Postal worker shoots two co-workers at Des Moines mail facility before swift capture

A postal worker opened fire on two of her co-workers inside the main U.S. Postal Service building in Des Moines on Thursday morning, wounding both women before officers caught her on a nearby bike path within minutes, police said. A third employee was hurt in a fall while trying to escape the building.

The shooting happened shortly after 9 a.m. on the second floor of the postal facility at 1165 2nd Ave., in a work area closed to the public, according to the Des Moines Police Department's account reported by NBC News. Witnesses told officers they heard 10 to 12 shots. Police identified the suspect as Jennifer Christine Pledger, 39, of West Des Moines, and said she was a postal employee herself.

The building is formally known as the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Memorial Post Office, a name Congress attached to the 1165 2nd Avenue facility through a 2009 law honoring service members from the two wars. It functions as the main postal hub for Des Moines, handling retail counter service as well as back-of-house mail operations on the floor where the shooting occurred.

Officers on scene within three minutes

Calls began reaching Des Moines police around 9:10 a.m. Officers arrived within three minutes and set up a perimeter around the building, which sits just north of downtown and across the street from one of the city's main hospitals. Pledger left the building on foot and was taken into custody at 9:21 a.m. along a bike path near the facility, police said. She did not resist arrest, and investigators recovered a 9mm handgun at the location where she was detained.

Police said the two women she is accused of shooting were 45 and 53 years old. According to the account relayed by police, Pledger stood over one of the women after she had already fallen and fired again before continuing to shoot as she fled the building. A 55-year-old male employee was injured in a fall as he tried to get away but was not shot. All three victims were taken to a hospital and were in stable condition Thursday, with none of the injuries believed to be life-threatening.

Des Moines police Sgt. Paul Parizek, the department's spokesman, said of the victims:

"They're all at the hospital. They are being cared for right now."

Pledger faces two counts of attempted murder, two counts of willful injury causing serious injury and one count of intimidation, according to police. Her case is expected to proceed through the Polk County District Court, part of the Iowa Judicial Branch's Fifth Judicial District, which covers Polk County. It was not immediately clear Thursday whether she had retained an attorney, and police said she had made no statement about a motive. Additional accounts of the arrest, carried by The Associated Press, matched the local police version in every material respect, including the timeline, the recovered handgun and the condition of the three victims.

A history of violence the Postal Service has tried to study away

Workplace shootings at postal facilities have punctuated the agency's history for four decades, giving rise to the phrase "going postal." A disgruntled letter carrier shot 14 co-workers in Edmond, Oklahoma, in 1986 before killing himself. A fired worker killed four former colleagues in Royal Oak, Michigan, in 1991. In 2006, a former postal employee killed six workers at a mail-sorting plant in Goleta, California, before taking her own life.

A postal-commissioned study published in 2000 concluded that the "going postal" characterization was largely a myth and that postal employees were, on average, less violent than the broader American workforce. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the federal law enforcement arm that polices crimes against the mail system, says protecting postal employees from assault is one of its core responsibilities, and it is investigating Thursday's shooting alongside local, state and federal authorities.

Postal work is not unusual in carrying elevated risk. Federal labor statistics cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration show that workplace violence is the third-leading cause of fatal occupational injury in the United States; of 5,283 fatal workplace injuries recorded in 2023, 740 resulted from violent acts, including 458 homicides. OSHA's guidance identifies jobs that involve handling money, working with the public or laboring in isolated settings as carrying higher risk, categories that overlap with much of postal work's public-facing delivery side, even though Thursday's shooting took place among co-workers in a non-public area.

The scale of the system in which Thursday's shooting occurred is considerable. The Postal Service reported operating nearly 31,000 retail offices and maintaining more than 236,000 delivery routes nationwide in the past fiscal year, a sprawling workforce spread across tens of thousands of buildings much like the one in Des Moines, where employees on an ordinary Thursday morning found themselves instead barricading doors and waiting for an all-clear.

Nearby schools locked down as police worked the scene

The shooting's ripple effects reached beyond postal workers. Des Moines Public Schools temporarily restricted entry and exit at an elementary school, a district welcome center and a nutrition center located near the post office while the suspect remained unaccounted for. Those restrictions were lifted once police confirmed Pledger was in custody, and normal operations resumed later Thursday morning.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said in an online post that she was in contact with the state Department of Public Safety as the situation unfolded. "We are monitoring the situation and our prayers are with everyone involved," she wrote, adding that she was "grateful for the immediate response by law enforcement."

For the employees who work at the Des Moines postal facility, Thursday's shooting disrupted a normal shift into a lockdown and, for two of their colleagues, a hospital stay. Mail processing and retail operations at the building were affected for at least part of the day as investigators processed the second-floor scene, though neither police nor postal officials detailed how long normal service would be interrupted.

What comes next

Pledger is expected to make an initial court appearance in Polk County in the coming days, where a judge will set bail and she will be formally advised of the charges against her. The Postal Inspection Service's involvement means federal charges tied to assaults on postal employees, which carry their own penalties under federal law, remain possible alongside the state charges already filed by Des Moines police.

Investigators have not said whether Pledger and the women she is accused of shooting had any history of conflict, and police cautioned Thursday that the inquiry into a motive was in its early stages. The Postal Inspection Service said only that it was assisting local, state and federal law enforcement and had no additional findings to release.

Hospital officials have not released further updates on the condition of the three injured employees beyond police confirming Thursday that all were stable. The Des Moines Police Department said it would provide updates as the investigation continues.