Ahh, the humble boss. A sub-species of humanity that we all have to deal with one at point. Identifying characteristics of a boss include a propensity to never be there when required, consume vast quantities of caffeine despite always being late (and likely getting more sleep than normal), make jokes that are funny as a heart attack, and have the strange belief that they are attractive even if they have the sex appeal of a car accident. The only reason why the average person puts up with their boss is because they are reliant on an artifact known as the ‘paycheck’ which the average person uses to live a normal life that doesn’t involve sleeping under bridges or dumpster diving for food.

All joking aside, one thing that all of us who deal with annoying employers have in common is the fantasy of exacting revenge on them for all manner of annoyances and outrages. Some of those fantasies are harmless, like mooning them after winning the lottery jackpot, and juvenile like spiking their ever so precious caffeinated beverage with a touch of LSD and blaring out Skrillex music while watching the inevitable fireworks…

But most fantasies aren’t that creative or demented. Some lean more towards gunpowder and sharp pointy objects and giant dragons that obey our every command. For most sane people, that just remains a bunch of electrical signals in our brains that give us the pictures in the process we fondly call imagination.

However, for a certain group of people, they just can’t be bothered with simply envisioning themselves as Ramboesque commandos infiltrating fortified compounds and riddling the big boss within with imaginary bullets. They feel the need to actually pull it off. Sometimes this is a result of prolonged abuse, other times it’s because they were fired from a job that they couldn’t live without, or at least didn’t want to lose, or a combination of these. It happens a lot more than you think… according to The Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1 in 10 bosses are murdered.

So now, for your reading pleasure, here is a list of top 15 individuals who fired back at their bosses after getting fired.

15. Christian Rene Haley

OK, so this isn’t technically a man killing his boss. It’s actually even worse…

On December 20th, 2013, Marylyn Erb and Kelley Erb were at their home, minding their own business, before Christian Haley walked right in and smashed their heads with a cement block. The actual boss, Todd Erb, returned to find his wife and daughter dead in a pool of their own blood. He was justifiably distraught, but Haley was soon arrested and charged with the murder. He was brought on trial and found guilty in 2015 and is now serving life imprisonment without parole.

The reason for being fired? Poor work attendance. You’d think that someone who wants to keep their job so badly that they’d kill someone for it would make a note to show up at work. As it turned out, Christian had a variety of mental illnesses that contributed to his ill-fated decision. Illness that should have been treated sooner and with more care by society.

14. Rodney Jackson

His coworkers called him a quiet man who kept to himself. In the real world that means introverted or shy or someone who just don’t like socialization. In the movies that means serial killer. This is one situation where the movies definitely got it right.

49-year-old Rodney Jackson came back to work despite the fact that he was fired for whatever reason, and then promptly pulled out a pistol and shot his former supervisor multiple times before he tried to flee the scene in a stolen truck. He eventually grew a conscience and turned himself in. No one was able to figure out why he decided to do it. Either way Rodney isn’t going to get out of prison any time soon.

13. Irelio Reyes Osorio

Drinking on the job is never a good idea. Not only because coffee is generally cheaper than whiskey, but also because there are very few jobs that would let you keep them if you hit the juice while you’re supposed to be working. Irelio Osorio is someone who disregarded that rule and ended up getting the can for it. I’m sure he wasn’t thrilled when he realized that it wasn’t a can of beer.

In fact, he was so not thrilled by it that he bombarded his boss with threatening emails and texts and made demands for the pay that he felt he was owed. The two agreed to meet… and Irelio promptly stabbed his boss multiple times, but that wasn’t enough, he also ran over his former employer with a car.

But apparently his boss was a terminator or something, since he actually managed to survive the ordeal. OK, so this is another cheater entry in that the boss wasn’t technically killed, but it is just amazing how over the top the entire thing got. Most murderers would have been content with just shooting their boss and being done with it. But no, Irelio wanted to utterly destroy him. How he managed to fail is anyone’s guess.

12. Mario Betancourt

The year 2000 once seemed like such a far off, futuristic year that entire genres of science fiction promised us robots, flying cars, and space travel. Instead what we got was Windows ME which made Windows 8 look like a masterpiece of operating software. It was also the year when Mario Betancourt decided to shoot both his boss and another co-worker before shouting ‘you won’t make my day miserable now!’ No info on whether or not he was caught, they kinda were bare-bones in their reporting back in the far off and primitive year of 2000…

11. Eric Allen Kirkpatrick

Christmas is normally a time of good cheer. You have a Christmas tree, eggnog, lots of presents, eggnog with a dash of whiskey, friends, eggnog with a dash of vodka, reruns of a Christmas Story, eggnog with a dash of rum, and a general good feeling of goodness that makes you feel happy to be alive.

And the best part of it is when an ex-employee comes in and lights up his former boss like a Christmas tree with a shotgun. That is the sad fate of Benjamin Banky of TallGrass Distribution when he was murdered by Kirkpatrick in December of 2008. At least the police officers could spend the day with their families since Kirkpatrick surrendered himself to them not long after.

10. Howard Huh

Huh? Yeah OK you should have seen that coming. That guy probably heard that joke a million times before I said it, but what is even stranger is that this man worked for someone called Alex Huh before a years-long dispute over who owned the spa they worked at. That is, until Howard decided to settle the dispute with a pistol. The conflict happened in 2010 and Huh was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Alex and Howard were not related, just in case you were wondering. Huh.

9. Byran Uyesugi

Byran’s hobbies included raising goldfish and firearms. I mean liked to own guns and not raise them… that would be silly. What wasn’t silly, however, was when he decided to go up against his employer, Xerox, and thought it was a good idea to shoot up his workplace and kill 7 people.

OK so this is a bit of a cheater. He was not actually fired, but he actually said he wanted to give his employer a reason to fire him by refusing to take mandatory training, which was grounds for insubordination. So it is something that would have happened anyway, but Byran decided to jump the gun and get to the good part, apparently.

8. Andrew John Engeldinger

Byran was too impatient to wait to get fired, but Andrew Engeldinger didn’t bother to wait to plan his shooting, the moment he was informed that he was being fired, he decided to fire at his two managers and went on to kill a total of 6 people. Apparently he was also a fan of 80s slasher movies because he moved slowly and casually throughout the entire ordeal, or so said his former coworkers who narrowly avoided being shot to death. Unlike most people on this list, Andrew didn’t turn himself in or get arrested, he just decided to save society some time and added himself to the list of shooting victims…

7. Chanthinh Sangthavong

Well, after two mass shootings, I think we’re able to go back to some boring, simple single murders here. 2004 brought us another California-based murder after Chanthinh (henceforth called by his nickname ‘Bobby’) killed his supervisor Jerry Sarnowski after losing his job at a Pepsi bottling factory.

That’s really it. No mention of anything special in the news… that’s no good… umm… let’s see… ahh yes! Pepsi used to have a slogan Come Alive With Pepsi. When brought to China many years ago it was mistranslated as ‘Pepsi will bring your ancestors back to life’. Maybe he was just trying to test to see if that would actually work. I dunno. Stranger things have happened.

6. Caswayne Williams

Walmart… beneath the smiles you find on the bag, you’d probably find that at least one of them has been used to hold the body parts of a poor soul who thought he’d make some quick savings… or something like that.

This one might be a little more worrying since unlike the others that happened years ago, this one is barely a few months old, which means the accused killer hasn’t even been convicted yet. Caswayne stabbed to death his former boss, Davon Brown, who he accused of being abusive. It is scary how many of these were probably overblown cases of workplace abuse.

5. Marion Guy Williams

Marion Williams apparently was always a disgruntled individual, but one day he decided that his co-workers and boss had ruined his life and he yelled ‘y’all ruined my life’ before he opened fire on his employer and co-worker, killing both of them. Most of these guys on our list either surrendered or committed suicide following their rampage, but Marion apparently wasn’t the type to do either, since he instead chose to get into an altercation with the police, which resulted in one officer injuring his knee, and two more co-workers getting injured.

4. David M. Stead

Now whether or not this guy was fired by his boss is up for debate. But something bad must have happened between the two, since not only did David break into his former boss’s home and shoot him dead, but also robbed the place. Seems like stealing his life wasn’t the only thing he had in mind when he plotted that crime.

Stead was arrested shortly after his boss’s father found him dead in his home. He had stolen his boss’s pickup truck and drive a short distance before police found and arrested him. Stead faced charges of felony murder, robbery, theft and weapons possession.

3. Jeffrey Johnson

Jeffrey Johnson was a laid-back clothing designer, at least he was laid-back until he got laid off, and then he went from just being fired up to firing up. OK that was silly, but nevertheless, Jeffrey not only shot dead his former employer, but also pointed his gun at police officers to get them to shoot at him. The ensuing fusillade resulted in no less than 9 people being injured by the police who can’t be bothered to aim properly (but cut them some slack, their fingers were too rough from writing all those tickets).

This one is interesting just for the sheer public spectacle that it created since it happened in one of the most tourist laden places on the planet, New York City.

2. Rene Alfaro

So far most of the shooting deaths we have covered were rather mundane, just a couple of shots fired and it’s all over for the unfortunate victim. Most of it wasn’t even done with any kind of ritualism or preparation of the victim. But Rene Alfaro wasn’t content with just a few shots, he shoved his former employer to the ground before he shot him 6 to 10 times with a rifle. He may not have had the vast weapons array of Byran, but what he lacked in arsenal, he made up for in brutality…

1. Darryl Dinkins

Darryl Dinkins (seriously, so many alliterative names on this list) was a car cleaner in the New York transit system, one of the most abused occupations in the city. No joke, it was actually made that way on purpose by the city in order to reduce the amount of people on welfare or something. I don’t know how that works, I don’t have smart brain think…

But when you do have a system almost entirely designed to be abusive, something like this would be inevitable when Darryl Denkins not only accused his bosses of being total a-holes, but also of being racist to him since he was black. It was odd since one of his bosses was also black. Whatever the case may be, both of their bullet-ridden corpses were discovered in the wee hours of morning.

Dinkins was found crying and in sheer emotional agony at what he had done, and his friends and relatives described him as an easy-going and friendly guy… but those who knew what conditions he and others in the transit system were going through weren’t surprised that he ended up doing what he did. This is why I saved it for last. It’s a tragic case of a tragic system that breaks people down and puts them in desperate situations. Does it justify murder? No, but maybe future murders can be prevented by seeing it as a desperate cry for help…

Sources: indystar.com, fox5vegaas.com, theguardian.com, latimes.com, telegraph.co.uk