■ A man who killed nine people appeared to target some, a sheriff said.
Search warrants out for gunman’s phone, home
SAN JOSE, Calif. — A gunman who killed nine people at a California rail yard appeared to target some of the victims, a sheriff said Thursday, while a Biden administration official said the man spoke of hating his workplace when customs officers detained him after a 2016 trip to the Philippines.
The shooter arrived at the light rail facility for the Valley Transportation Authority in San Jose around 6 a.m. Wednesday with a duffel bag filled with semi-automatic handguns and high-capacity magazines, Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith said.
“It appears to us at this point that he said to one of the people there: ‘I’m not going to shoot you,’” Smith said. “And then he shot other people. So I imagine there was some kind of thought on who he wanted to shoot.”
While there are no cameras inside the rail yard’s two buildings, Smith said footage captured him moving from one location to the next. It took deputies six minutes from the first 911 calls to find the gunman on the third floor of one of the buildings, Smith said.
He killed himself as deputies closed in on the facility serving the county of more than 1 million people in the heart of Silicon Valley. More than 100 people were there, and authorities found five victims in one building and two in another, Smith said.
Authorities did not yet know whether the gunman had worked regularly with any of the victims.
Investigators were serving search warrants for his home and cellphone, seeking to determine what prompted the bloodshed, the sheriff said.
“I’m not sure we’ll ever actually find the real motive, but we’ll piece it together as much as we can from witnesses,” Smith said.
The attacker was identified as 57-year-old Samuel Cassidy, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
A solemn and tearful moment of silence was held Thursday by transit authority officials, who read the names of the nine victims aloud.
Meanwhile, there was nothing in public records to indicate Cassidy ever got in trouble with the law. He received a traffic ticket in 2019, and sheriff ’s officials said they were still investigating his background.