Memorial for VTA'S `most tragic day'
Loved ones, employees mark one year after deadliest mass shooting in Bay Area history
With the country shaken again this week by a massacre at a Texas grade school, grieving loved ones and VTA employees gathered at the Guadalupe rail yard in San Jose on May 26 to mark the one-year anniversary of the Bay Area's dead- liest mass shooting that shattered families and left a transit agency struggling to heal.
At exactly 6:30 a.m., 10 blasts from the horn of a VTA light rail car, punctuated by sobs, signaled the moment a disgruntled maintenance worker took the lives of nine co-workers on May 26, 2021. A 10th employee who witnessed the horrific attack took his own life months later.
“It was the day the incomprehensible became an unwanted reality,” said Carolyn Gonot, the Valley Transportation Authority general manager. “It was the most tragic day in VTA history.”
For the victims' families, the anniversary is fraught with deep emotional wounds and exhaustion from a year of fighting for accountability. They are memorializing their family members while filing new wrongful death lawsuits against the VTA, law enforcement and a private security contractor.
“There were too many red flags that they didn't pay attention to,” a sobbing Karrey Benbow, who lost her 35-year-old son Jose Hernandez III, told a crowd during the second of two ceremonies on Thursday. She donned a jean jacket and denim pants, the same clothes she wore during a motorcycle ride with her son three days before his death.
“I spent six hours with my son,” she said. “I didn't know that was the last time I was going to hug and kiss him.”
A year later, the families say, there are no satisfying answers from VTA leadership as to why the gunman was allowed to return to work after he berated a colleague so viciously that a VTA worker worried he could “go postal.” Or how he was able to obtain dozens of high-capacity magazines that are illegal in California.
On that early Wednesday morning, in the busy time between the night and the morning shifts, the shooter, Samuel Cassidy, killed nine men — six of them meeting in a break room — before turning the gun on himself.
At least two of the VTA victims' widows did not attend the event because they said the ceremony focused on the violent minutes before their husbands' deaths and not the full lives they lived.
The nine shooting victims were as young as 29 and as old as 63. Most of them left behind wives and children, including a 3-year-old son, a teenager now preparing for college, and a widow planning to leave San Jose behind and start anew in Chicago.
Alex Fritch, the only victim to live long enough to be hospitalized, was a father of two and the “life of the party” who built a tiki bar in his backyard.
Taptej Singh, a father of two young children who often arranged camping trips with his colleagues, helped hide co-workers from the shooter before he was gunned down himself. Lars Lane was a father and grandfather and “amazing cook” who worked at the VTA for two decades.
Adrian Balleza, the youngest victim at 29, was married with a son who is now a toddler. He also died helping others to safety. Abdolvahab Alaghmandan, the oldest victim at 63, was a substation manager who could “fix anything” and was known as a gentle soul.
Paul Megia, who worked his way up from light rail operator to supervisor, was a practical joker who loved taking his family on outdoor adventures. Timothy Romo, an overhead line worker at the VTA for more than 20 years, was considered by his son as “my superman.”
“If feels at times physically painful, and when it gets to that, you have to shift your focus,” Gloria Rudometkin, who lost her husband, Michael, said last week. When she feels the deep pain of grief, Rudometkin remembers how the pair would hold each other in the kitchen and sway to their wedding song, Frank Sinatra's “Summer Wind.”
“You practice gratitude and think about the impromptu dance parties,” said Rudometkin. “Or just walking the dogs on the beach.”
Mel Gonzales is now tasked with revamping the VTA'S Maintenance Way department where many of the dead worked. He said he is still processing that dark day, but he offered some advice for the communities in Uvalde, Texas, where a teen gunman killed 19 grade schoolers and two teachers on Tuesday in the nation's deadliest school shooting in nearly 10 years, and in Buffalo, New York, where another teen gunman killed 10 Black people in a racist attack at a supermarket on May 14.
“Be strong in your beliefs and your convictions,” he said. “Take care of your neighbor. Look out for your co-worker.”
The VTA shootings also left a traumatized workforce to rebuild and trudge ahead with keeping buses and trains running in Santa Clara County.
“Systemically, we face a monster, a monster at VTA that wasn't created overnight,” John Courtney, the union president who was in the room when Cassidy started shooting and was spared, said on Thursday at the memorial.
Revamping the VTA'S workplace culture remains far from resolved, including answers on how the agency and worker unions would handle a future employee with abusive behaviors like those exhibited by Cassidy.
Both labor leaders and VTA management say an outside consultant is needed to bring major changes to a workplace culture with a history of vitriol between workers and management.
“It's not going to be fixed in a year,” Courtney said, “but God darn it, it's going to be fixed if it's the last thing that we do.”
Staff writer Julia Prodis Sulek contributed to this report.