A fired postal worker who killed three people and wounded six others before shooting himself died Friday of his injuries.
Colleagues predicted that Thomas McIlvane, who threatened supervisors and co-workers, would one day shoot up the Royal Oak post office if he didn't get his job back. One described him as a "waiting time bomb."On Thursday, police said, the 31-year-old ex-Marine made good on his threats, spraying the post office with bullets from a 22-caliber semiautomatic rifle. Three postal workers were killed and six were wounded before he turned the gun on himself.
McIlvane was pronounced dead early Friday and doctors removed his organs for transplant, hospital spokeswoman Karen Trefil said. Two of the wounded remained in critical condition.
The post office in this suburb 10 miles north of downtown Detroit was closed Friday and mail delivery to the city's 70,000 residents was canceled while counselors met with shaken survivors and relatives of the victims.
McIlvane was fired from the post office last year for timecard fraud and had appealed his dismissal. U.S. Postal Service spokesman Lou Eberhardt said an arbitrator rejected his appeal on Wednesday.
"Everybody said if he didn't get his job back, he was going to come in and shoot," postal worker Bob Cibulka said. "Everyone was talking about it."
"He was a waiting time bomb," said former postal worker Mark Mitchell, who was stationed with McIlvane at the Marine Corps base in Twentynine Palms, Calif., in the early 1980s.
"One time at Twentynine Palms there was a guy he was mad at and he drove a tank over his car," Mitchell said.
Thursday's shooting came just a month after four New Jersey postal workers were killed during another rampage. In that case, Joseph Harris, 35, is charged with shooting his former supervisor and her boyfriend at their home, then going to the Ridgewood, N.J., post office and killing two employees. He later surrendered to police.
Among those killed Thursday was branch operations manager Christopher Carlisle, 33, and labor relations representative Keith Ciszewski, 37. Also killed was injury compensation specialist Mary Benincasa, 32.