January, 2001: Robin Kilmer’s estranged husband, wielding a fiveinch hunting knife, bursts into a medical center in suburban Dutchess County, New York, where she works as a cleaner. He stabs his wife in the neck and chest, leaving her to be airlifted to a hospital in critical condition. Speeding from the scene, the assailant dies in a collision with a utility pole. Police describe the crash as deliberate.July, 2001: 20–year-old Lisa Atkins flees in her red Mustang from a boyfriend who is armed with an automatic handgun. She seeks refuge in a former place of employment: a building materials emporium in metropolitan Atlanta. The boyfriend follows Lisa inside “with guns blazing,” according to a witness, killing her and the head of the hardware department before taking his own life.April, 2003: Tacoma Police Chief David Brame, who is embroiled in a tumultuous divorce proceeding, encounters his wife, Crystal, and their two young children in a shopping mall. Drawing his .45–caliber service weapon, he mortally wounds the spouse and turns the gun on himself. The incident prompts the resignation of city officials who had kept Brame at his post, despite danger signs.Episodes like these demonstrate that domestic violence, once confined to the home, now often invades the workplace, blurring the boundary between personal life and the job. Although gruesome accounts of murder and suicide in a work setting bring to mind unstable employees and vindictive customers, all too often the offender is a battering boyfriend, an enraged former spouse, or a partnerturned- stalker.The possibility that an intimate partner may injure an employee challenges employers and unions to devise strategies for protecting the workplace while preserving a zone of privacy for workers. Equally important is keeping the targets of violence from being doubly victimized—by sacrificing their livelihoods as well as their safety.
