5th Kansas shooting victim dies

KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- A fifth victim died early Saturday of wounds suffered in a rampage here on Friday at a meatpacking plant, where an employee opened fire with two handguns he had smuggled into work.

The police said they still were not sure about the motive of the gunman, Elijah Brown, 21, who killed himself. But police said that he had acted with apparent deliberation in choosing his victims. Brown had just attended an employee meeting with some of them.

"He knew exactly what he was doing," the Kansas City police chief, Ronald Miller, said at a news conference outside the ConAgra Foods plant where Brown and the victims worked the second shift on the manufacturing line, making products like bologna and braunschweiger.

Police officials identified the fifth victim as Ardell Edwards, 55, a production line worker from Grandview, Mo.

Miller said that two other men wounded in the attack were expected to survive and that the investigation was continuing.

"It's a complex situation," he told reporters. Then, in the next breath, Miller seemingly reversed himself. "It's really a pretty straightforward situation," he said.

Interviews with employees, family members of the victims and people familiar with the stresses, strains and singular workplace quirks of the industrial meat-processing economy here in eastern Kansas said much the same thing: What happened at ConAgra was a shocking mystery -- ultimately unsolvable, perhaps, because Brown was not alive to answer for his crimes -- but on another level, it hardly seemed a mystery at all, after other such recent incidents in the American workplace.

One witness said he believed Brown had had a confrontation of some sort with co-workers earlier this week. Another said he believed Brown had been teased or taunted. Police investigators and company officials declined to say what the employee meeting just before Brown's attack had been about.

A spokeswoman for ConAgra, Julie DeYoung, said at the Saturday news conference that the company would not comment on its security procedures or how the guns got into the plant, and she would not say whether there were any disciplinary or grievance issues involving Brown. DeYoung said he had been hired last September as a manufacturing line worker, laid off earlier this year because of a production slowdown and rehired six weeks ago.

The police also were not sure whether it was a coincidence that three of the dead men were related. Lonnie Ellingburg, 46, and Travis Nelson, 23, both of Kansas City, and Edwards, the man who died early Saturday, were all part of an extended family, said Col. Sam Breshears, a deputy police chief.

Breshears said one of the dead men was a Mexican citizen whose name would not be released until his family could be located. He identified the other victim as Leonardo Rodriguez, 49, also of Kansas City. Two other wounded men are expected to survive, Breshears said.

People who work in the meatpacking industry here and in the niche businesses that serve it, like warehousing or refrigerated shipping, said the environment of a meat factory was probably an important element in explaining what happened at the plant. The work is high- speed and high-pressure, they said, which often means employees cannot spare too much attention noticing whether a co-worker is acting suspiciously. Lose focus, the workers said, and you risk getting behind on the line.

"It's a very stressful environment," said Eleazar DeLeon, 39, who left meat manufacturing after a few years and now works for a meat shipping and distribution company. DeLeon works nights at his job and had stopped for breakfast after work at a diner around the corner from the ConAgra plant. "Any processing plant is repetitive line work," he added. "It's very hard."

Employees at ConAgra said the bulky coats that everyone wears, both for warmth in the 40-degree refrigerator chill of the factory and for identification -- production side workers at ConAgra wear blue coats, packaging side workers wear white -- would also make it easy to conceal a weapon once it was on the factory floor. Many people also carry lunch boxes and coolers into the plant, and they have not routinely been searched in the past, one employee said.

Edna Perkins is a career meat-processing worker, with 28 years on the line. Perkins was one of the 160 or so people at the plant on Friday, and is related to Ellingburg, Nelson and Edwards, though she described the men as being from "another side of the family."

Just after 5 p.m., Perkins said, she was at her job as a white- coated "boxer" on the packaging side, assigned the task of packing prepared meat for shipping, when she saw people running above her on the catwalk that extends out over the production floor. A few seconds later a man walked by above her, bleeding.

"My first thought was that they'd had a mechanical accident," she said. Then everyone started running and next thing she knew she was outside the plant in the parking lot. Interviewed by telephone on Saturday morning from her home, Perkins said she had been unable to sleep all night.

On Saturday, the plant was closed, sealed by police barricades on the driveway, and the ConAgra spokeswoman, DeYoung, said she did not know when it would reopen. Counseling sessions were being offered Saturday for employees.

The shooting followed by a year and a day an attack in which a manufacturing plant employee in Jefferson City, Mo., killed three people and then himself.

Meat industry work has deep roots in Kansas City, where a nexus of railroads and ranching combined to build a culture of stockyards and packing plants beginning in the late 1800s.

The industry has declined significantly over the last 50 years but remains alive in the neighborhoods like Armourdale, named for the meat company, and in factories like ConAgra. In recent years, workers here say, the plants have seen an influx of immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

Even on Saturday while the ConAgra plant sat silent and employees mourned, there was a reminder of the city's culture of heavy trucking, rail and agriculture. As Miller and other officials spoke at the news conference, reporters repeatedly had to lean in to hear, the speakers forced to shout, as another tractor-trailer rumbled by the factory door.

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