SAN JOSE, CA – The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office recently released bodycam footage from the May 26th shooting that occurred at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority that saw nine victims killed.
“There were over 100 VTA employees on site that morning, and I believe the bravery of all of law enforcement personnel really prevented the loss of additional life.”https://t.co/ukTDJb3XcJ
— WLNS Newsroom (@WLNS) June 2, 2021
According to authorities, 57-year-old VTA employee Samuel Cassidy arrived at the VTA site, going between two buildings and killings his co-workers.
Cassidy was reportedly armed with two semiautomatic handguns and was also carrying 11 loaded magazines.
The suspect had killed nine of his co-workers, later identified as:
- Lars Kepler Lane
- Abdolvahab Alaghmandan
- Michael Rudometkin
- Timothy Romo
- Jose Dejesus Hernandez
- Adrian Balleza
- Taptejdeep Singh
- Paul Delacruz Megia
- Alex Ward Fritch
On June 1st, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office released four minutes of bodycam footage that showcased sheriff’s deputies as well as San Jose Police entering the VTA building where they’d later discover Cassidy.
Video shows the team making their way up flights of stairs around the building exterior, making their way into the third floor of the building.
A VTA supervisor had reportedly given the team a key card so as to be able to pass through interior doors inside of the building.
As officers were clearing one of the rooms, a series of gunshots could be heard.
Once the gunshots went off, an officer moved over to a doorway and peered through the glass, noting that he sees a subject that is down.
The team opens the door, with one officer yelling:
“Let me see your hands!”
While blurred in the video, a man can be seen slumped over in a chair, with officials saying there was a gun in his hands. The man, later identified as Cassidy, had shot himself under the chin and moved the gun to the side of his head.
Officials are uncertain as to whether Cassidy knew that law enforcement was closing in on him before killing himself, but it’s highly likely that he heard the team communicating with each other as they were getting closer to where he was holed up inside of the building.
Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith commended the work of the contact team that entered the building that day, remarking that they “hardly spoke a word to each other,” while inside of the building because “they knew what their job was.”
Sheriff Smith said that the work of those law enforcement officers likely saved a lot of lives that day:
“There were over 100 VTA employees on site that morning, and I believe the bravery of all of law enforcement personnel really prevented the loss of additional life.”
Earlier in June, Law Enforcement Today shared an editorial pertaining to the San Jose mass shooting that confirmed Cassidy was once stopped by federal authorities in 2016 where he was in possession of materials that should’ve set off some red flags.
Here’s that previous editorial.
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The following article contains editorial content written in part by a retired Chief of Police and current contributing writer to Law Enforcement Today.
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SAN JOSE, CA- While cities such as Chicago continue to resemble the killing fields of Cambodia in the 60s and 70s, Democrats and their “leader,” Joe Biden continue to ignore the carnage there while using situations such as last week’s San Jose mass shooting in order to punish law-abiding gun owners.
On cue, Biden and anti-gun zealots seized on the workplace shooting last week to push for draconian gun control measures, while ignoring what happened prior to the shooting. Once again, law enforcement failed to intervene when all the warning signs were there for anyone to see. Yet another intelligence failure led to the San Jose incident:
As reported in FrontPageMag:
In 2016, federal officials detained the San Jose man accused of killing nine of his colleagues last week, finding him with books on terrorism and detailed writings about how much he hated the people at his work—but nobody bothered to alert local authorities, according to reports.
Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen told USA Today Friday the intel might have helped prevent the mass attack by Samuel Cassidy Wednesday that resulted in the deaths of nine employees at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority light rail hub.
“The DA’s office was not notified,” Rosen said, adding he wasn’t aware of a single agency in the area that was told this information. “I would like to have known this in 2016.”
This of course isn’t the first time that an intelligence failure has led to tragic consequences. One of the most egregious such examples occurred in 2018 in Parkland, Florida, when 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
In a rare display of actual journalism, CNN host Michael Smerconish blasted the intelligence failures that failed to stop Cruz from committing the shooting. He alleged there were repeated warnings about Cruz leading up to the shooting, according to The Hill.
“Let me say it flat out: The Florida school shooting was an epic intelligence failure,” he said.
“It never should have happened. In this technological world of Apple and Google, Facebook and Amazon, better management of data by law enforcement needs to keep us safe from mass killings. And better integration of that which was in a variety of databases should have kept us safe from this guy.”
Smerconish went on to lay out a series of information which should have gotten the attention of authorities, and which was predictive of the incident.
“There was a staggering amount of seemingly searchable information that predicted his future path. Consider just some of the electronic breadcrumbs that he left behind,” Smerconish said.
He added that the Broward County Sheriff’s Office received 18 calls about Cruz over 10 years leading up to the mass shooting.
Smerconish listed numerous incidents involving Cruz, which included 911 calls from family members who took him in after his mother passed away, as well as statements from others who indicated Cruz may attempt suicide in a school shooting situation.
“The protection of Americans of all ages demands better data management about those who pose a gun risk,” Smerconish said. “We were a keystroke away from catching this guy. Instead, 17 are dead. It’s time to work smarter, not harder.”
In addition, the Wall Street Journal reported that Cruz had come to the attention of the FBI, with the agency being warned that Cruz had the potential to become a school shooter only a month prior to the Parkland shooting.
“You know, it’s so much,” a woman told the FBI’s tipline. “I know he’s—he’s going to explode,” she added.
She said she made the call because she wanted to maintain “a clear conscience” if Cruz indeed carried out such an act, the WSJ reported.
Omar Mateen killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016, wounding 58 others. According to The Guardian, Mateen had been the subject of a 10-month FBI terrorism investigation prior to the shooting.
In 2017, Esteban Santiago killed vie people and wounded eight at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida. Two months prior, he walked into an FBI field office in Alaska with a loaded handgun magazine, saying he was having “terroristic thoughts.”
While the FBI ignores real threats from serial killers, they lay out tens of thousands of man-hours pursuing people who committed criminal trespass at the Capitol on January 6…and send a team to Talladega to investigate a garage door pull. Priorities, we guess.
Also in 2017, Devin Kelley, a former member of the Air Force who was kicked out after a domestic violence conviction, killed 26 people outside a church in San Antonio, Texas. The Air Force neglected to notify the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), which would have prevented him from buying firearms.
So instead of laying the blame on intelligence failures, or the mental state of mass shooters, we blame the guns and excoriate lawful gun owners.
“In almost every case, behaviors were observed and caused concern, whether in the physical world or in cyberspace through emails and social media activity, and in many cases these were reported to law enforcement,” said John Cohen, a former senior counter-terrorism coordinator with the Department of Homeland Security who now conducts training on spotting potential mass killers.
“The single greatest issue we’ve had with our intelligence is the failure to pass on information,” said Ted Sexton, a former Alabama county sheriff and former senior Department of Homeland Security official.
“If I have the information, I can deal with it, see if the person has a pistol permit or a history of domestic violence. If the person is a threat to himself or to others, we can deal with that though due process. Without the information though, we can’t even do the simple things.”
There is also a psychological profile common to nearly all mass shooters. They tend to be loners, have low self-esteem and poor or non-existent family relations, and they look for a way to validate themselves and take revenge on a world they blame for their troubles,” Cohen said.
As FrontPage Mag notes, a majority of “mass shootings in this country come down to intervention and information sharing failures like this one.”
That doesn’t stop Democrats from seizing on shootings such as this one in San Jose to push for radical, draconian gun control measures. This despite the fact that in heavily gun-controlled cities such as Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C., gun crime is out of control. It is not law-abiding citizens who are shooting up our cities.
Look at what is being proposed in some cities. Democrat, George Soros-funded district attorneys are watering down sentencing enhancements for gun crimes, while at the same time advocating the punishment of people exercising their Second Amendment rights. It’s almost like they want to remove the ability of people to protect themselves from the criminals they’re setting loose through soft-on-crime policies.
Yet in countries where they have strict gun control measures, criminals have still been able to get guns in order to carry out mass killings…in Europe, for instance. In a number of mass killings, in France or England, for example mass killers don’t even need guns Vehicles or knives serve the purpose.
Leftists are like a broken record. Every time there is a mass killing where they can take political advantage, they do. When there are mass killings every weekend in Chicago, they are like crickets. Their agenda is very visible if only one chooses to open their eyes.
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