On the morning of Friday, August 19, 1983, the post office in Johnston, South Carolina, became the scene of a deadly workplace attack. Former mailman Perry Bush P.B. Smith entered the building armed with a 12-gauge shotgun and began shooting. Postmaster Charles McGee, 49, was pursued outside, chased into the nearby Pantry convenience store, and fatally shot after Smith kicked down a storage-room door where McGee was hiding. Three other men were wounded: postal employees Allen Thomas and Monroe Kneece, and off-duty officer Robert Carroll, who was shot when his weapon misfired as he attempted to intervene.

Smith was taken into custody and charged with murder and three counts of assault and battery with intent to kill. After periods of mental-health commitment and competency proceedings, Smith was tried multiple times; at a November 1987 trial a jury convicted him of McGee’s murder and one count of assault and battery with intent to kill, and he received a life sentence plus ten years. Did anyone in Johnston at the time remember warning signs or interactions between Smith and the post office staff in the months before August 1983?