In June 1993, Keith Blum, a co-owner of a hair salon in Woodland Hills, remembered giving Ferri a haircut and telling one of those typical barbershop jokes. “If you were locked in a room with Saddam, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and a lawyer, and you had a gun with two bullets in it,” Blum asked Ferri, “who would you shoot?” Ferri apparently had heard the joke before. He answered, “The lawyer—twice.” He then reportedly erupted in laughter “so explosive he had to take off his glasses to wipe the tears from his eyes.” By then, Ferri had already purchased three guns, legally, in Las Vegas, using his Nevada driver’s license and his Nevada home address. On April 25, Ferri bought a TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol. A couple weeks later, on May 9, he bought another TEC-9 pistol.
On June 18, Ferri traveled to the Mojave Desert on an early-morning target shooting trip, with Michael Spivack, a recent acquaintance, and another man. Ferri practiced shooting his TEC-9. He had added a Hell-Fire trigger system to the gun, making it nearly fully automatic and capable of firing between three hundred and five hundred rounds of ammunition per minute. Ferri also added the Hell-Fire system to his second TEC-9. All perfectly legal, of course. During the Mojave outing, Ferri made an “unsolicited out-of-context” statement: “I don’t like lawyers. I don’t like lawyers.”
A week later, on June 25, Ferri was back in the Las Vegas area. At the Pawn & Gun Shop in Henderson, Nevada, he bought a third weapon, a Norinco forty-five-caliber semi-automatic pistol, Model 1911A. He also bought five hundred rounds of forty-five-caliber Black Talon ammunition, two hundred rounds of nine-millimeter Black Talon ammunition, extra clips, a belt holster, and a black utility gun sling for the TEC-9. From Henderson, Ferri drove back to Las Vegas. The next day, June 26, he was off to Barstow, California, on the west side of the Mojave Desert. From Barstow, Ferri drove the white Cadillac DeVille up to Oakland, where he stayed at a Motel 6 on Edes Avenue. He remained in Oakland for three days. He would not allow the chambermaids to clean his room during his stay; he told them he had papers scattered around the room that he did not want disturbed. When he checked out of the Motel 6, he paid cash. He also, weirdly, left behind a seven-inch Skilsaw in an orange metal case. There was a label on it, bearing Ferri’s name. The next night, June 30, Ferri spent in his Cadillac; it was filled with food wrappers, dirty clothing, empty cans and bottles, a cooler with some food in it, and some thermal blankets.
On July 1, 1993, at one thirty-three in the afternoon, Ferri parked the white Cadillac DeVille in the Embarcadero Two garage. An hour or so later, he walked the two blocks to the 101 California Street office tower—where Jody Sposato was giving her deposition in the thirty-fourth floor, with Jack at her side. Nobody stopped him. Building security was not particularly vigilant in those days, and Ferri looked like a middle-aged businessman who could easily be working in the building or visiting someone who did. At 2:45 p.m., Randall Miller, who worked as a salesman for Kodak on the thirtieth floor of 101 California, saw Ferri in the lobby by the security console as he headed to the elevator bank for floors twenty-seven through thirty-six. Miller noticed that the “quite fat” Ferri seemed to be struggling with a metal cart that some clerks at law firms use to transport legal files from one floor to another. Ferri had placed a large black canvas bag into the cart and was having great difficulty pushing it from the building lobby into the elevator.
A few minutes earlier, Ernesto Zuniga, the building superintendent, was on the thirty-fifth floor changing lightbulbs when he realized he needed to go to the supply closet, on the floor below. He took the elevator down a floor, got the supplies he needed, and returned to the thirty-fourth-floor lobby to await the elevator to go one flight up. He saw Ferri there, pacing back and forth. Ferri was dressed in a suit and tie—not unlike a lawyer at Pettit might be—but Zuniga thought he had a strange look on his face, as if he might be lost. Zuniga also noticed the luggage cart off to one side of the lobby and that it had several bags in it. He asked if Ferri needed help but instead of an answer, he got a grumble and a sense that Ferri wanted to be left alone. When the elevator came, Zuniga got on and returned to the floor above.
At about 2:55 p.m., as Randall Miller, the Kodak salesman, was returning to the lobby, Judy Robertson, who worked on the thirty-fourth floor, went to the elevator bank with the idea of going to the thirty-fifth floor to get something to eat. When she got to the elevators, there was no one there. She pressed the elevator button to call the up elevator and when the door opened, she saw Ferri, in the back of the elevator. He had a large gun in his hand. Thinking he wanted to rob her, Robertson offered Ferri her purse. He responded by flipping the elevator stop button, locking the elevator on the floor. It was 2:56 p.m. “It’s okay, you just wait right there,” Ferri told her. “Just wait there.” He didn’t want her money.
While he continued fishing around in his bags, she did not do what he ordered her to do—stay put—and instead bolted from the elevator and ran back into the Pettit office to tell her boss, Robert Burke, and her fellow employees about the fat man in the elevator with a gun. Burke was on the phone, speaking with another attorney, at a different firm. He acknowledged Robertson’s warning but continued his conversation. Seconds later, Robertson yelled into Burke’s office that Ferri was firing away down the hallway and walking toward conference room 34C. Burke shouted into the phone, “Oh my God, it’s gunfire. Call 911.” He hung up. The attorney on the other end of the phone called for help.
It turned out that Ferri had smuggled his two TEC-9 semi-automatic pistols (now operating basically in automatic mode), the pistol, and his hundreds of rounds of ammunition into 101 California in the leather briefcase and suitcase that he was pushing around in the cart. When he got out of elevator sixteen on the thirty-fourth floor, Ferri had the two TEC-9s around his neck in a sling. The pistol was in a holster. He had earplugs in his ears and he was carrying a canvas bag filled with hundreds of rounds of ammunition. He walked out of the elevator and turned to his right, down the hallway toward conference room 34D. He passed several people in the hallway on the way toward 34D but did not stop or seem to notice them. He walked past the secretarial station also without stopping.
In 34D, Sharon O’Roke, a thirty-five-year-old in-house attorney at EDS, was trying to finish up the second day of Sposato’s deposition. Jack was by Sposato’s side in the conference room while O’Roke conducted the deposition. Deanna Eaves, a thirty-three-year-old court reporter from Richmond, California, was dutifully recording Sposato’s words. Jack and Jody sat with their backs to the glass window, facing the interior of the office space and a glass wall that opened onto the thirty-fourth-floor corridor. A closed curtain blocked the view into the conference room. It couldn’t have been a more typical, and more typically mundane, legal setting.
Whether looking inside or outside, one could only see shadows. Ferri stood a couple of feet back from the outside glass wall of the conference room and opened fire with one of his TEC-9 “automatic” weapons. The glass shattered from the impact of the rapid gunfire. Jack was shot six times. Jody was shot five times. They fell from their chairs to the ground. Then, as a protective measure, they moved under the table and lay side by side, trying to avoid further gunfire. They probably survived for around fifteen minutes, long enough to know what was happening to them. Later, when police recovered Jack’s briefcase, they found his unused airline ticket for Los Angeles with bullet holes in it.
* * *
FERRI THEN LEFT CONFERENCE ROOM 34D, turned east, and lighted at the desk of Elizabeth Newark, a legal secretary. She had heard screams and smelled gunpowder and had started dialing 911 when Ferri appeared. “He looked at me, and his face was blank,” she recalled. “He wasn’t interested in me. I gather he was interested in the lawyers.” Brian Berger, her boss and a thirty-nine-year-old litigation partner, yelled at her to run. Berger then went into the office of his partner, Allen Berk, fifty-two, who specialized in labor law, and closed the door. Ferri shot through the door, killing Berk, who was seated at his desk, and critical
ly wounding Berger, in the chest and arm. Ferri continued moving eastward on the thirty-fourth floor, firing indiscriminately at people who were in his path.
He found the interior staircase to the thirty-third floor and another group of Pettit & Martin offices. When Ferri got to the lower floor, he encountered David Sutcliffe, a thirty-year-old intern, who had just come out of the office of attorney Charles Ross. He had just met the California attorney general at a luncheon at the firm and came away a bit starstruck. Ferri fired three times at Sutcliffe, at point-blank range, killing him nearly instantly. John and Michelle Scully, husband-and-wife attorneys at Pettit, were about fifteen feet from Sutcliffe when he was shot. Michelle Scully had been doing some legal research on the thirty-third floor when her husband told her to gather her things. They needed to leave fast because there was a gunman on the thirty-fourth floor, killing people. They grabbed their belongings and headed to the elevators. That’s when they saw Sutcliffe ahead of them. From the opposite direction, she said, she saw “a fat man in a white shirt” walking rapidly. She said she thought he looked like he belonged in the law offices until he shot Sutcliffe. At that moment, she and her husband dashed into an unoccupied office and took refuge behind a file cabinet.
Within seconds, Ferri was in the doorway of the office, pointing the gun in the Scullys’ direction. He walked over to where they were hiding and shot them. He then left the office, turning right. The Scullys were badly hurt. Michelle tried to call 911 but couldn’t get an outside line. They lay still for a few minutes, all the while continuing to hear Ferri firing shots nearby. Suddenly Ferri reappeared in the office doorway, looked at Michelle Scully, didn’t say anything, and walked on. She eventually got through to 911 and was told help was on the way. The police arrived in about fifteen minutes, she said. She tended to her husband, who was hit four times. She checked on Sutcliffe; he was dead. John Scully, twenty-eight, later died as well.
Charles Ross, who had just been speaking to David Sutcliffe moments before he was shot and killed, hadn’t heard any shots, just some noise that he ignored. Suddenly the door to Ross’s office swung open and Ferri was before him. Before Ross could say a word, Ferri shot him in the right upper biceps. Ross then got up and closed the door in Ferri’s face. As he started back to his desk, Ferri opened his office door again and started pointing the gun at him. This time, to try to avoid being shot again, Ross pushed aside Ferri’s gun, ran past him, and found some vacant office space on the thirty-third floor for ten minutes before making his way to the thirty-fourth floor after the police had arrived. “I knew I was confronting a reality I couldn’t even imagine,” Ross told the New York Times a few days later. “The gunman was cold, detached, impassive as if I could be anybody. It made me realize that I had to be as cold-blooded to him as he was to me … I was worried that I would die some pathetic death in the office.” He broke down in tears recalling how upset he was that Sutcliffe, whom he described as “a friendly kid who had a Jimmy Stewart sincerity that was rare,” had been killed moments after leaving his office. “I worked for what I got,” he said. “I fought for my life. But I have survivor’s guilt.”
At about 3:04 p.m., Ferri headed into the fire stairwell between the thirty-third and thirty-second floors. By this time, none of the elevators in 101 California were operating. When he arrived at the thirty-second floor, he reloaded one of the TEC-9 pistols, which had been emptied of a forty-round clip. Police found the empty clip plus a full fifty-round clip in a postal mail tub next to the thirty-second-floor freight elevator. The thirty-second floor at 101 California housed the offices of the Trust Company of the West, a Wall Street investment firm, and the San Francisco office of Davis Wright Tremaine, a large national law firm. Ferri walked past the receptionist into the TCW offices and started firing through a glass window into the office of Donald “Michael” Merrill, a forty-eight-year-old father of two. He cried out, “Oh my God!” He was shot four times and was killed. Ferri then turned to his right and fired into the office of Vicky Smith, forty-one, a marketing executive who had jumped up from her desk to see what the loud noises were coming from next door. She was then hit in the back and head by “a burst of gunfire,” according to police, knocking her to the floor, where she remained, pretending to be dead.
Smith heard secretary Shirley Mooser, sixty-four, take her last breath after Ferri shot her four times. Charles Stockholm, Mooser’s boss, heard the shooting start around 3:03 p.m. He saw Mooser get shot and then fall into his doorway, without moving again. Ferri shot his final victim, Deborah Fogel, nine times through the glass of attorney Harry Shulman’s office. Attorney Paul Smith found her there, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. He administered CPR as best he could, but she soon died.
Ferri left the thirty-second floor of 101 California via the building’s internal stairwell, which exits to the street at ground level. As he was entering the stairwell, he encountered two women who had entered the stairs on the thirty-fourth floor and were trying to escape the carnage that Ferri had created. The women thought Ferri was there to help. They called to him. He shot at them but missed. His gun jammed, giving them the opportunity to escape to the thirtieth floor. But the exit door to the floor was locked. They pounded on the door until it was opened from the inside and they escaped to safety. Ferri, too, tried to escape the stairwell by going to the thirty-first floor. But the door was locked and nobody let him in. There was blood on the door handles, evidencing his efforts to reenter the floor. Now, feeling “trapped in the stairwell,” according to police, Ferri went down to the half floor between the twenty-ninth and thirtieth stories, put his head back against the stairwell wall, put the forty-five-caliber pistol in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. It was around 3:25 p.m. In addition to killing himself, Ferri had killed eight people and wounded another six in what was then one of the worst seemingly random acts of mass murder in American history. It was the worst mass killing in San Francisco history. “Nothing compared to this, and I had seen a lot of bodies in my time,” explained Earl Sanders, who investigated the killings. “The (semiautomatic assault) weapons Ferri had—TEC-9s—turned a 55-year-old, pudgy out-of-shape little man into a killing machine.”
* * *
POLICE FOUND A FOUR-PAGE single-spaced document—titled “LIST OF CRIMINALS, RAPISTS, RACKETEERS AND LOBBYISTS”—on Ferri’s dead body when they came upon it in the 101 California stairwell. After describing his Midwest property deals in “a disconnected, hazy way,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle, he wrote, “I spent the last 13 years trying to find legal recourse and to get back on my feet, only to find a wall of silence and corruption from the legal community.” He claimed Pettit & Martin was biased against him and his foreign investors. “One possibility of the deceit of P & M is old racial and ethnic prejudice: Two of our investors are African, one Spanish. One Muslim.” In another place he wrote, “What happened to me at P & M … was rape”; he added that Pettit & Martin had “not attended to the details” and had given him bad advice intentionally in order to “steal the money and take over the corporation.” The document also claimed that the seller falsified records and bribed people in order to achieve a “ridiculous settlement.”
The San Francisco Chronicle described the document as a “paranoid’s biography” that showed “how he thought his business deals were thwarted by evil conspiracies.” Ferri had no criminal record, and there was no evidence of his drug or alcohol use at the time of the murders. Ferri wrote: “There is this condescending attitude in business that when you get emotionally and mentally raped, well ‘you got screwed’ and the accepted results is the victim is now supposed to go to work at 7-11 or become homeless and the rapist is admired and enveied [sic] as ‘a winner.’”
* * *
CAROL HAD FINISHED UP HER WORKOUT at the Bay Club, was showering, and began to notice that a group of women had gathered around a television screen, with the volume turned up. She asked what was going on and they told her there had been a shooting at 101 California St
reet. “I was half torn,” she said. She needed to go back to her office to find out whether Jack had left her a message about where he had parked the BMW, and she then had to go pick up Zack at day care. “I had this time pressure,” she recalled, “but I also was concerned because then I started hearing things about ‘It’s at a law firm.’ Mind you, nothing related to Jack came to mind because he was to be in LA. What was going through my mind was Oh my God, who do I know that’s in that building in that law firm? Who do I know at Pettit & Martin? That’s what was going through my mind.” She went back to her office. There was no message from Jack about where he had parked the car. She called his secretary but the phone went to voice mail. She didn’t leave a message.
Carol knew she needed to track Jack down in Los Angeles at his next deposition to find out where he had parked the car. She spoke with the receptionist, who told Carol to hold on while she got Michelle, Jack’s secretary. When Michelle got on the phone, Carol could tell there was hesitancy in her voice, trying to figure out how much Carol did or did not know about what was going on. She was put on hold a few more times. “I was beginning to get a little annoyed and impatient,” she said. “But at the same time something instinctively is telling me that something’s amiss here and I didn’t know what it was. So that was a little uneasy.” Someone came on the line to tell Carol that Jack had been at 101 California and that they could not locate him. Carol was still not worried. She told his colleagues that Jack had gone to Los Angeles for another deposition, and had been on a noon flight. Actually, Michelle told Carol, the Sposato deposition had run long and she had changed Jack’s reservation to Los Angeles to a later flight. But no one at Bronson seemed to know what was going on at 101 California other than that Jack had been at Pettit while Sposato was giving her deposition and that it had been delayed.
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