Rail yard confronts `most tragic' day
With the country shaken again this week by a massacre at Texas grade school, grieving families and VTA employees gathered at the Guadalupe rail yard in San Jose on Thursday to mark the one-year anniversary of the Bay Area's deadliest mass shooting that shattered families and left a transit agency struggling to heal.
The ceremony started at 6:30 a.m. marking the moments a disgruntled VTA employee took the lives of nine of his colleagues.
Families cried as a VTA light rail car rang its horn 10 times to start the ceremony in honor of the men killed on May 26, 2021, and another employee who witnessed the horrific attack and later took his own life.
“It was the day the incomprehensible became an unwanted reality,” said Carolyn Gonot, VTA's general manager.
On that early Wednesday morning, in the busy time between the night and the morning shifts, the shooter killed nine men — six of them in a break room — before turning the gun on himself. The victims – beyond their work keeping the trains running that thousands depend on every day – were fathers, brothers, and husbands.
The nine men gunned down were: Abdolvahab Alaghmandan, 63, Adrian Balleza, 29, Alex Ward Fritch, 49, Jose Hernandez, 35, Lars Kepler Lane, 63, Michael Rudometkin, 40, Paul Megia, 42, Taptejdeep Singh, 36, and Timothy Romo, 49.
Henry Gonzales, a longtime paint and body worker,
later died by suicide after witnessing the tragedy.
Mel Gonzales is now tasked with revamping the VTA's Maintenance Way department where many of the dead worked. Gonzales said he is still processing that dark day, but he offered some advice for the community in Uvalde, Texas, where an 18-yearold gunman killed 19 gradeschoolers and two teachers on Tuesday in the nation's deadliest school shooting in nearly 10 years.
“Be strong in your beliefs and your convictions,” he said. “Take care of your neighbor. Look out for your coworker.”
Victims' families are still trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. The killed VTA employees left behind a 3-year-old son, a teenager now preparing for college, and a wife planning to leave San Jose behind and start anew in Chicago.
A year later, there are no answers from management or VTA's main workers union 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.
At least two of the victims' widows said they did not attend Thursday's event because they said the ceremony focused on the violent minutes before their husbands' deaths and not the full lives they lived.
“It's really insensitive to make us relive that exact moment that they were murdered,” said one widow, who asked not to be named. “Maybe don't commemorate the moment that Sam Cassidy took their lives. Remember them as valued employees.”
Victims' families filed hundreds of millions in initial damage claims in November and filed wrongful death lawsuits this week against the VTA, the sheriff's department, and Allied Universal, a private security company contracted to protect VTA facilities.
The shooting 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.
Revamping the VTA's workplace culture remains far from resolved, including how the agency would handle a future employee with abusive behaviors like those exhibited by Cassidy.