Postal employees gather to remember two murdered colleagues

By Brent Begin, Bay City News Service

December14, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) - Postal workers from around the city are expected to come together tonight to remember two colleagues who recently died at the barrel of the same handgun.

Genevieve Paez, 53, and Julius Tartt, 39, both worked nearly two decades with the U.S. Postal Service before their deaths, which occurred less than a day apart.

Paez was found by one of her four children outside their Visitacion Valley home in San Francisco on Nov. 28. She was on her way to work when someone shot her once in the back of the head, according to police.

Police in Livermore found Tartt's body the next day in a parking lot off Bluebell Drive, the result of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.

San Francisco police, who have been investigating the murder of Paez, are on the verge of closing the case.

"This is very close to being solved,'' Sgt. Steve Mannina said today. He said ballistics tests have determined that both bullets came from the same gun: the handgun that was found at Tartt's side.

But tonight's vigil isn't about what happened in that last week of November, according to Executive Vice President Ray Fong of the National Association of Letter Carriers, a union representing postal employees.

"There's going to be no drama. We're not going to talk about what happened,'' Fong said.

"We're just there for healing.''

Many members of the "postal community'' have been shaken up by the news of the murder, Fong said. Paez worked as a supervisor at the Bayview annex in San Francisco, where Tartt had spent most of his career working as a letter carrier.

"They were both wonderful people,'' said Fong, who added that he didn't find it strange that the vigil would incorporate a possible murder suspect. "We don't look at it that way.

We look at it that they're both human beings. The postal community is one family, you know.''

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