Jennifer San Marco

Sometime in November, a mental health clinic manager named Darlene Hayes said she saw San Marco alone in a post office parking lot kneeling at her car and talking to herself. When asked what she was doing, she replied, "They pray before they get in." She was supposedly talking about her sister and brother (who she apparently believed were there). Hayes called the police and left several minutes later. According to a police lieutenant, there was no record of Hayes’s call.

The Goleta postal facility shootings were a spree killing perpetrated by Jennifer San Marco on January 30, 2006. San Marco, a former US Postal Service employee, shot and killed seven people in Goleta, California before taking her own life.

On January 30, 2006, San Marco drove to her former Santa Barbara condominium and killed Beverly Graham, a former neighbor who she argued with. She then drove to the mail processing plant in Goleta, California. San Marco entered the sprawling plant's lot by tailgating another car as it passed through the gate. She gained entry to the building by taking an employee's identification badge at gunpoint in order to gain an electronic access to the secure staff entrance. She then told the employee to leave and was unharmed.

San Marco's car broke down in Grants, New Mexico sometime in 2004 and she ultimately stayed there until her death. In the small town of Grants, San Marco earned a reputation for her strange behavior, which included speaking (or sometimes furiously shouting) to herself, ordering food at restaurants and bolting out the door before eating it, stripping naked in public (often in random parking lots), kneeling and praying in random places (often roadsides), talking to an imaginary friend, screaming death threats, yelling profane rap lyrics, and making racist comments. She began getting tattoos and showed them to a neighbor named Jeannie Steen. When Steen didn't react, San Marco walked around her in a circle and spat on the ground.

In July 2004, she was denied a business license to begin publishing a periodical which would have been known as The Racist Press. San Marco also at one point said she wanted to register a cat food business and was rejected because she lived in an unincorporated area of Cibola County. While being interviewed there, she would often talk to herself. After the rejection, she would frequently come to the office and stare at an employee named Sonya Salazar and ask to see her. Salazar was often told to hide when San Marco came to the office. San Marco once made a rude accusation that Salazar slept with someone and authorities were called. She also came into contact with authorities after she appeared naked at a gas station. She was clothed when the officers arrived and ultimately let off with a warning. These run-ins with authorities were frequent and she was once admonished for driving half-naked. San Marco sold her condominium and told people she was going to visit a sister on the East Coast.

She had held down a number of jobs, including working as a dispatcher for the Santa Barbara Police Department in the mid-1990s, a job for which she underwent a background check and psychological evaluation. She left the job after several months. San Marco worked at a high school serving lunch before quitting in 2000. She eventually bought a condominium and went to work for the postal service as a clerk. She left on psychological disability following a 2003 incident in which she was pulled out from under a mail-sorting machine and had to be wheeled from her workplace by police in handcuffs. She did return briefly, but was again removed from the building due to her erratic behavior and never returned. She was institutionalized at a Ventura hospital for three days in February 2001.

Jennifer San Marco (December 6, 1961-January 30, 2006) was born in Brooklyn, New York. She went to Edward R. Murrow High School. She later attended Brooklyn College and studied natural resources management at Rutgers University in New Jersey but didn't graduate. In 1989 she came to California, where after studying she was hired as a guard at medium-security Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe. She quit two days before her probation period ended. She never gave a reason for quitting and was described as a good worker.