American Lawyer Media, June 24, 1994
Recovery has been steady in the year since the 101 California St. shootings
Allen Berk’s office on the 34th floor of 101 California Street at one time housed a water cooler, a maestro’s baton, a slot machine and a kitchen sink that held a spindly potted palm. Like most of the people who worked nearby, his partner Charles Ehrlich often wandered into Berk’s office to grab a drink of water and shoot the breeze with the affable Pettit & Martin partner.
When Berk was shot and killed one year ago during Gian Luigi Ferri’s rampage through Pettit’s offices, Ehrlich remembers, “the water cooler was also a casualty.”
The kitchen sink, however, survived. It sits in a small window alcove of Berk’s former office, now an otherwise unremarkable “caucus” room where people can make phone calls or seek refuge from meetings in the nearby conference room.
When he visits Berk’s old office these days, Ehrlich recalls the time, as a young man, when he interviewed at Los Angeles’ Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. An attorney was moving into the office of an old-guard partner who had just died. It seemed odd to Ehrlich, at the time, that they would replace him so quickly, but he also realized that firms can’t enshrine every office of every deceased lawyer.
Pettit & Martin, though, had suffered a decidedly more tragic experience. The July 1, 1993 shooting spree left nine people dead – three of them Pettit employees.
So Allen Berk’s office remains unoccupied, a testament to the strange reality of Pettit’s losses.
“I haven’t thought about [Ferri] for a long time,” says Pettit partner-in-charge James Lowy. “I guess what I feel toward him is anger. I still don’t quite understand why he did what he did.”
The full reality of what Ferri did hit Lowy the morning after the shooting. “I was the first one in the office,” he recalls. “I went downstairs before the maintenance people came to clean. It was very emotional to see the broken glass. I had a lot of difficulty walking around then.”
By the time the firm opened its doors five days after the shooting, it had restored Berk’s office and the conference room where Ferri confronted four other victims to their pre-shooting condition.
John Fox, a San Jose partner who worked with Berk in Pettit’s labor group, saw the firm’s efforts – which included placing a memorial wreath on the conference room table and opening Berk’s office for his friends and co-workers to see – as an attempt at both normalcy and remembrance.
“It was a way to help psychologically ease the transition from what had been to what was,” recalls Fox, who left for Fenwick & West about a month after the shooting. “The reality was inescapable – there had been a shooting. We didn’t want to pretend it hadn’t happened.”
The firm has chosen this coming Thursday, the day before the one-year anniversary of the shootings, to mark the sad occasion with a private memorial. “The day is etched in our mind as the Thursday before the Fourth of July weekend,” explains Pettit marketing director Victoria Spang.
The firm plans to hold another small gathering in the office on the actual anniversary, as will Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon, whose labor partner Jack Berman was one of those killed in the conference room where Ferri fired his first shots. All of the gatherings are private. “This is an anniversary we’d just as soon not have to remember,” says Bronson managing partner James Krieg.
Both firms are also offering time off to employees who want to attend a June 30 march organized by the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, which will proceed from Grace Cathedral to the Embarcadero beginning at noon.
It is hard to imagine, walking into Pettit’s airy reception area today, that anything could ever shatter the firm’s plush formality. But when Gian Luigi Ferri emerged from the marble-walled elevators armed with an arsenal of semi-automatic weapons, he did so with a vengeance.
The day after the shootings, a Friday, the firm arranged for counseling sessions at a nearby hotel. Pettit’s 230 employees were not required to show up for work after the long Fourth of July weekend – but most did.
“We all kind of needed to be together,” recalls Nancy Asbill, a labor associate who worked closely with Berk and associate John Scully, who was also killed that day. “Everyone was upset and frightened. We wanted to be with people who had been through it.”
For about a month after the shootings, therapists were available at the Pettit offices for anyone who needed a sympathetic ear. But for most people, work served as the best means to transform an office that had become a killing ground for a brief period back into a workplace. Slowly things began to seem, if not normal, then at least routine.
“People got back to work pretty quickly,” Pettit’s chairman, Theodore Russell, recollects. “Work habits are long-term things.”
The conference room where Ferri began his shooting spree was put into use immediately; the 33rd floor, where Ferri shot contract attorney Charles “Lou” Ross and killed summer clerk David Sutcliffe, was sublet to a new tenant (the firm was in the process of moving out of the floor before the tragedy).
For those who use the rooms regularly, the dailiness of their jobs quickly overpowered any sense of the eerie or macabre in the places Ferri touched.
“Our office is not a scary place, it’s a professional workplace,” explains Bernadette Davison Bantly, another associate in the labor group, when asked how she can work in a space that to outsiders may retain a haunted quality. “Life goes on. That may sound callous, but it’s not like we had the luxury of falling apart…. We continue to work, and that’s how Alan would have wanted it.”
Still, one partner who left the firm a few months after the shooting recounts the difficulty he experienced going to the 34th floor conference room. “I was probably in there one time maybe three or four months later for a meeting. I didn’t feel comfortable being there.”
Pettit & Martin had had its troubles before the shootings, with a large chunk of its practice anchored to the sinking real estate market. The downturn sparked an exodus of profits and partners that reduced the firm from a peak of 240 lawyers in the late 1980s to just 150 now.
Ten partners have left since July 1. But one doesn’t sense, talking to those who left, that their departures stemmed from any pall that the carnage may have cast over the firm.
“If anything,” says former construction partner John Heisse, who joined Thelen, Marrin, Johnson & Bridges in May, “The shooting made it harder to leave. Any time a group of people goes through something like that it forms a bond. I decided to change firms for unrelated reasons, but once that decision was made, it was more difficult to leave.”
The former partner who felt uncomfortable visiting the 34th floor conference room agrees. “Because I was there that day I have a connection to everybody there. I would rather not have to have that connection, but at the same time I appreciate it,” he observes. “I felt for a period of a couple of months that I shouldn’t even consider other options.”
Chairman Russell says that the shooting may have played a factor in the departure of a couple of employees, including one associate and Berk’s secretary, who left in late April. “These were people who were here a really short period of time and didn’t have that investment in the firm.”
At Bronson, one associate who had worked with Jack Berman did decide to leave. “Jack’s death was very hard on his associates, ” explains Edwin Currey, a labor partner and close friend of Berman’s. “Seeing that someone close to their age could die, and could die quickly.”
Currey compares the effect of Berman’s death on the firm to a death in the family. “There is a terrible intensity for a while, and then life, fortunately, goes on. There is still a terrible sense of sadness here.”
While Bronson lost one lawyer, Pettit survived not only Ferri’s terrifying siege of the firm, but the ensuing media blitz. But Russell asserts that the event’s impact on firm business has been negligible. “When we met after the shooting to discuss its impact, we concluded that our existing clients would, if anything, feel more loyal to us. We were more concerned with the questions of what it would do to new clients.
Russell notes that the firm is signing on new clients at a much healthier rate than this time last year. But, he says, “That is not because of the shooting but because of the recovery in the California economy.”
For those working at the firm, the events precipitated an era of hypersensitivity that sometimes meant people were “not as resilient as they might be,” recalls Heisse. At the same time, he says, “There was a tremendous sense of concern about everybody else.”
It also ushered in what one former partner terms “an era of good feelings.”
“Partners who would usually walk past someone in the hall would now say hello to everyone. People struck up conversations with each other who had never even known each others’ names.”
Lou Ross, one of the victims who escaped with an injury to his arm, remembers the months after he returned to work as a time of great kindness at a firm where he had worked as a contract attorney for only six months.
“There were probably 15 to 20 people that I knew well, and 20 to 30 more who I knew by name,” recalls Ross, who now works as a mediator with the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. “Out of the subset I knew, people were obviously quite kind. But what was interesting was how kind and forthcoming the people I didn’t know were after the shooting.”
Labor associate Bantly, who is currently on maternity leave, thinks the tragedy allowed staff members to share the collegial bond that had previously been present only among the firm’s lawyers. “A tragedy like this kind of puts everyone on the same level.” She remarks. “We’re just all people.”
Doors remain open within the Pettit & Martin offices, but not to the outside. The entrances from the elevators – the open doors through which Ferri walked into the firm that day – are now regulated by black boxes and magnetic badges. “Since July 1, there has probably not been an elevator door propped open for more than a minute,” Heisse says.
Everyone in Pettit’s labor group has tacked a picture of Allen Berk to their bulletin board or taped it to a piece of furniture in their office. It’s a photograph taken at his 50th birthday party, two years before he was killed, and he is wearing a broad smile that brings to life the powerful, playful presence his friends remember.
The department hasn’t hired any new lawyers since the shootings, although a new associate has signed on to start in September. In the meantime, the workload, which was heavy when Berk and Scully were alive, continues unabated now that there are only five full-time labor lawyers in the San Francisco office.
“We’ve acquired new clients and we haven’t lost any old clients,” says labor group head Michael Hallerud, who worked closely with Berk and considered him his best friend. “Working gave you the hope that something approaching normalcy is possible.”
Near his picture of Berk, which is taped to the glass window of a bookcase in his office, Hallerud has also put up Scully’s firm portrait. Both Berk’s and Scully’s name plates from their offices lie on the shelf below.
“I don’t need the office to remind me of Allen, although it does,” reflects Hallerud. “I don’t consider it an act of disloyalty to Allen that I survived, physically and emotionally.”
Asbill and Bantly, the two associates who had worked with Berk, have moved their offices to be near Hallerud. In that section of the 34th floor, Berk is still a powerful force. “There is not a day that goes by here when Allen is not present,” says Hallerud. “He represents a standard that we try to live up to, though I’m sure we also probably idealize him. Allen would be tickled to know he’s doing better now than he’s ever done.”
Memory has a funny way of helping us though tragedies, as Lou Ross has concluded in the months since he was shot. Ross originally recounted to police that he closed the door to his office after being shot in the arm, then jumped Ferri when the gunman burst through the door, and ran out.
A few months later, Ross realized that, in fact, he hadn’t closed the door. “I added the door closing – sort of a waking hallucination – I think as a psychological method to protect myself and enable me to run at this guy with a gun when I had no gun and was completely defenseless,” Ross remembers.
When he thinks of Gian Luigi Ferri now, he says that he finds that he can even begin to forgive him. “He was a pathetic, lonely, scared, impotent creature who did something morally outrageous and psychologically deranged, but I have some forgiveness for him in the sense that he was a distraught person.”
Others at the firm are less forgiving. But Nancy Asbill believes that the fact that Ferri took his own life in the shooting spree may make it easier for them to deal with their feelings. “I think all of us would probably have a much more difficult time emotionally with respect to Ferri if he were still around,” Asbill says, “At least there’s some finality to it. You can close the door.”
Everyone at Pettit has closed the door on Ferri in their own way. “Some people went into therapy, some people dealt with it through work, some people have gotten very active in the gun control thing, some people have pushed it away,” Ehrlich observes.
Ehrlich spent the weekend after the shootings phoning colleagues to help him form Legal Community Against Violence. He estimates he spent 30 to 40 percent of his time getting the organization off the ground last year, and currently spends at least an hour and a half each day working on LCAV matters. That is the way he has come to terms with Ferri’s legacy.
“I’m not talking about this for the sake of talking about it. I’m trying to do something that’s predicated upon what happened,” Ehrlich explains.
“If you can see anything positive in a terrible situation like this,” adds Bernadette Bantly, “this is it: We’ve recovered. We haven’t forgotten, but we have recovered.”
