On June 21, 1972, 22-year-old Robert Bartone, a male resident of Delanco, New Jersey, was inside the Heritage Office Building at 383 Kings Highway North in nearby Cherry Hill when an ordinary afternoon of office work was shattered without warning. The two-story structure, known locally as the Heritage or Heritage House building and home to the Key Personnel, Inc.
employment agency, was busy with clerical routines and job placements when a visitor arrived whose anger had been quietly building for months.
That visitor was Edwin James Grace, a Pinkerton security guard from Brooklyn who had become fixated on Key Personnel after he felt the agency had failed to find him the kind of job he believed he deserved. Shortly after 2:30 p.m., Grace drove down from New York to Cherry Hill, parked near the building, and walked inside carrying two sawed-off. 22-caliber firearms and a large supply of ammunition, described in contemporary reports as multiple twenty-round magazines that together gave him close to a hundred shots. Once upstairs in the office suite, witnesses later told reporters that he calmly ordered women out of his way before beginning to fire at the men around him, moving from room to room as he reloaded and continued the attack.
Within minutes, the business day had turned into what newspapers called a bloodbath. Grace's bullets struck twelve men in all, six of whom would die from their wounds. Among the dead was Bartone, listed in press accounts as “22, of Delanco,” alongside Joseph A. DePalma, Charles Merkel, Theodore G. Hall, Stephen B. Robinson, and Joseph Boyd, all of them male victims who had simply been in the wrong place when the gunman chose to open fire. Surviving witnesses described diving for cover, huddling in corners with overturned chairs for shields, or climbing out of windows to escape while the sound of shots grew weaker and then finally stopped. Outside, police surrounded the building in force after a wounded man managed to summon help, and officers eventually entered under cover of tear gas to find bodies and injured men scattered through the office space, the women spared but traumatized by what they had seen.
Bartone's life appears in the record mainly through the bare lines of these reports and later memorial pages: a 1950 birth year, a home in Delanco, and the stark notation that he “lost his life” or was “killed in the shootings” at Cherry Hill on that June afternoon. He is remembered as one of six men whose names recur in lists of the dead whenever the Heritage Building Massacre is recalled, a shorthand title that later writers and memorial sites have given to the attack. Over time, the incident has been cited as an early example of a modern workplace mass shooting, the kind of event that would become grimly more familiar in later decades, but in 1972 it shocked communities far beyond southern New Jersey as wire-service stories carried Bartone's name to newspapers across the country.
The investigation into Bartone's death focused entirely on Grace, who was identified from the outset as the lone assailant. When officers and medical personnel reached the upper floor, they discovered that the gunman had turned one of his weapons on himself, inflicting head and neck wounds that left him gravely injured but still alive. Taken to Cherry Hill Medical Center, he survived for a little over two weeks before dying there on July 8, 1972, from his self-inflicted injuries. Contemporary and later accounts consistently describe the shooting as the act of a single disgruntled guard; there is no indication in those records of accomplices, additional suspects, or further arrests connected to the killings. With Grace dead and the motive traced back to his grievance against the employment agency in the Heritage building, Bartone's case—and the larger massacre of which it was a part—closed without a trial, leaving only the names of the victims, the address on Kings Highway, and the echo of a few terrible minutes to carry the story forward into memory.
