In the early hours of October 10, 1991, Donald Scofield McNaught, a 63-year-old male postal worker, made his way to the Ridgewood, New Jersey post office where he had worked for years, a steady presence in a job he had taken after a life that already included service in the U.S. Marine Corps and a long residence in northern New Jersey. He had lived in Hackensack before settling in Pompton Lakes decades earlier, commuting to Ridgewood to handle the heavy, unseen work of moving the mail through
the night. To co-workers he was one of the quiet anchors of the overnight shift, a man in late middle age who had spent six years with the U.S. Postal Service in Ridgewood and treated the job with the same sense of duty he had once brought to the military.
What Donald could not have foreseen was that another man’s resentment toward the same workplace had been building toward catastrophe. Joseph M. Harris, a former Ridgewood postal worker who had been fired after years on the night shift, had been nursing grievances since his dismissal in 1990. Investigators later learned he had written an angry manifesto about the postal service and those he believed had wronged him, focusing particular hatred on his former supervisor, Carol Ott. On the night of October 9, Harris dressed in black, armed himself with a cache of weapons that included an Uzi-type firearm, a. 22-caliber pistol with a silencer, explosives, and even a samurai sword, and went first to Ott’s home in Wayne, New Jersey. There he killed Ott with the sword and shot her fiancé, Cornelius Kasten Jr., setting in motion a rampage that would carry him next to the familiar loading docks and sorting tables of the Ridgewood post office.
As the clock moved past 2 a.m., the quiet of the Ridgewood facility was broken when Harris slipped to the rear entrance, positioning himself where employees arrived for work under cover of darkness. Accounts describe him dressed in dark, paramilitary or “ninja-style” clothing and wearing a bullet-resistant vest, prepared for both confrontation and siege. When Donald and fellow mail handler Joseph VanderPaauw came to start their shift, they walked into an ambush crafted by someone who knew exactly how the building operated at that hour. Harris opened fire, shooting both men as they arrived, turning what had been a routine start of the workday into a lethal attack that left Donald fatally wounded on the ground of the place where he had simply come to do his job.
The violence did not end with the initial burst of gunfire. A postal truck driver who approached the building came under fire as well, and responding officers soon found themselves in a dangerous, shifting scene. Harris threw explosive devices at police as they tried to enter, and the encounter quickly evolved into a prolonged standoff around the besieged post office. For hours, law enforcement surrounded the building while Harris remained inside with his weapons and bombs, a situation so volatile that investigators later compared it to a small war zone tucked into an otherwise quiet New Jersey town. Only after roughly four hours did Harris surrender to authorities, ending the siege and allowing rescuers and investigators to fully reach Donald and the other victims.
In the days that followed, Ridgewood and the neighboring communities tried to process the scale of what had happened. News stories described large crowds gathering to mourn the rampage victims, and Donald’s own obituary, carried in regional papers, sketched the outline of a life that had begun in Teaneck in 1928 and wound through military service, family, and decades of steady work before ending violently in a place that had once simply been his job. He was remembered as a Marine veteran, a longtime resident of Pompton Lakes, and a postal employee whose life was cut short by another man’s carefully planned revenge. Memorial listings and later online tributes recorded him as “lost to gun violence” on October 10, 1991, one of four people killed by Harris in less than a day.
For investigators and prosecutors, the question of who was responsible was never in doubt. Harris, 35, of Paterson, was arrested at the scene after his surrender and charged with the murders at both Ott’s home in Wayne and the Ridgewood post office. Over the next several years, details of his earlier crimes emerged, including a previously unsolved 1988 Montville home invasion in which a man was murdered and his family terrorized by an assailant dressed in black; Harris was ultimately linked to that case as well. Juries convicted him of multiple murders, and he was sentenced to death for his crimes, though he died of natural causes on death row in 1996. The Ridgewood killings, including the death of Donald McNaught, became part of the grim pattern of workplace massacres that etched the phrase “going postal” into the American vocabulary, a shorthand for sudden, lethal eruptions of rage in places where people like Donald had simply gone to work expecting to see another ordinary day.
