Portrait Of A Killer

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Every few weeks for six years, Michael McDermott drove up to an hour to Dedham, Mass., to donate blood platelets. He went to the Red Cross there because it was the only one in the area with the equipment required for the involved procedure--which takes two hours, about twice as long as ordinary blood donation. McDermott gave voluntarily, receiving no payment in return. On the lower right of his car's rear bumper, he pasted a sticker: GIVE BLOOD.

But last week McDermott chose to draw blood. The morning after Christmas, McDermott, 42, dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans, was chatting about video games with a colleague at Edgewater Technology in Wakefield, Mass., where he wrote code for and tested the company's software. Just after 11 a.m., however, he strolled through the lobby with an AK-47 assault rifle, shotgun and semiautomatic pistol. When a co-worker asked, "Where are you going with that?" he responded, "Human resources." He then shot to death two employees at reception, headed down the hall to the human-resources department, picked off three people and proceeded to accounting, where three other workers were barricaded. McDermott blasted through the door and gunned down two. (The third employee survived by concealing herself beneath a desk.) "No one saw it coming," said a former employee who asked to remain anonymous. "I was talking to one guy who was sitting in the conference room when the first bullets were fired. The bullets flew through the glass. They had no idea what was going on. They hit the ground, and one individual had glass all in his hair." McDermott then returned to the lobby, sat in a chair within reach of a black tote bag packed with ammunition and waited for the police.

Money troubles seem to have triggered his rampage. The burly engineer hunted down the two departments--accounting and human resources--that were about to garnishee his wages to pay overdue taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. McDermott had complained to colleagues about the garnishment and had asked for a cash advance a week before Christmas. The request was denied by one of the victims. The last straw, however, may have been a call he received at 11:07 a.m. on the day of the shooting. A Chrysler representative informed him that his 1994 Plymouth was going to be repossessed. According to the Boston Globe, he responded blithely, "I won't be needing it. Come pick it up."

There had been one warning. Haverhill police received a call at 11:40 p.m. on Christmas Eve reporting gunshots. Investigators learned that a man driving a sedan with the license plate MUCKO had been spotted in a wooded area where they later found a handful of shotgun shells. McDermott was nicknamed "Mucko" by a nephew who couldn't pronounce his first name. "We didn't encounter McDermott," says Sergeant Stephen Brighi. "If luck had been on our side, history could have possibly been changed."