She drove past the perimeter fence by following another car and got into the front door of the building by taking an employee's electronic identification badge at gunpoint.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0201postoffice0201.html
Woman kills 5, self at Calif. postal plant
Tim Malloy Associated Press Feb. 1, 2006 12:00 AM
GOLETA, Calif. - "Going postal" had almost become an anachronism.
So many years had passed since the siege of violence that gave rise to the phrase that it had all but vanished from common usage.
But Monday night a former postal worker who had been removed from a mail-processing plant because of strange behavior returned with a gun.
When sheriff's deputies arrived, five postal workers had been slain, another was critically wounded and the shooter was dead in an apparent suicide. It may have been the worst workplace shooting ever carried out by a woman.
Investigators would not discuss a motive for the attack.
"Chances are she might have known her victims," U.S. Postal Inspector Randy DeGasperin said the morning after the woman made her way inside the gated facility and left a trail of bodies that ended with her own.
The 44-year-old woman, identified as Jennifer Sanmarco of Grants, N.M., had worked at the Santa Barbara Processing and Distribution Center more than two years ago but was given a disability retirement in 2003 for an unspecified psychological reason, postal officials said.
Sometime in that year, she was removed from the building by sheriff's deputies after co-workers said she began acting strangely, DeGasperin said.
She made no threats, but co-workers were afraid she might hurt herself, he said. He provided no other details.
She returned Monday evening to the sprawling center, armed with a 9mm handgun. Witnesses told police she reloaded at least once during the rampage, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Jim Anderson said.
She drove past the perimeter fence by following another car and got into the front door of the building by taking an employee's electronic identification badge at gunpoint. The employee was not hurt, authorities said.
Sheriff's deputies responding to calls about gunshots found two bodies in the parking lot, another just outside the front door and a badly wounded woman just inside.
Three bodies were later found elsewhere in the building. One was the assailant, who apparently shot herself, Anderson said.
It was unclear whether the woman targeted her victims or fired randomly, Anderson said.
As the shooting began, some of the workers streamed out of the building. The woman was well-known to authorities in western New Mexico, where she moved after leaving her job at the postal center.
In July 2004, she applied for a business license to start a publication called the Racist Press, said Terri Gallegos, deputy clerk for the city of Milan, N.M.
When applying for the license, she constantly talked to herself, "not just mumbling to herself, but real audible, like she was arguing with someone but there was no one there," Gallegos recalled.
The clerk's office filed a complaint with police last spring alleging she harassed a worker during another visit.
Police in nearby Grants, N.M., gave her a warning last June after receiving complaints that she was naked at a gas station. She was dressed when officers arrived.
Killed in Tuesday's attack were Ze Fairchild, 37, and Maleka Higgins, 28, both of Santa Barbara; Nicola Grant, 42, and Guadalupe Swartz, 52, both of Lompoc; and Dexter Shannon, 57, of Oxnard.
The wounded woman, Charlotte Colton, 44, of Santa Barbara, remained hospitalized Tuesday.
It was the first lethal shooting at a postal installation in nearly eight years and one of the deadliest since a string of high-profile cases in the 1980s and 1990s, including one in which a part-time letter carrier killed 14 people in Edmond, Okla., before taking his own life.