Experts: More women carrying out violent acts in workplace

September 16, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA

If Yvonne Hiller killed her co-workers at the Kraft Foods baking plant in Northeast Philadelphia last week as charged, she would join a rare — but possibly emerging — breed: women as workplace killers.

Women commit fewer than 5 percent of homicides and assaults in the workplace, said Larry Barton, a teacher at the FBI Academy and author of four books on crisis management and violence at work.

And, as a rule, they’re much less likely to kill in general than men. They tend to internalize their anger or use words rather than haul out a gun in a public place and open fire, experts say.

But in the last year, several high-profile cases of women killing in the workplace have occurred, including a professor accused of killing three colleagues and wounding three others in a February rampage after being denied tenure at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

“I cannot recall a one- or two-year period in which we’ve had as many women with multiple victims,” said Barton, who also is a professor at the American College, a risk-management and insurance school in Bryn Mawr.

In March, a Tarpon Springs, Fla., supermarket worker fired for threatening to kill a co-worker returned to work and made good on her threat.

And though not as recent, in January 2006 a former U.S. Postal Service employee killed six colleagues and then herself at a mail- sorting plant in Goleta, Calif.

“Is it too early to call it a trend, or is it just an anomaly?” Barton wondered.

In the Philadelphia case, Hiller, 43, is charged with killing LaTonya Brown, 36, and Tanya Wilson, 47, both of Philadelphia. She also is accused of shooting co-worker Bryant Dalton, 39, in the neck; he was in critical condition at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

Women are much less likely to kill than men, statistics show. A study by the University of Tennessee found that women committed 15 percent of homicides, though they make up more than half the U.S. population.

In 2009, there were 521 workplace killings in the United States, 420 of them committed by gunfire, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.