Stephen B. Robinson, a 42-year-old male from Cinnaminson, New Jersey, went to work on June 21, 1972, not knowing that an ordinary afternoon would turn into one of the most notorious mass shootings in the state's history. That day he was inside the Heritage office building at 383 Kings Highway in neighboring Cherry Hill, a professional complex whose first floor housed an employment agency called Key Personnel, Inc. The Heritage building was busy with men moving through offices, phones ringing, paperwork changing hands — the quiet, routine backdrop against which Robinson's life would be abruptly cut short.
The man who shattered that routine was Edwin James Grace, a Pinkerton security guard from New York who had become fixated on Key Personnel. He believed the agency had failed him, unable or unwilling to find him the security job he wanted, and over time his disappointment hardened into anger.
On the afternoon of June 21, at about 2:30 p.m., Grace drove from Brooklyn to Cherry Hill, parked his Volkswagen behind the Heritage building, and walked inside wearing a guard's uniform and carrying two sawed-off. 22-caliber rifles along with a large supply of ammunition.
Grace stepped into the Key Personnel office first. There, according to later accounts, he separated the people in front of him by gender, waving the women aside while focusing his rage on the men who remained. He opened fire at close range, and in those first terrible moments three men in that room were shot while a fourth survived only by leaping through a window as Grace paused to reload. From there the gunman moved methodically through the building, going office to office, reloading as he walked, and continuing to seek out male employees, deliberately sparing women as he passed them in corridors and doorways. Witnesses later estimated that the shooting lasted only a few minutes, yet in that brief span he fired dozens of rounds, turning a professional office into a maze of shattered glass, overturned furniture, and wounded men calling for help.
Robinson was among the men caught inside this chaos. He had come into the Heritage building that day as any working professional might, part of a community of office workers from Cherry Hill, Cinnaminson, and other nearby towns who shared hallways, elevators, and coffee breaks. When Grace's rampage reached the areas where Robinson and others were working, there was little time to react. Contemporary reports and later reconstructions list Robinson alongside five other men who did not survive: Robert Bartone of Delanco, Joseph DePalma and Charles Merkel of Cherry Hill, Theodore G. Hall of Willingboro, and Joseph Boyd of Morristown. All were struck down in the middle of an ordinary workday, their lives linked forever by a few violent minutes inside a suburban office block.
Outside the building, the first calls for help brought a heavy police response. Officers surrounded the Heritage complex, unsure whether more than one gunman might be inside, and prepared to storm the structure. Accounts compiled from news reports describe how Grace, after finishing his circuit through the offices, retreated to a basement area and turned one of his rifles on himself, shooting himself in the head and ending the attack before officers reached him. When law enforcement finally entered, they found a scene of devastation: twelve male victims in total, six dead or fatally wounded and six more gravely injured. Robinson's name appears in those lists of the dead, a member of a small community of workers whose offices had suddenly become the site of a massacre.
In the hours and days that followed, investigators began assembling a picture of the man they quickly identified as the sole suspect. Police and state officials named the gunman as Edwin James Grace, in his early thirties, a Brooklyn native who had been working intermittently as a Pinkerton guard and dealing with mounting frustration toward the Cherry Hill employment agency he blamed for his stalled prospects. Reports from the time describe how he had armed himself heavily, carried a detailed map with marks over Cherry Hill and nearby towns, and focused his attack on the offices of Key Personnel in what authorities interpreted as a targeted act of revenge against the agency.
Grace did not die immediately. After shooting himself, he was found alive, taken into custody and transported under guard from the Heritage building to Cherry Hill Medical Center. Television and print coverage from the period noted that police regarded him as the man responsible for killing six men and wounding six more during the June 21 shooting spree. He remained hospitalized for more than two weeks before succumbing to his injuries on July 8, 1972, at the same medical center. With Grace's death, there would be no trial, no cross-examination, and no formal sentencing; the criminal case ended without a courtroom reckoning, leaving the public record to be shaped instead by investigative files and media narratives.
For Stephen B. Robinson and the other men who died, the aftermath played out in quieter ways: funeral notices in local papers, cemetery records, and the memories carried by families and colleagues. Later memorial efforts, including victim lists on mass-shooting databases and gun-violence remembrance sites, preserved Robinson's name as one of the six men lost in what became known as the Heritage Building Massacre, while community histories in New Jersey still recall that day as a stark reminder of how abruptly violence can intrude on ordinary life. Investigators and chroniclers have consistently identified Edwin James Grace as the only perpetrator, and no other suspects or accomplices have ever been named or arrested in connection with the attack that claimed Robinson's life.
