Mail Carrier Shot While on Route

A beloved letter carrier known for greeting residents along his Mid-City route by name was shot twice at close range and critically wounded as he delivered Friday’s mail.

Michael J. Berry, 41, a U.S. Postal Service employee since 1975, was the first carrier shot on duty in Los Angeles in more than 20 years, authorities said.

Berry was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with gunshot wounds to the head and lower back shortly after the 10:30 a.m. incident near South Manhattan Place and 15th Street.

He remained in critical condition Friday night.

Although robberies of Los Angeles mail carriers have risen sharply in recent years--especially in the Central City area--theft did not appear to be a motive in this case. Berry’s letter bag was left untouched on a walkway where he dropped it, said Lt. Jim Miller of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Witnesses told authorities that a man parked a yellow and white pickup truck near the small, two-story tan apartment building where Berry was making a series of deliveries. The man walked up to the carrier, fired twice, then got back in his car and drove away, police said.

The notion that robbery was not a motive left residents of the area baffled about why anyone would want to harm their always-smiling mailman, who often brought his two young daughters to tag along with the other neighborhood children who liked to follow him on his route.

“He’s friendly, he’s nice, everybody loves Michael,” said Margie Lee, 51, a longtime resident of the area who remembered when the carrier lived just a block from the scene of the shooting. “Why would somebody shoot Michael?”

Neighbors, who moments before had responded to Berry’s usual ring of the doorbell announcing that the mail had arrived, rushed outside when they heard the shots.

Several described seeing their mailman lying on the ground, twitching and shivering and being comforted by other neighbors while he held a folded white towel to the left side of his head. His clean, light blue shirt was marked with a growing dark red stain on the left side, one woman said.

“Everyone told him, ‘Don’t give up, don’t lose hope,’ ” said 14-year-old Louisa Carillo, who along with her brother heard two shots and ran outside to find Berry on their neighbor’s walkway.

It was her brother who brought Berry the towel and a blanket, she said.

“He didn’t say nothing,” she said. “He was just closing and opening his eyes.”

Berry had worked the same route out of the Postal Service’s Rimpau station since 1980, giving him a chance to really get to know the people along his route, a quiet neighborhood dotted with several board-and-care facilities.

“We’re very concerned about the employee and his family,” said Los Angeles Postmaster Jesse Durazo. “All the carriers are very concerned because we see robberies in Los Angeles all the time during the period of delivering checks.”

If the motive in this case turns out to be something other than robbery, it nonetheless serves as a reminder of how vulnerable mail carriers are.

In 1995, Los Angeles County stopped sending welfare payments through the mail because of the alarming increase in robberies of carriers, instead requiring recipients to pick up their money.

About that same time, postal authorities suspended all mail service at the beginning of the month to a six-block area of Watts because of robberies.

Durazo said there were six robberies of carriers on Monday alone.

“Like most people who work in Los Angeles, it’s part of the job,” Durazo said.

“It’s very difficult. We try to encourage workers to talk about it and we prepare them.”

A team of counselors was at the Rimpau station on Friday to counsel letter carriers as they arrived.