Members of the Edmond, Okla., police department and medical personnel remove one of those killed in a shooting spree Aug. 20, 1986 at the Edmond Post Office in Edmond, Okla. (AP photo)
EDMOND — Survivors of the Edmond Post Office massacre and their friends are planning a 30th anniversary memorial ceremony outside the downtown post office where 14 workers were killed.The Yellow Ribbon memorial for the slain 14 postal workers, located outside the downtown post office where they were killed.
Next Saturday (August 20) marks the morning in 1986 when gunman Patrick Henry Sherrill went on a rampage also wounding six others and then taking his own life inside the post office where he worked.
Sherrill, 43, had been reprimanded the previous day for poor job performance.
Sherrill dressed in his postal uniform, entered the post office shortly before 7 a.m. with his mail bag loaded with three guns that left seven female co-workers and seven male co-workers dead.
Those who died are Betty Jarred, Patty Husband, Tommy Shader, Rick Esser, Mike Rockne, Pat Gabbard, Jonna Gragart Hamilton, Patti Welch, Judy Denney, Patty Chambers, Kenneth Morey, Bill Miller, Leroy Phillips and Jerry Pyle.
The ceremony, which is open to the public, will start at 8 a.m. around the memorial to the victims on the south side of the post office at 200 N Broadway.
Wreaths will be placed around the statue called Yellow Ribbon by Rich Muno that commemorates those killed.
“They will never be forgotten,” said retired rural carrier Herb Rettke, the organizer of the memorial. “It was bedded in your mind. The ones who were wounded not only carry it in their mind, but in their body.”…
…Mayor Charles Lamb will open the memorial ceremony that is created “to remember the U.S. Postal Service Employees killed or wounded and the many others whose lives were forever changed 30 years ago,” Rettke said.
Source: NewsOK.com