UPS metal detectors failed to foil killer
Given all the metal detectors at employee entrances, one big question being asked in the aftermath of the recent shooting rampage at a UPS distribution center in San Francisco is how longtime company driver Jimmy Chanh Lam got inside the windowless building with two guns and a box of ammunition.
On the morning of the shooting June 14, according to one San Francisco police source, Lam passed through a metal detector at an employee entrance and set off the buzzer and red lights — but nonetheless was allowed in.
Once inside, Lam opened fire with a stolen semiautomatic assault pistol, killing two co-workers and wounding two others, before walking outside and fatally shooting a third driver. Then he went back inside and shot himself to death when he was confronted by police.
Officers later found a second gun that Lam, 38, brought into the building and a box of bullets in his backpack.
Police Department spokesman David Stevenson declined to comment on how Lam gained entry to the building and referred questions about security there to UPS.
Company spokeswoman Kim Krebs told us Tuesday, “It is too early to speculate on what may have occurred, (and)
there is no additional information to share.
“This incident continues to be under police investigation, and UPS is conducting its own investigation of the incident,” Krebs said.
A spot check of the block-long distribution center at 16th Street and San Bruno Avenue this week found metal detectors staffed by security guards at employee entrances on all four sides of the building. However, it wasn’t immediately clear how long the detectors had been in place, or if any had been installed since the shootings.
Rick Smith, a former FBI agent who runs the private investigations firm Cannon Street Inc. in San Francisco, cautioned that it may be too early to point the finger at UPS’s security procedures for what happened.
“I think the problem is he (Lam) was an employee, so he’s got two things going for him,” Smith said. “He knows where all the security installations and personnel are, and as an employee, he knows all the players — and, rightly or wrongly, they would not look at him as a threat.”
If anything, Smith said, focusing on the building’s security may be “looking at it the wrong way.”
“It’s easy to criticize security,” he said, “but there had to be some behavioral issues he exhibited before that should have been addressed.” Overtime: The Golden State Warriors broke ground on their new Mission Bay arena back in January, but that isn’t stopping the littleknown Good Neighbor Coalition from starting a petition drive for a pair of ballot ballot measures in San Francisco taking aim at the project.
One would put the city on record as condemning the move to take the basketball franchise out of Oakland. The other would add four people to the sevenmember Entertainment Commission to help the city deal with the expected “health, safety, traffic and disabled issues” stemming from the new arena.
To make the ballot, each measure requires several thousand valid voter signatures.
The drive is being headed by Allen Jones, who once lived out of his pickup truck and who identifies himself as a “Warriors historian, draftsman and former Bible study teacher.”
Campaign disclosure reports show that Jones’ coalition has received $3,000 in early contributions to get the two measures off the ground.
The bulk of the money has come from James
Erickson, who is described in the group’s filings as a Lafayette insurance executive. But there is also a $500 donation from the law firm
Soluri Meserve of Sacramento, which represented the UCSF benefactors who formed the Mission Bay Alliance in an unsuccessful legal fight to prevent the Warriors from building their arena next to the university-run medical center.
Proof that the fight never ends.