Patricia Chromik, 22, a White woman, went to work in Albany, New York, on September 23, 1970, expecting an ordinary day inside a state office building. Instead, the morning unraveled into a brief, terrifying burst of gunfire that would end her life and leave co-workers and investigators trying to make sense of what had just happened.
According to contemporary reporting carried by UPI, a quiet senior analyst in the State Department of Labor named Joseph White had been out on sick leave
for about six weeks before returning that Wednesday to his desk in room 545. He arrived carrying a box wrapped in bright red Christmas paper and tied with a large red bow—an ordinary-looking package that concealed something deadly. After sitting at his desk for a short time, White opened fire with a rifle, turning a workplace routine into chaos in minutes.
The attack moved through the building quickly. Reports described the violence as ending in roughly fifteen minutes, with victims struck on different floors as White ranged through office spaces. Patricia Chromik was among those killed during the burst of shooting; other employees who died were Sandra L. Peters, Linda D. Willis, and Mary Ann Reinisch. In the aftermath, the building was treated as an active crime scene, and law enforcement pieced together the path of the shooter and the sequence of shots from witness accounts and physical evidence.
White did not survive to face arrest or prosecution. An AP account reported that he ultimately put a bullet through his own head. Investigators recovered a note found on his body; Albany County District Attorney Arnold Proskin said it contained what he called a “statement of his intellectual processes,” and he declined to describe it as a conventional suicide note or to publicly confirm any motive. Police also traced the weapon—described as a. 308 Remington rifle—learning it had been obtained from a local sporting-goods store, while also authenticating that the note had been written by White. With the shooter dead, there were no criminal charges, trials, or convictions tied to Patricia Chromik’s killing, only the grim certainty of who had done it and the unanswered question of why.
In the years since, Patricia Chromik has been remembered through public memorial records noting her death in Albany on September 23, 1970, and her burial in the Capital Region. The sparse facts preserved in these records—names, dates, and places—stand in quiet contrast to the sudden violence of that morning, when an office corridor became a killing ground and a wrapped box became the last warning no one understood in time.
