BOSTON – A heavily armed employee has gunned down seven co-workers in a ‘work-related’ shooting spree at a troubled Internet consulting firm in the US – the day after Christmas.
The suspect, Michael McDermott, 42, was set to be arraigned on murder charges, officials said.
Police said McDermott reported for work at Edgewater Technology’s corporate headquarters armed with a loaded AK-47 assault rifle, a shotgun and a semi-automatic handgun.
At about 11 am local time, he allegedly walked through the office building and fatally shot seven co-workers at a firm undergoing a major reorganisation in the latest of a series of mass shootings in the United States.
“I thought I was going to die,” a 29-year-old worker, who declined to give his name, told Reuters. He was one of up to 70 people who were at work in the building at the time, officials said.
A prosecutor, visibly shaken after emerging from the scene, told reporters, “Police were able to subdue McDermott, wrestle him to the ground. Place him in custody. McDermott has been placed under arrest.”
“All the victims died from gunshots,” he said. “There were no other victims. There were no other shooters.”
McDermott was hired in March by Edgewater, an Internet software consulting firm located in a three-story renovated factory building in Wakefield. The suburb, some 15 miles northwest of Boston, is part of the high-tech corridor that rings the city.
McEvoy declined to give a motive for the shootings except to say that it was “work-related.”
Coakley said investigators were looking into reports a US Internal Revenue Service attempt to garnish McDermott’s wages could have been behind the shooting spree.
The massacre was the latest in a string of shootings in recent years in US workplaces, schools and churches.
The most recent, in Honolulu in November 1999, also left seven dead. Shirley Singleton, Edgewater’s chief executive, released a statement confirming the shootings and vowing to help police.
“Everyone at Edgewater Technology is shocked and devastated by the loss of our friends,” the statement said in part and added, “We extend our deepest sympathies to the victims’ families at this tragic time.”
Started as a private Internet commerce software firm outside Boston in 1992, Edgewater Technologies was purchased by a large publicly traded temporary staffing company, StaffMark of Fayetteville, Arkansas, in May 1999.
The company has been in a state of flux lately. In the past 18 months, StaffMark began shedding its staffing units to focus solely on high-technology consulting at Edgewater.
StaffMark changed its name to Edgewater last summer, just as it completed the sales of its largest staffing units.
While the company raised about US$450 million through the sales of its staffing units, shareholders were displeased with the divestiture and some of its employees were unhappy with the move from Arkansas to Massachusetts.
StaffMark generated revenue in excess of US$1 billion in 1999 before it began a series of divestitures. During the first nine months of 2000, Edgewater reported US$23.4 million in revenue.
