A Year of Grief

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Questions Persist About Goleta Postal Shootings

by Drew Mackie

A brief pause in the rain provided a calm backdrop to the remembrance service held on Tuesday at the Goleta Postal Distribution Facility, in which postal officials dedicated olive trees in memory of the six workers slain in the shooting nightmare that unfolded there one year ago. Now, the line of trees and a plaque stand to remind all passing through the facility of Ze Fairchild, Maleka Higgins, Dexter Shannon, Nicola Grant, Guadalupe Schwartz, and Charlotte Colton.

Although many in the approximately 200-person crowd appeared moved by the ceremony, not all the families of the victims attended. Some stayed away because they were opposed to the ceremony’s being held at the site of the shootings and to the actions — or inaction — of the U.S. Postal Service in the aftermath of the tragedy.

For the family members, post office employees, and public officials present, the grief was palpably fresh. During his address to the crowd, Father Jon Stephen Hedges acknowledged that the healing process had only begun. “Even the ground itself needs to be healed,” Hedges said, as several attendees wept openly. At a loss to depict the magnitude of suffering caused by the shootings, Goleta Postal Distribution Facility Manager John Byars said, “No words can describe how this tragedy has impacted us.”

Although Byars said he has had direct contact with the families of the victims throughout the healing process, many of those who chose not to attend Tuesday’s memorial said they wished to avoid such statements as his, which they perceive to be empty. Sherie Higgins, the mother of Maleka, claims that her daughter’s former employer has not done enough since the murders to improve safety at the facility or to console the families involved. “The day after my daughter was killed, two women from internal affairs were at my door,” Higgins explained. “That’s the only thing we’ve heard since.” In the intervening time, Higgins feels the Postal Service has erred continually, culminating in planning the memorial at a time when many people were at work. “And why does it have to be in the parking lot of the plant where my daughter was killed?” Higgins asked. “A lot of us can’t even go to [the nearby] K-Mart because of what happened.”

Charlene Ramos, the sister-in-law of Guadalupe Schwartz, said the unsafe conditions that led to the shooting persist. “They say it’s a safe facility, but if by that they mean six dead employees, then they’ve reached their goal,” she said. Ramos, who attended a separate private memorial service with the Higgins family, said she is frustrated by the fact that Schwartz’s family never received the counseling postal officials promised them. Ramos added that Schwartz’s children never received benefits from the postal workers’ union, as they were not dependents and their father was already deceased.

At the ceremony, Postal Inspection Service spokesperson Renee Focht said the Goleta plant had been deemed safe. “The plant had been surveyed both before and after [the shootings]. That’s standard operating procedure,” Focht said. A post office employee, who would speak to The Independent only on condition of anonymity, said the Goleta facility’s main entrance has been modified so that anyone entering the parking lot must present identification and enter a personal security code. “It’s more adequate than what they’d been doing before,” the employee said. “But the most likely person to start a shooting spree would be a current worker, not a former worker.” The employee admitted that if outsiders wanted to break in, they probably still could.

A year after losing her daughter, Higgins’s main goal was to work toward peace of mind. For her, this includes uncovering details from the night of January 30, 2006, that she believes the Post Office is withholding, as well as exposing the allegedly tense working environment that has driven postal workers to murder. “Someone needs to tell the truth about what happened to Jennifer San Marco while she was working there. Someone needs to investigate this further, but none of us has the money,” Higgins said. “Nobody but me or some of the family members care to find the answers.” In the meantime, Higgins has also implemented a the Maleka Higgins Memorial Fund, to which people can contribute by stopping in a donating at the main branch of Santa Barbara Bank & Trust.

Many of those who attended the remembrance service declined to reveal their thoughts on the one-year anniversary. Focht, however, chose to focus on the event’s familiar atmosphere. “We’re all members of the same postal family,” she said. “And if anything like this happens to anyone in the family, it’s a very sad thing.”

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