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Two people have died and three have been left wounded after a former employee opened fire at a linen company in Chester, Pennsylvania.
The shooting took place at around 8.30 am on May 22, with the perpetrator fleeing the scene in a vehicle before being captured and detained in a traffic stop.
According to Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer, the shooter was a former colleague of those who were attacked.
“A disgruntled employee has walked into a linen shop — the Delaware County Linen shop behind us — and shot five people, five co-workers,” he told local reporters. “Two are deceased; three are at the hospital.”
Stollsteimer added that the shooting is “a tragedy, a story that plays out too often across the United States of America.”
Stefan Roots, the Mayor of Chester, responded to the event by calling for lawmakers to do more to tackle the gun crisis, including providing better care to those with poor mental health that may lead them to commit acts of violence, including those in the workplace.
“Violence is always unpredictable. We don’t know what conditions people are under, in a city that’s impoverished like ours,” he stated.
"We can't have guns in the hands of the wrong people,” Roots continued. “There had to be some type of mental health issue that would have an employee walk into his workplace on a day of work and take out his anger in such a violent way — to not just the boss, but his coworkers, who he probably worked side-by-side with for years.”
Of the three victims who remain in hospital, at least one is in a critical condition.
Gunfire took place both inside and outside the business, according to Stollsteimer.
The attorney general, speaking to NBC Philadelphia, said the shooter “had had some issues with fellow employees, but nothing that would lead to what happened today.”
"The people who are victims of this shooting today, they came to work to live the American dream,” Stollsteimer continued. “They came to work to work hard, to play by the rules and to get ahead in their lives — and today two of them are laying on the ground dead.”
"This is just a horrible, horrible tragedy and another example of someone who had access to a firearm who shouldn't have and took out whatever anger he had for whatever reason on the employees."
While events such as this can be hard to predict, and there is debate about whether declining employee mental health is a valuable warning sign of future violence, employers have a duty of care under the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), as well as other equivalent state laws, to provide a place of employment that is “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.”
To comply with these safety laws, most workplaces will adopt an anti-violence policy, including a ban on weapons in the workplace.
