"'I would rather not continue with life since I will only be subjected to further persecution....' Pickett was preparing to work in the Middle East for the U.S. government and was studying Arabic before that plan fell through...." -=-=-=-=-=-= Man Wrote Suicide-Style Letter to IRS By Serge F. Kovaleski Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, February 8, 2001; Page A01 Days before Robert Pickett was arrested outside the White House grounds, the fired IRS worker wrote a letter to the agency proclaiming its commissioner "guilty of murder" and blaming his emotional problems on his struggle with his former employer. "My death is on your hands," Pickett wrote in a letter dated Feb. 2. Saying that a federal court in Ohio last week rejected a whistle-blower lawsuit he had filed against the Internal Revenue Service, he called himself "a victim of a corrupt government." The 21Ž2-page, single-spaced letter ends: "I would rather not continue with life since I will only be subjected to further persecution." A copy of the letter was sent to the Evansville (Ind.) Courier & Press and was marked to be sent to politicians including President Bush. Former and current neighbors in Evansville where Pickett grew up and continued to live in a modest, neatly kept two-story brick house described an isolated and reticent man who did little but work at the accounting firm started by his father. Many did not know that he suffered from mental illness, for which he had received treatment over the years, according to a lawyer who represented him after the IRS fired him in the mid-1980s. "He was terribly upset at the IRS" after it denied his request in the 1980s to be reinstated to his job, said the lawyer, Joseph Yocum, of Evansville. "I guess as time went on, [his grievance] was like a snowball; the more you roll it, it gets bigger." However, Yocum said he saw no violent tendencies in Pickett. "I don't know that the incident today was directed at anybody but himself," Yocum said. "He wanted to let the world know how he felt." News that Pickett was the armed man who was shot and wounded outside the White House quickly circulated in Evansville yesterday, shocking people who remembered him as amiable, a bit distant but harmless. Pickett lived alone in the house he had once shared with his parents, both of whom are dead. "He may have had friends or acquaintances, but no one that I ever saw. He was quite a private person," said Beverly Buck, a neighbor of the Pickett family for 23 years before moving five years ago. Buck said that every year on Pickett's birthday, she treated the solitary accountant to a home-cooked meal that usually ended with one of his favorite desserts, coconut meringue pie. "I always liked to have him out for his birthday because he was alone in this world," she said. "I would always try to have a nice dinner. Everyone should be able to celebrate a birthday with friends." Buck said the annual rite was driven in part by the sadness she felt for a man who had never married, who had no meaningful relationships to speak of, and who had become estranged from his two sisters and brother because of an inheritance dispute. "If you gave me a list of someone who would do something like this, he would be on the bottom of it," said Ron Waite, owner of A La Carte Food & Wine Shop in Evansville, which had used Pickett, 47, as an accountant. "He was not outgoing, but he was always very professional. He never discussed personal business, for example." Neighbors said they rarely saw Pickett, except for those occasions when he would do yardwork, wash his car or jog. One evening several years ago, he sat unflinchingly in front of his television while a Boy Scout knocked on his front door for more than five minutes, in what turned out to be an unsuccessful attempt to sell the man popcorn. "I knew that he was in there because I could see through the glass [of the door] that he was sitting in a chair watching television," said the Boy Scout, Chris Brandenburg, 15. "I kept knocking, but he would not come to the door. He just kept looking straight ahead at the TV." Sahar Wafa lived across the street from Pickett for nearly seven years. "I never felt anyone was even living in the house until I saw him outside cutting the grass or something," she said. Her husband, Marwan, recalled that during several brief conversations with Pickett, "he struck me as a sad man, a very sad man. He was so reserved, and his facial expressions were always tense." "He was okay to talk to," Marwan Wafa added, "but he was not the kind of person you could get close to easily, in my own assessment. You always had that sense that there was distance between him and you." Buck said that over the course of his life, Pickett had struggled "to find himself" both professionally and personally and at times seemed to suffer bouts of depression. In 1993, Pickett was reported missing by his father, neighbors and authorities said. But the case was resolved when he resurfaced. There were many false starts in his life, including a stint at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point that lasted about seven months before he left under circumstances that are unclear. Buck also said that at one point, Pickett was preparing to work in the Middle East for the U.S. government and was studying Arabic before that plan fell through. He would eventually work in the field of accounting and bookkeeping, although the Indiana CPA Society said he is not licensed by the state of Indiana as a certified public accountant. In his letter, Pickett said he "suffered from a severe mental illness," adding that "constant betrayals by those obligated to uphold the law and people who professed their regard have destroyed me." He wrote that IRS officials had shielded an "incompetent manager" from whom he had tried to "protect the citizens." Buck said she last saw Pickett last week, when he was doing the family's taxes. "He seemed fine. Nothing seemed unusual about him." Staff writer David A. Fahrenthold contributed to this report. © 2001 The Washington Post Company
