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The early news reports made Jeffrey Johnson out to be a deranged monster: After pumping five bullets into the supervisor who’d fired him from his job at the Empire State Building, Johnson supposedly went on a wild shooting rampage out on 5th Avenue, firing randomly at innocent bystanders, wounding nine before cops took him down using their anti-terrorism training.
In this early, cinematic version of events, the NYPD’s aggressive anti-terrorism training paid off—who knows how many more people Jeffrey Johnson would have shot and killed?
But as the day wore on, the early heroic version of events started to give way to something more complicated and disturbing—as so often happens with these workplace shootings. The gunman, it turned out, didn't go on a wild shooting spree; all of his bullets were fired into one target, his former boss who downsized him; it was the NYPD who hit the bystanders while trying to get the gunman, who happened to be standing right next to their faces, in what appears to have been a conscious decision to commit suicide-by-cop.
Despite all the Jack Bauer anti-terror training the two cops supposedly received, they couldn’t hit the side of a skyscraper if their lives depended on it—let alone the front of a human being practically pressing his face into the barrels of their guns. In fact the "graphic" CCTV video looks like some desperate middle-aged schlub trying to get himself killed by Mr. Magoo and Magoo's twin, who empty their handgun clips on every living creature except for the suicidal schlub with the .45 in his hand, doing a tapioca dance right in front of their faces.
It's only when they fired those last couple of bullets that the gunman suddenly stops dancing and drops like a sack of trash on the cement. Later it emerged out that the police fired 16 bullets, hitting a total of ten people: nine innocents (described as "collateral damage" by a CNN live guest), and the one perp. That's a .100 batting average: Even drones score better than that.
Once it became clear that Jeffrey Johnson wasn’t another James Holmes “Joker” type monster out to randomly massacre, pathos quickly seeped into the narrative void.
The Empire State Building shooter, it turns out, was some kind of middle-aged nerd—just over five feet tall, alone, wounded and intelligent. And unemployed at age 58. He wasn’t merely the “quiet type”—he was liked, or rather pitied, by his neighbors. After he was laid off from his job designing handbags and accessories two years ago, Johnson didn't cope well: He would dress up in a suit and tie every morning, head out of the apartment building in the Upper East Side, have breakfast at McDonald’s, and return a half hour later, go into his apartment and stay there for the rest of the day. Every day.
What is a middle-aged man in this country, nearing retirement, if he doesn’t have a job? Almost 60, with a black mark on his employment record after having been downsized, looking for work in the worst job market in decades—what did that make him? What were those long mornings and afternoons like when he returned to his apartment from McDonald's?
When I was at the Mitt Romney rally in Vegas earlier this month with James and James, I bought a bumper sticker that pretty much sums up the dominant cultural ideology in this country: “Vote Republican: we can't ALL be on welfare!” In Russia, when you fall through the cracks, when you’re hitting rock ******* bottom—it’s at this point that you attain some sort of Jesus-like status. Your normally cold-hearted, brutal, callous acquaintances suddenly go soft and want to be your personal Florence Nightingale. It's only then, at your worse moment, your surrender to complete failure, that they truly love you. They understand it; all Russians I've known have fallen through the cracks at least a few times before succumbing. But here, it doesn’t work that way...
Even as his corpse was still cooling, the New York Times description of Jeffrey Johnson dripped with smug irony:
Alone, the “slight, meticulous artist” joined a group of bird watchers in Central Park.
The Times converted Johnson’s rather pedestrian misery into bad New Yorker fiction:
If you understand the raw pain from accumulated nerd humiliations, and you calculate how that incident would be played over and over and over to this short, unemployed 58-year-old “Willy Loman” every morning as he puts on his suit and heads out to the McDonald’s—and there must have been so many more memories like that in the shuffle, still raw after all these years, as studies on the effects of bullying have shown—then you can start to grasp what makes a guy like Jeffrey Johnson go back to his last workplace two years after getting laid off, and kill the sources of his pain: Meaning, first, his supervisor who fired him; and then secondly, himself, Jeffrey Johnson, in a poorly-executed suicide-by-Keystone-cops.
Again, the Times:
In this early, cinematic version of events, the NYPD’s aggressive anti-terrorism training paid off—who knows how many more people Jeffrey Johnson would have shot and killed?
But as the day wore on, the early heroic version of events started to give way to something more complicated and disturbing—as so often happens with these workplace shootings. The gunman, it turned out, didn't go on a wild shooting spree; all of his bullets were fired into one target, his former boss who downsized him; it was the NYPD who hit the bystanders while trying to get the gunman, who happened to be standing right next to their faces, in what appears to have been a conscious decision to commit suicide-by-cop.
Despite all the Jack Bauer anti-terror training the two cops supposedly received, they couldn’t hit the side of a skyscraper if their lives depended on it—let alone the front of a human being practically pressing his face into the barrels of their guns. In fact the "graphic" CCTV video looks like some desperate middle-aged schlub trying to get himself killed by Mr. Magoo and Magoo's twin, who empty their handgun clips on every living creature except for the suicidal schlub with the .45 in his hand, doing a tapioca dance right in front of their faces.
It's only when they fired those last couple of bullets that the gunman suddenly stops dancing and drops like a sack of trash on the cement. Later it emerged out that the police fired 16 bullets, hitting a total of ten people: nine innocents (described as "collateral damage" by a CNN live guest), and the one perp. That's a .100 batting average: Even drones score better than that.
Once it became clear that Jeffrey Johnson wasn’t another James Holmes “Joker” type monster out to randomly massacre, pathos quickly seeped into the narrative void.
The Empire State Building shooter, it turns out, was some kind of middle-aged nerd—just over five feet tall, alone, wounded and intelligent. And unemployed at age 58. He wasn’t merely the “quiet type”—he was liked, or rather pitied, by his neighbors. After he was laid off from his job designing handbags and accessories two years ago, Johnson didn't cope well: He would dress up in a suit and tie every morning, head out of the apartment building in the Upper East Side, have breakfast at McDonald’s, and return a half hour later, go into his apartment and stay there for the rest of the day. Every day.
What is a middle-aged man in this country, nearing retirement, if he doesn’t have a job? Almost 60, with a black mark on his employment record after having been downsized, looking for work in the worst job market in decades—what did that make him? What were those long mornings and afternoons like when he returned to his apartment from McDonald's?
When I was at the Mitt Romney rally in Vegas earlier this month with James and James, I bought a bumper sticker that pretty much sums up the dominant cultural ideology in this country: “Vote Republican: we can't ALL be on welfare!” In Russia, when you fall through the cracks, when you’re hitting rock ******* bottom—it’s at this point that you attain some sort of Jesus-like status. Your normally cold-hearted, brutal, callous acquaintances suddenly go soft and want to be your personal Florence Nightingale. It's only then, at your worse moment, your surrender to complete failure, that they truly love you. They understand it; all Russians I've known have fallen through the cracks at least a few times before succumbing. But here, it doesn’t work that way...
Even as his corpse was still cooling, the New York Times description of Jeffrey Johnson dripped with smug irony:
'Jeffrey T. Johnson, 58, a slight, meticulous artist, the first one to work in the morning and the last one out, without so much as a look outside for fresh air in between...'
Johnson resented the workplace humiliation he'd endured before getting fired, when a taller, tanner, and much younger salesman from New Jersey, Steven Ercolino, was hired as Johnson's boss. And boss he did, loudly and brashly, despite being almost two decades younger. Johnson’s resentment festered—they nearly came to blows in the office. When business got tough two years ago, the then-39-year-old boss fired Johnson, sending him out into a kind of late-middle-age spiral.Alone, the “slight, meticulous artist” joined a group of bird watchers in Central Park.
The Times converted Johnson’s rather pedestrian misery into bad New Yorker fiction:
'Years passed this way at the company, Hazan Imports, which sold handbags and belts, until Mr. Johnson was laid off almost two years ago.
And yet, the casual observer would not have known it, to look at him. He put on the same suit every morning: the Upper East Side’s own Willy Loman, dressing for a job he no longer had. He picked up his newspaper on the front stoop and walked two blocks to McDonald’s for breakfast.'
Johnson returned to the office a few months after getting fired—but that visit ended badly when the fired ex-worker wound up in an elevator with the tan, healthy Vice President, Steven Ercolino. Apparently the wispy Johnson delivered a kind of passive-aggressive elbow into his former boss, who responded by grabbing Johnson's throat and threatening to kill him if he ever tried something like that again.And yet, the casual observer would not have known it, to look at him. He put on the same suit every morning: the Upper East Side’s own Willy Loman, dressing for a job he no longer had. He picked up his newspaper on the front stoop and walked two blocks to McDonald’s for breakfast.'
If you understand the raw pain from accumulated nerd humiliations, and you calculate how that incident would be played over and over and over to this short, unemployed 58-year-old “Willy Loman” every morning as he puts on his suit and heads out to the McDonald’s—and there must have been so many more memories like that in the shuffle, still raw after all these years, as studies on the effects of bullying have shown—then you can start to grasp what makes a guy like Jeffrey Johnson go back to his last workplace two years after getting laid off, and kill the sources of his pain: Meaning, first, his supervisor who fired him; and then secondly, himself, Jeffrey Johnson, in a poorly-executed suicide-by-Keystone-cops.
Again, the Times:
'Mr. Johnson was fastidious at his apartment, which he shared only with cats. He ran his vacuum early in the morning. One neighbor, Gisela Casella, 71, thought the man in the suit worked at a bank. “He was the nicest guy,” she said. “I never saw him with a woman, and I would always say to myself, Boy, he deserves a nice girlfriend.”
He seems to have spent more time drawing women than dating them. A series of six illustrations of an attractive woman on a motorcycle, on his Web site, describe a chance encounter in Florida in 1983, at a gas station. “Her blonde tresses fell just below the taut line of her shoulders and was being teased by a sea breeze coming off the bay,” Mr. Johnson wrote. He told her, “Nice bike,” and she replied, “in a soft, throaty voice, ‘Fast bike.’ ”
He went out for his breakfast every morning in his suit, returned with his McDonald’s bag and seemed to stay up on the third floor all day.'
At this point, you just want him to get it over with, it hurts just to read it. In fact I’ve rarely come across a workplace murder where the pathos emerges so quickly, and immediately weaves its way into the narrative, laying it on thick as this one has. Times have changed—we’re starting to understand these shooters a little better now, intuitively so. He seems to have spent more time drawing women than dating them. A series of six illustrations of an attractive woman on a motorcycle, on his Web site, describe a chance encounter in Florida in 1983, at a gas station. “Her blonde tresses fell just below the taut line of her shoulders and was being teased by a sea breeze coming off the bay,” Mr. Johnson wrote. He told her, “Nice bike,” and she replied, “in a soft, throaty voice, ‘Fast bike.’ ”
He went out for his breakfast every morning in his suit, returned with his McDonald’s bag and seemed to stay up on the third floor all day.'
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