"New Normal" at Hartford Distributors Four Months After Shooting Attack

At about 7 a.m. on Aug. 3, Omar Thornton, an employee of Hartford Distributors, was summoned to a disciplinary hearing with company and union officials. Officials showed Thornton a videotape of him stealing beer from the company and gave him a choice: resign or be fired.

Less than an hour later, nine employees lay dead, including Thornton by his own hand, with two others wounded, in one of the most severe instances of workplace violence in Connecticut history.

Now, four months later, a company executive stopped short of saying that life had returned to normal at Hartford Distributors' massive warehouse on Chapel Road.

But Steve Hollander did feel comfortable stating that the beer distribution company and its employees were finding ways to move forward in the wake of the horrific attacks.

"I don't think things are ever going to be back to the way they were here, and I don't think that's a reasonable expectation," said Hollander, executive vice president and general manager of the company, which has been in the Hollander family since his grandfather Jules Hollander bought the business in 1963.  "All of us who were here, we've been through a horrible thing together. It, in a sense, has banded us together. We'll never be the same, but you get to a new normal, because you have to live with these things and nobody asked for it, nobody wanted it, but we have to carry on."

Hollander described the mood at the company as "different" in the wake of the attack.

"We're so concerned about each other here, much more so than we used to be," he said. "We're always very sensitive to whether it seems like somebody might be upset or not operating at full capacity because of being under such stress."

Although Hartford Distributors has always granted employees access to counseling services through its employee assistance program, Hollander said use of that program has seen a significant spike in the months since the attack. However, he added, it is hard to gauge how much can be specifically attributed to counseling related to the shooting, since employees can access the service to deal with "a wide range of things."

Still, Hollander, who was present on the morning of Thornton's disciplinary hearing and was shot twice, said it would be "unreasonable and irresponsible" not to expect the 70 or so employees who were in the building during the attack not to seek out counseling. Hollander said he has done so himself.

"I have good days and bad days. Sometimes, some unusual things get me set on edge to where I feel anxious," he said. "I'll be a lot better for a while, and then it seems like I get worse. But I'm seeing somebody that helps me work through it all."

Chris Roos, principal officer of Teamsters Local 1035, which represents the majority of employees at the company, said the union has established a special assistance program specifically for Hartford Distributors employees that has been widely accessed since the shooting.

"Just about anybody that was there has been seeking counseling," Roos said.

Roos affirmed that, among union employees of the company, the mood at Hartford Distributors is significantly different than it used to be.

"There's a lot of camaraderie going on, but there's a lot of empty hearts still there," Roos said. "The guys are really helping each other through it, but there's that emptiness."

Hollander declined to discuss specifics of the morning of the attack.
"I don't think I should," he said.

According to Associated Press reports, after being shown video footage of him loading cases of beer into the trunk of his car, Thornton agreed to resign, but then pulled out a gun and started shooting. He walked around the complex shooting employees, until Manchester Police arrived on the scene. Police found Thornton dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in an office, but the Associated Press reported that he called his mother and spoke with her for about 10 minutes beforehand as she vainly attempted to talk him out of killing himself.

Thornton, who was black, had worked as a truck driver for the company for about two years. According to the Associated Press, he had complained to family members and friends about being the victim of harassment and racial discrimination in the months leading up to the attack, including an instance of finding a picture of a figure hanging by a noose and racial slurs scrawled on a bathroom wall. Members of Thornton's family could not be reached for comment for this article.

Roos said Thornton never filed a complaint with the union about the alleged discrimination and  as far as he was aware, there has never been a compliant on that basis filed against Hartford Distributors.

Hollander also said Thornton had never filed an official complaint with the company. When asked if there were any warning signs displayed by Thornton that may have been missed in the period leading up to the attack, Hollander paused a moment, then said that is a question he often asks himself.

"There were no warning signs. Nobody knew that Omar…nobody suspected that he would be a violent person," Hollander said. "We caught him stealing, but that wasn't a violent act. As far as anybody could tell, he seemed like a gentle person."

Manchester Police Chief Marc Montminy said the department expected to officially close its investigation into the shooting later this month. Although the incident might seem like a textbook example of an "open and shut case," Montminy said the department was taking every care to make its investigation as thorough as possible.

"There's going to be a huge amount of interest in this case," he said. "We have to document everything as though we are going to court with Omar."

Montminy said he was eminently satisfied with the department's response to the shooting, and that a January awards ceremony was being organized for those who responded.

"I can't praise them enough,' Montminy said. "I can't imagine them doing any better than they did. They were trained to do what they did, and they did exactly what they were trained to do."

Hollander said Hartford Distributors has revised several of its policies in the wake of the attack to better ensure employee safety.

"We've changed a few things, " he said. "For instance, we have a search and seizure policy in place now that we didn't use to have, and we provide all the drivers and warehouse people lockers if they choose to use them, but they have to use our locks. And we have a random method of search ensuring that nobody's bringing any weapons onto the premises."

Roos said applicants for employment at the company have actually increased in the wake of the attack.

"We've had record applications to apply for a job at the company," he said. "So I don't think the shooting did anything to deter anybody looking for a job at the company."

A memorial fund has also sprung up to support families of the victims - Teamsters Local 1035 Hartford Distributors Inc. Memorial Fund.  Roos said the fund has garnered more than $500,000 in donations in the four months since the shooting and has several fundraisers planned for the month of December.

The managers of the fund – three executives from Hartford Distributors and three union executives – will hold their first meeting on Dec. 16 to discuss ways to manage and distribute the money to families of the victims.

"When you divide it amongst eight families, it's good but not something that's going to support a family for the rest of their lives or some young kid," Roos said.
Hartford Distributors recently completed a merger with the South Windsor-based Franklin Distributors, which Hollander said should spike the company's workforce from about 120 employees to more than 160. The company is in the process of expanding its Manchester warehouse an additional 70,000-square feet to accommodate the new employees and products the merger will bring.

"This is a big deal for us," Hollander said. "It's something we've been working on for a long time, and it's something that's going to allow us to stay competitive in this market. We're a large distributor with low price points; they're a smaller distributor with higher price points."

But Hollander cautioned that, despite the company's rebound and expansion, or the fact that he managed to survive the attack when others were not as fortunate, there will be no happy ending for the tragic events of Aug. 3 and all those affected by it.

"I think that for the families of the people who were murdered, they'll never make sense of this. It's horrific, it's tragic, it's unfair," Hollander said. ""I was so lucky, but I have a hard time reconciling the thought that I'm lucky when my friends were killed. Most of the time, it's inconceivable that anything lucky happened that day."

According to information released by the Manchester Police Department, the eight victims  who lost their lives that day were:

• William Ackerman, 51, of Broad Brook;
• Francis Fazio Jr., 57, of Bristol;
• Louis Felder Jr., 50, of Stamford;
• Victor James, 60, of Windsor;
• Edwin Kennison, 49, of East Hartford;
• Craig Pepin, 60, of South Windsor;
• Douglas Scruton, 56, of Middletown and New Hampshire; and
• Bryan Cirigliano, 51, of Newington.

Hollander and Jerome Rosenstein, a 77-year old non-union employee from West Hartford, were wounded in the attack.

Donations to the Teamsters Local 1035 Hartford Distributors Inc. Memorial Fund can be sent to Teamsters Local Union 1035, 400 Chapel Road, 2-B, South Windsor, CT, 06074.