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Employment Network News Safety in the Workplace MAN KILLS 8, and HIMSELF at GMAC Office JACKSONVILLE June 19, 1990- A man whose car had been repossessed blasted his way through an auto financing office with a rifle and a pistol Monday, killing eight people and wounding at least five before committing suicide. There were 86 people in the office of the General Motors Acceptance Corp. in the Baymeadows Office Park. A customer was the first victim, shot to death at the front counter. Three employees were shot at their desks. The rest took cover under theirs -- death bunkers for six of them. Neighbors on West 22nd Street said Pough, 42, was a nice guy who minded his own business. Pough, pronounced "Pew" and nicknamed Pop, was described as a day laborer. His last known employer was a heating, ventilating, air-conditioning and sprinkler system contractor. He lived on the second floor of a worn cement block house, with the ground floor boarded up and the yard mostly bare dirt with a rusty weight bench standing outdoors. His 1988 Pontiac Grand Am was repossessed in January. It is not certain if that alone drove him into so great a rage, Duval County Sheriff James McMillan said. After surveying the massacre scene at the General Motors Acceptance Corp. in Baymeadows Office Park, the sheriff was certain of this: "It's just a terrible, terrible, senseless thing. It is one of the worst things I've seen in my 20-some-odd years of police work." GMAC, one of the nation's largest car financing companies, arranges time payments for customers of GM dealers. Since losing his Pontiac, Pough had been driving a 1977 Buick. Between shootings early Sunday, it jumped a curb and hit a pedestrian. Neighbors said Pough's routine was fixed: Carrying a hard hat, he left home every day at 6:30 a.m. and was home by 3:30 p.m. "He was a nice person. He came in his house, minded his own business," said neighbor Lonnie Webster. None of the neighbors really knew any more about Pough than who he was, said Mary Trapp across the street. "Everybody's like that. We don't visit with nobody." "It looks like he set out to do some real terrible things even as early as the weekend. Whether he had it in mind to go out to GMAC at that time, we don't know," the sheriff said. At 10:45 a.m. Monday, he parked at the GMAC office and left a 9mm semiautomatic pistol locked in the trunk of his Buick. He came in the door and shot a customer at the front counter -- Julia White Burgess, 42, of Keystone Heights -- and moved into the large, open room as employees dived for cover under desks. "He just started walking through the building and shooting," said McMillan.
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