Workers at the San Jose light railway have repeatedly reported Samuel Cassidy’s constant threats to kill everybody there.
But officials at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority never took any actions against the “disgruntled” mechanic.
Coworker Jose Hernandez III, 35, had shared his fears and frustration with his friend Joe Bennetti, well before he was gunned down at Cassidy’s hands.
“That guy Cassidy has been saying that s*** for months and they reported it,” Bennetti said at the mass shooting victims’ vigil. “Jose and that guy didn’t get along because that guy was constantly making threats.”
“They reported it to management and management didn’t want to do anything for fear of inciting him, so they just kind of brushed it off until this dude came in and did it. That’s the conversation Jose had with me.”
“That was like in March, he didn’t mention him by name but he said there was a guy who was saying all this crazy stuff and he had mental problems and all these guns.”
“I was like ‘Dude, you’ve got to tell somebody’ and he said ‘We tell them.’ Once they figured out it was a guy on Jose’s team that did the shooting I realized it was the guy he had told me about.”
Bennetti continued: “He (Cassidy) made the threat of doing what he did. He was like ‘I’m going to kill everybody in this place’ and Jose told me Cassidy would openly boast about how he was into guns.”
A heavily-armed Cassidy swarmed two VTA buildings and seemed to choose his victims like “having a list” of who should be killed.
“It appears to us at this point that he said to one of the people there ‘I’m not going to shoot you,” Santa Clara Sheriff Laurie Smith said.
“And then he shot other people. So I imagine there was some kind of thought on who he wanted to shoot.”
Witness Kirk Bertolet recalled how Cassidy “shot some people, he let another person live, and then he went around and shot everybody again.”
The gunman “coolly waked by some people coming out of the other building…then he walked in that building and found his targets over there. He killed the people he wanted to kill,” Bertolet, 62, said.
