KANSAS CITY, KAN. ? Hours after a gunman killed five ConAgra Foods Inc. employees, then himself, workers and their families began asking questions about security at the Kansas City, Kan., plant.

But a workplace safety expert says measures such as metal detectors and security cameras probably wouldn’t have been enough to prevent 21-year-old Elijah Brown’s deadly rampage.

“A metal detector keeps out the outside folks,” said Larry Chavez, who trains businesses on how to identify potentially violent situations. “But what they don’t realize is that the people who kill someone in a workplace scenario have the same key you do. Physical security means nothing to a killer on the inside.”

ConAgra policies

Julie DeYoung, a spokeswoman for Omaha, Neb.-based ConAgra, has declined to discuss security measures that were in place at the Kansas City, Kan., plant, though she said they were being re-evaluated since Friday’s tragic events.

At a meeting with corporate officials Tuesday afternoon, several employees raised security-related questions, she said.

“The head of security is onsite working with police, and we hope to learn from their investigation,” said DeYoung, who would not provide specifics about what was being done to make the plant safer.

Francisco Romero, who has worked at the plant for 14 years, said he has seen little more than a camera aimed at the parking lot to prevent break-ins and a few guards who aren’t armed and probably wouldn’t be much help if situations turned physical.

“They’re old folks,” Romero said of the guards. “They could push them around easy. They should be young guys who could run if they have to.”

Employees of the ConAgra Foods plant in Kansas City, Kan., attend a memorial service before the 7 a.m. shift in a tent outside the facility. Memorial services were to be held before each shift Tuesday to assist employees coping with Friday's shooting rampage, which left six people dead.

Romero, of Kansas City, Kan., said there weren’t many fights at the plant because people were afraid of losing their jobs. The few times he has seen a scuffle break out, he said, the guards have immediately called police.

‘Lack of awareness’

Chavez, who worked in law enforcement for 31 years, including eight years as a senior hostage negotiator for the Sacramento, Calif., Police Department, called the Friday’s shooting a “classic, cookie-cutter case.”

He compared it to a workplace shooting last year in Meridian, Miss., where a Lockheed-Martin employee shot five co-workers to death before taking his own life.

“I saw in this case the same thing that occurred at Lockheed-Martin,” he said. “These are sophisticated organizations, not startups. But there’s a tremendous lack of awareness of this subject at the first-line supervisory level.”

He said supervisors needed to be trained to recognize early warning signs of impending violence.

“They’re the weak link in this whole thing,” said Chavez, head of a security-training service called Critical Incident Associates. “If first-line supervisors don’t know what to do when they see something happening in the locker room or cutting room floor, they’re in trouble.”

He said properly trained supervisors might have noticed something suspicious in the way Brown was acting and taken measures to diffuse his anger. Co-workers said Brown sometimes was seen pacing and talking to himself, and got bothered by teasing that might not have been a big deal to other people.

A 1999 study conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management showed that only 35 percent of the companies surveyed train supervisors to identify the warning signs of violent behavior. About 68 percent of those companies had written policies addressing workplace violence.

“But I bet 100 percent train their people on how to deal with situations involving sexual harassment,” Chavez said.

DeYoung said conflict-resolution techniques were taught to ConAgra supervisors companywide as part of a supervisory skills training program.