, Germany - A young German who recently lost his job fatally shot 2 former bosses yesterday, then took a taxi to his old high school and killed the principal and himself as hundreds of students run for cover. The man, believed to be 22, wore army camouflage and carried 2 pistols and 2 pipe bombs, authorities said.... The chief state law enforcement officer, Guenter Beckstein, said the shooting spree clearly involved grudges....
  Police said the violence began about 8 am when the man, whose identity was not made public [call him the "Freising freak" - ed.] walked into the packaging company in Eching and shot his former boss...and a foreman.... Both men died at the scene. The assailant, who had kept his taxi waiting during the shootings, then took the cab 12 miles back to Freising, where he began the assault on his former high school.
  The man walked into the school shooting, then set off a pipe bomb. Witnesses said he entered the school office and asked for his former word-processing teacher. When told the teacher was not at school, the man fatally shot the principal and wounded a teacher in the cheek, police said.... Police said the gunman had a conviction for a 1998 armed robbery. For several hours after the shooting at the school, police were unsure whether the gunman was still inside. Police later said the man killed himself, possibly with one of the pipe bombs.

• Critic who quit top Enron post is found dead - Police rule suicide, by Jim Yardley, NYT, front page.
  HOUSTON...- The body of a former Enron Corp. vice chairman who resigned last May after voicing concerns about the company's financial practices was discovered early this morning inside his Mercedes-Benz after he apparently killed himself.
  The former executive, J. Clifford Baxter, had complained last spring to Enron's management team, including Jeffrey Skilling, then the CEO, about questionable accounting measures used by the company, friends and former colleagues said. Mr. Baxter left Enron shortly after that, a decision the company attributed to his desire to spend more time with his family.
  Mr. Baxter, 43, was discovered locked inside his car at 2:23 am by a local constable working a private security detail inside the affluent Sweetwater subdivision of Sugar Land, a suburb about 25 miles southwest of downtown Houston.
  Police investigators say he had been shot once in the head with a .38-caliber handgun and have concluded that his death was a suicide. The police said he left a note, but they would not release its contents.
  Mr. Baxter, married and the father of two children, had apparently been anguished over the problems at Enron and had recently been subpoenaed to testify before Congress. He was also among the many company executives who had been sued by shareholders.
  One former business associate, who did not work at Enron, said Mr. Baxter broke down in tears during a telephone call two days ago as they talked about the company....
  [Followup - "An executive's death - 'I just can't go on,' ex-officer wrote'", by Jim Yardley, 4/12/2002 NYT, C4, quotes Baxter's handwritten note to his wife, "Carol, I am so sorry for this. I feel I just can't go on. I have always tried to do the right thing but where there once was great pride now it's gone. I love you and the children so much. I just can't be any good to you or myself. The pain is overwhelming. Please try to forgive me.   Cliff."]

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