There were 458 workplace murders last year. They’ve become disturbingly frequent

On the day after Easter 2023, Dana Mitchell went to work, grabbed a coffee and walked to the conference room for the regular Monday morning meeting. She was talking to a co-worker about his tan from a vacation.

On the day after Easter 2023, Dana Mitchell went to work, grabbed a coffee and walked to the conference room for the regular Monday morning meeting. She was talking to a co-worker about his tan from a vacation. She looked up and saw another co-worker, Connor Sturgeon, in the doorway. He was holding a gun. Chaos erupted as he began to shoot at Mitchell and their colleagues at Old National Bank in Louisville. Within minutes Sturgeon had killed five bank employees and wounded another eight co-workers, including Mitchell, before he was killed by Louisville police responding to the scene. In the United States, it was hardly a unique event. Hundreds of people are murdered on the job every year in the United States. According to a report released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 458 people murdered at their workplace in 2023. That’s an average of nearly nine a week. The total was down from the 524 who were murdered on the job in 2022. Between 2018 and 2023 there have been 2,762 workplace homicides in the United States. The threat of being murdered at work is, of course, not the only risk workers face. The report shows a total of 5,283 died on the job in 2023, with transportation accidents the most common form of death with 1,942 dying that way last year, followed by deaths following falls, trips or slips, which killed 885 workers. But those were unintentional deaths.