irene

United States Postal Worker
Shot: August 2 1996
Gurley Alabama

The carrier doesn't know anything about your money

Irene: "I looked and there was the lady. The lady was paying for a postage-due and she left twenty dollars in her mailbox. She was worried about her change and she kept coming back in the post office. She was waiting out in the parking lot, and this was August 2nd in Alabama and it was extremely hot. Once the carrier came in, I said, `Why don't you go out to the parking lot and talk to your customer?' I said the customer's name and address and the carrier said, `I'm not going out there, that lady's crazy.' That was the first time I had an inkling because the lady didn't seem crazy to me. I was thinking about the lady in the car probably sweating to death, so I went out to her and I said, `The carrier doesn't know anything about your money.' That was the only time the woman got mad. She said, `Well, if I don't find it I'm calling the police.' I said, `Please check in the back of the box, see if it fell on the ground, let me know if you find it or you don't.'

You'd better watch out you could be next

"So, I'm kind of waiting for her call, and running money orders, that's when I heard the door ring and I didn't even have a chance to look over, just boom! I felt like someone threw a basketball at my chest. I looked over and here's the lady and I just said, `Why?' When I looked over at the customer I was serving she just looked as white as a ghost. Then the shooter looked at the customer and says, `You'd better watch out, you could be next,' then she goes out of the lobby. I go down to my knees and everything was just muffled. My arm felt like a hundred pounds. The pellets went across my chest too, the blood was all over my shoes. And I kept thinking, `Oh, my kids,' and I thought that was going to be it.

They had a sheet over me and my daughter thought, she's dead

"When I got down to my knees I was doing okay, I could breathe and stuff, and I got back up and I walked ten feet to the phone and dialed 911. I said, `This is Irene at the Gurley Post Office and I just got shot.' Then one of the carriers came in and she called me darling, or dear, she said, `Relax, sit down,' and she grabbed the phone. I'm laying there and now the police are cutting off my clothes and I can't believe I was worried about the police seeing me without clothes on, but I was. The pain was just awful, the pellets had gone across my upper chest and my arm and kind of blew a hole in my arm, it took three fourths of the muscle and all three major nerves were severed. They rushed me by med flight, and they covered my head with a sheet because the med flight was throwing dust all over. My daughter, when she saw it on the news, she still remembers, they had that sheet over me, and she thought right away, she's dead and nobody's telling me the truth. She remembers even saying to the youngest one, `Mommy's dead.'

"I remember in the med flight it just hurt so badly and I said, `Just give me something for the pain,' and they said, `No, we can't do it until they observe what's wrong, how extensive the injury is.' I just kept thinking, Why?"