Search turns up 'items of interest'
Police officials say Sanmarco executed her neighbor

By Jim Maniaci
Cibola County Bureau

MILAN — Postal inspectors collected three boxes of "items of interest" during Thursday's search of the hillside home of Jennifer Sanmarcos, about a half-mile outside the village limits.

The death toll following Sanmarcos' Monday night rampage is now up to eight people, including herself. The Associated Press said the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office confirmed that Sanmarcos killing spree began early Monday evening with the execution of a neighbor with whom she had contentious relations for disturbing the peace at their apartment complex.

Then around 9 p.m., California time, she began gunning down workers about 80 people escaped the building in the parking lot of the gigantic U.S. Postal Service mail sorting facility in Goleta, an ocean-front city adjacent to Santa Barbara. Once she went inside the postal service complex, three more workers met their death with slugs from her 9 mm handgun. Another woman would later die from her wounds.

The Sanmarcos case is the deadliest one of work place mass killings by a woman in U.S. history.

United States Postal Inspection Service press officer Amanda McMurrey, who came to Milan from the division headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, said Thursday night that the execution of the federal search warrant from a U.S. magistrate in Albuquerque concluded around 1:45 p.m. And the three boxes are being taken to California where investigators will sift through them to see if there is anything that will help determine why the 44-year-old woman shot and killed seven people before turning the weapon on herself.

At 9:35 a.m. Thursday, officers from the village of Milan, city of Grants and county of Cibola cordoned off Enchanted Mesa Trail, the twisting two-lane gravel road which leads to the Sanmarco compound from Elkins Road.

The area was blocked off for a safety search, since the federal inspectors were not sure what they would find. If any of the three buildings had been booby-trapped, they didn't want any civilians around. Two neighbors voluntarily left during the safety search which took about 50 minutes.

"We have reports that firing of guns had been heard there" so what McMurrey called "an abundance of caution" was being exercised since inspectors didn't know if she had access to black powder and other explosives.

Sanmarcos was trying to sell the view property, Cibola County Undersheriff Johnny Valdez confirmed.

After the street was cordoned off, a convoy of 22 vehicles, including a U.S. Air Force Security Police K-9 unit, raced up the hill. McMurrey said that unit from Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque carried a specially trained bomb-sniffing dog. Units from all three local law enforcement agencies, as well as postal inspectors, made up the contingent of more than two dozen officers.

Meanwhile, wire services, networks, radio stations and newspapers have been trying to track down and authenticate copies of Sanmarco's short-lived newsletter, "The Racist Press."

She distributed it via the USPS from a Milan Post Office box during 2004 when she held a village business license; however, the Village Clerk's Office later declined to give her a second license for a cat food plant because she was outside Milan's official boundary.

Sanmarcos worked at the Post Office center in California from 1997-2003 when she was given a disability retirement, McMurrey said Wednesday. Co-workers began reporting trouble with her in 2001. In 2004, she apparently moved to Cibola County.

At first Milan and Grants residents and businesses considered her merely an eccentric. But her increasingly erratic behavior began to cause some concern; however, she never did enough to be arrested, even though she came close twice. Her major target was the Milan Village Hall, where workers called the police chief to remove her after harassing visits worried workers. Because she left before he arrived, he never did establish contact with her, but the visits stopped.

— To contact reporter Jim Maniaci in Grants, telephone 285-6184 or (505) 870-7775 (cellular).