San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
RAIL YARD SHOOTING’S GRUELING FALLOUT
Terra Fritch’s husband was the only victim of the San Jose killings to make it to the hospital. For her, those first hours were just the beginning.
Terra Fritch awoke May 26 to a quiet house.
It was a Wednesday, shortly after 7 a.m., so she expected to hear husband Alex’s diesel truck rumbling to the curb and the family dog barking to welcome him to their San Jose home. Typically, he would enter the bedroom, untie his boots and crawl into bed beside her after working the night shift at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority’s Guadalupe light-rail yard across the city.
Terra texted him from the kitchen while brewing coffee. But the next message she received was an urgent one from a friend: There’s been a shooting. She woke up her two teenage sons and turned on the TV to see that dozens of sheriff ’s deputies in tactical gear had swarmed the rail yard.
Immediately, Terra remembered how, several months earlier, Alex had come home shaken after overhearing a co-worker threaten to “put a bullet” in someone’s head.
Now, her fear rising, Terra called an acquaintance at the county coroner’s office, who pointed her to San Jose’s trauma hospital, Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. As a friend drove her, she spoke over the phone to a hospital employee who told her Alex was there, alive.
At the hospital, a social worker led her to an empty room that was soon filled with doctors. They told her Alex had been shot in the head and did not have long to live, and then they led her to his bedside. As she took in the sight of her 49-year-old husband’s
swollen head, matted with blood, she felt only disbelief at first. You should be crying, she told herself. Why aren’t you
crying?
Then Terra put her head on her husband’s chest and began to sob. She steeled herself for what would come next: summoning loved ones to the hospital to say goodbye.
What she didn’t fully appreciate in those first hours of May 26 was the difficulty that lay ahead for her and her family over the coming weeks and months — the wrenching private fallout from Northern California’s deadliest-ever mass shooting. At age 43, she would confront not only the loss of her partner, but also her belief that the VTA and the federal government had failed to protect him.
Nearly six months after the VTA gunman killed nine colleagues and himself in a warehouse at the rail yard, the attention has faded. Most friends have stopped calling to check in. Terra and the couple’s children are left figuring out how to move forward without Alex. While many people touched by firearm violence become advocates for gun control, Terra is more interested in making it easier for families to get the resources they need after tragedy strikes.
“Clearly, after Sandy Hook, our country is OK with kids getting killed,” she said, referring to the 2012 elementary school shooting in Connecticut. “If you can’t keep mass shootings from happening then, just like earthquakes, you need to prepare for when they happen.”
***
Terra met Alex Ward Fritch at the Saddle Rack, a countrystyle bar in Fremont complete with a mechanical bull, after each went dancing with friends one March night in 2001. Unlike the other men who approached Terra, Alex seemed shy, and she liked his “Blue Steel smoldry look.” She asked him to dance.
The attraction was mutual, but Alex left after their brief dance, afraid he might bungle an instant connection that he later told her had been “something special.” Their first date started with lunch in Cupertino and stretched late into the night.
They discovered they were both “rugged country kids” who’d spent their childhoods building forts and hunting in the woods of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Terra grew up without electricity in the wilderness south of Los Gatos, traveling more than an hour to attend school each day. Alex was raised by a German mother and an American father in the small community of Ben Lomond.
They bonded over a shared love of dirt-biking and discovered they both frequented an old mining tract in San Benito County favored by serious riders. Alex doubted Terra’s skills — until he realized she could shred trails as well as any man.
Six months after their first dance, they married on a weekday morning at a Santa Clara County courthouse.
The relationship faced early trials: the demands of parenthood and strained finances amid a series of medical crises. Terra underwent two surgeries for a back injury, one while pregnant with the couple’s second child. Months later, Alex was hospitalized after he was severely burned while fixing an ambulance as a mechanic.
Terra felt grateful to have a stable partner in Alex. She admired his ability to remain optimistic, even when they lost their first house to bankruptcy in the financial crash of 2008. She experienced abuse when she was younger, she said, and learned to hold back her emotions to survive. For the first six years of their marriage, she never let Alex see her cry.
“I thought: Crying makes things worse. So you don’t cry,” she said. “You don’t show weakness.”
But Terra began to let down her guard. She learned to be vulnerable with another person.
The pressure of supporting a young family weighed on Alex, she said, and after several years fixing commercial trucks as an itinerant mechanic, he sought the stability of a government job. The VTA hired him as a bus mechanic before he apprenticed as a utility pole repairman, then he took a graveyard-shift job repairing the electrical substations that power the agency’s trains.
He found the hours grueling and the work unfulfilling, but stayed for the job security. Terra encouraged him to find joy in other parts of his life.
After a visit to Smuggler’s Cove, San Francisco’s famed Tiki bar, Alex became enamored with craft cocktails, teaching himself everything he could about rum. He built a tropical-themed Tiki bar in their backyard to entertain friends.
The coronavirus pandemic’s restrictions were hard on Alex, Terra said. He found he craved the company of friends more than he had realized.
“When all of this is over,” he told her, “I think I’m going to become a hugger.”
***
Watching early news coverage of the shooting, Atticus Fritch, 18, tried to remain calm. Thousands of people worked at VTA — there was little chance his father was among those shot, he reasoned. When his mother left for the hospital, Atticus went to the kitchen to fix breakfast for his younger brother, Justin.
Within minutes, a family friend arrived to escort the brothers to the hospital, too. Atticus left uneaten toast on the counter. As they drove, Justin, then 16, used his phone to tell his physics teacher over email that he wouldn’t be there to race cardboard boats in the school pool.
Arriving at the trauma center, the brothers saw three sheriff ’s deputies sitting in the lobby, one covered in blood. Terra emerged through double doors.
“Dad was shot in the head,” she said. “He doesn’t look like himself right now.”
Atticus could tell she was trying not to alarm them. She sounded calm, almost casual. Surely they wouldn’t show us if it
was really bad, Atticus thought as Terra led them to their father’s bedside.
Taking in the sight of his father’s unrecognizable face, Atticus felt his stomach churn. His mind went blank. Atticus and Justin whispered farewells, not knowing how long their dad would live: “Thank you for everything you’ve done. Thank you for being our father.”
Before long, Stephanie, Alex’s 30-year old daughter from a previous relationship, arrived from San Diego. Together, the three siblings sat at his bedside for hours. They cracked jokes to break the tension, just as their dad would have done. When the breathing tubes emitted snorts of air, Stephanie said, “Hey, don’t make that noise unless you’re going to make a miracle happen!”
As their father’s condition deteriorated, Justin and Stephanie asked to go home. After the three siblings left, Terra prepared a do-not-resuscitate order, in keeping with Alex’s wishes.
Then she gave her husband a sponge bath, cleaning his face and washing the blood from his hair and ears. She wanted to undo the gunman’s work, to show Alex the tenderness he deserved. It was evening when she finished.
Climbing into bed beside him, Terra looked down at the “Star Wars” tattoos they had each gotten for their 15th anniversary. She pressed the Princess Leia tattoo on her right forearm to the Han Solo tattoo on Alex’s right arm.
She forced her hand into his closed palm. To her surprise, he squeezed her hand back.
“He knows you’re here,” a nurse said.
Terra was astonished to see tears streaming down Alex’s face. She felt an electric current radiate through her body.
“I think he just passed,” the nurse said.
“I know he did,” Terra replied. “I felt it.”
Terra lay in silence for several minutes beside her husband. She kissed him a final time. Then she climbed out of the bed and waited in the hallway for the coroner, because now her husband’s body was evidence.
***
Terra quickly realized she would struggle to find the time or space to grieve. A few days after the shooting, a letter arrived stating that her family’s health insurance had been canceled. “Insurance coverage for a deceased employee,” the letter explained, “stops upon that person’s death.”
She was confused and incensed.
The letter had been generated in error by an automated system. Staff members called each victim’s family to inform them that VTA intended to provide health coverage for one year.
Soon, Terra was deep into funeral planning. She considered an open casket, but decided against it due to the extent of Alex’s injuries. She splurged on a blue pearl granite headstone she knew her husband
would have liked before returning it, uneasy about her mounting expenses.
A thick manila envelope of paperwork arrived within days from the VTA, explaining the benefits available to victims’ families. Overwhelmed, it would take Terra more than a month to navigate the papers in order to begin receiving Alex’s pay. To her, the process seemed unnecessary and bewilderingly complicated.
Annette Romo, whose husband, Timothy Michael Romo, was also among those killed at the rail yard, recalled the daze of grief that persisted for weeks. Romo asked her brother-in-law to handle conversations with VTA administrators about benefits. In the meantime, she worried about falling behind on her mortgage.
Unlike Romo, who had help, Terra was alone.
With each passing day, she knew she was approaching the moment she would have to face the finality of Alex’s absence.
***
Eight days after the shooting, Atticus graduated from high school in a sea of students wearing orange ribbons in solidarity against gun violence. In an Instagram post ahead of the ceremony, he asked his classmates for privacy: “Please do not approach me to give me a hug or condolences.”
“No one knows what to say,” he explained later, “and yet people feel obligated to say something.”
His parents had promised a graduation present: to pay for Atticus to legally change his name and gender, fulfilling a desire he had held since he’d come out as trans five years earlier. But amid the tumult, neither he nor his mother had the energy to go to the courthouse.
Atticus had chosen his name at age 14 in part because it was reminiscent of Alex Jr., the name his parents would have chosen.
The transition caused “a lot of tension” in the household, Atticus recalled. His father was stoic at first. But slowly, Atticus noticed, Alex developed greater emotional awareness and empathy. They would have long conversations, Atticus said, in which his father would “try to relate in any way he could.”
Humor was their shared language. The afternoon before the shooting, Atticus remembers his father picking him up from a doctor’s appointment. As he stood outside the office, he heard Alex’s truck barreling down the one-way street in the wrong direction. When Atticus got in, his father kicked the pickup into reverse and drove backward out of the parking lot.
“Why? I wish I knew,” he said. “But it made me laugh.”
One afternoon, Atticus asked his friend Jack to join him online in a multiplayer video game. As their elfin avatars fought monsters, Atticus described his dad’s final hours at the hospital.
They talked through their computers for hours, until they reached the ruins at the outermost limit of the virtual world. Their avatars walked through the mountains to the edge of an abyss and, for a brief spell, Atticus felt less alone.
***
Grieving, Terra realized, was like “building a house of cards.” Every flashback of Alex, and every new revelation about his killing and his killer, arrived “like a gust of wind to blow it all down.”
Terra often lingered on the memory of those mornings when Alex returned home, slipped off his steel-toed boots and climbed into bed. Most days, as they sipped coffee in bed, she would ask about his night and he would say, “Lovely,” his hint that he didn’t want to talk about work.
But she kept thinking of the day last November when Alex had overheard one co-worker tell another: “You need to be careful, because one day I’m going to put a bullet in your head.” The man making the threat was Samuel James Cassidy, the gunman who would kill Alex and the eight others six months later.
Terra said she asked her husband if he thought Cassidy would act on the threat. “I don’t know, he’s scary,” Alex responded. “He’s freaking me out.” They discussed what Alex would do in the event of a shooting.
“I would run and hide,” he told her. “I would run and hide because you and the kids need me.”
Alex told her he had discussed the incident with his supervisor, who he said had “pushed it off.” (VTA officials declined to comment on the allegation, saying they were awaiting results of an internal third-party investigation.)
The more Terra learned about Cassidy’s history at VTA, the more questions she had.
A redacted personnel record released by VTA documented a string of confrontations in the last two years. In January 2020, several employees witnessed Cassidy “shouting and pointing” at a co-worker and calling her “the most corrupt person at VTA.”
Supervisors learned that one employee had said, “He scares me. If someone was to go postal, it’d be him.”
VTA investigated the incident but referred the matter to Cassidy’s manager after determining “there was nothing in Cassidy’s disciplinary history, or additional information to explain or support that concern.” The agency said after the shooting that it had found “no indication of records in Cassidy’s VTA personnel file of any formal discipline for threatening behavior or violence during his 20-year career at VTA.”
Terra said Cassidy’s threats were well-known among VTA families like hers but were not addressed. “This should have been prevented,” she said.
As it turned out, Cassidy’s co-workers knew little about other issues in his troubled past. In a 2009 civil court declaration, an ex-girlfriend had accused him of raping and abusing her, and said he had complained about co-workers getting preferential treatment at the rail yard.
In 2016, Homeland Security agents searched Cassidy’s luggage as he arrived at San Francisco International Airport following a trip to the Philippines. In an internal report, the
agents, who suspected Cassidy of participating in sex tourism, wrote that they found “some books about terrorism and fear, and manifestos ... and also a black memo book filled with lots of notes and how he hates the VTA.”
But the federal agency did not report the episode to local law enforcement or to the VTA, officials said.
Terra believes VTA must be held accountable for the violence that, she notes, could have been worse given Cassidy’s access to trains and buses. Her family and the families of other victims have been pursuing a potential lawsuit against public agencies, though they have declined to discuss details.
Terra’s attorney, Jeff Rickard, told The Chronicle, “The legal process for these survivors is expected to be formally initiated very soon.”
***
How is a widow supposed to
behave? Terra would find herself wondering. Was she allowed to chase her boys around the backyard with squirt bottles? If someone saw her laughing, would they think she didn’t miss Alex?
Neighbors stopped her on the street and strangers recognized her in restaurants. Her new prominence often felt burdensome.
More worrisome, though, was the prospect of forgetting details about her partner of two decades — his gestures, his witticisms — as days turned to months.
She took comfort in the sight of Alex’s belongings, which, for a long while, remained just as he had left them. She couldn’t bring herself to erase the note he’d made on the whiteboard in their bedroom — a reminder to renew his driver’s license.
She would linger over her husband’s flannel shirts, still smelling of his cologne, that hung in their shared closet. She would sit for hours in his elaborate backyard bar, admiring his meticulous woodwork and ordered rows of rum bottles. But she longed to hold his favorite possession again: a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses he’d bought 13 years earlier.
“He took such good care of them,” Terra said. “We had lots of arguments and conversations about those damn sunglasses.”
Alex usually kept the sunglasses tucked in his button-up VTA shirt. But when Terra tried to retrieve the shirt from investigators, they told her the bullet-ridden item was evidence. That’s how she learned, more than a month after her husband’s death, that he had been shot in the chest, too.
Her next thought was that the sunglasses might have
fallen during the shooting, so she asked a VTA worker who had witnessed the shooting to describe everything that he’d seen happen to Alex. Then she persuaded a sheriff ’s captain to accompany her to the rail yard in July.
Terra retraced Cassidy’s path through the warehouse as he stalked his victims with three semiautomatic pistols, then entered the hallway where he had shot her husband. She lay on the floor where Alex had fallen, mimicking his posture as described by the co-worker. She tried to imagine her husband’s final lucid moments.
With the autopsy and sheriff ’s investigative report not expected to be released for months, she wondered: In which order had the bullets pierced his body?
If he was shot first in the head, he may have lost consciousness before he knew what was happening, Terra reasoned. If he was shot first in the chest, he likely suffered longer and was aware of the chaos unfolding around him. She understands that many in her position would not want or need to know such details. But she does, for closure.
“Alex and I shared everything. We had no secrets. We shared in every joy, every heartache,” she said. “We shared every single experience for 20 years. This is his last experience, so why wouldn’t I share in that?”
In the warehouse, Terra shined her cell phone’s flashlight beneath a nearby row of lockers. The sunglasses weren’t there.
In any event, she had already replaced them: While shopping for a black dress to wear to Alex’s funeral, Terra bought a new pair of Ray-Bans for Alex. They sit atop the box of ashes beside her bed.
***
In the months after the shooting, Terra sought out the other eight victims’ families, one by one; she found some relatives through GoFundMe pages and others on Facebook.
They started a group text and then began meeting regularly on Zoom, united in their belief that VTA had failed their loved ones by overlooking Cassidy’s red flags. Now, they thought, the agency was ignoring their financial needs.
Stacey Hendler Ross, a VTA spokesperson, said victims’ families received worker’s compensation and life insurance benefits, donated funds from VTA employees and private funds raised by GoFundMe accounts, the transit union and other groups.
But after months of tense exchanges with the families, the agency granted additional support. In August, it agreed to pay a full year’s salary to the families of each victim. The first payments were issued in October, Ross said, and will continue until next summer.
For Terra, the move offered a step toward stability, but was not enough for a family that lost its sole provider.
She would like to see VTA pay each victim’s salary until their planned date of retirement. For Alex, that would have been 12 more years. She also wants spouses like her to retain medical benefits for life, and for dependents, like Atticus and Justin, to keep their health insurance until they turn 26.
Families also struggled with the emotional fallout of the shooting. A veteran VTA employee who witnessed the shooting died by suicide in August; his family said he’d suffered severe post-traumatic stress. Following the suicide, the president of the VTA’s biggest employee union lambasted a “thicket of bureaucratic hurdles” that restricted workers’ access to care. Ross said hundreds of VTA employees, including those who were at the yard the morning of the attack, went through mandatory trauma recovery training, and that all but 21 have returned to work. Trauma recovery counselors were made available “around the clock” to victims’ families, employees and their families, she said.
Terra began treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder in early November. That Alex survived long enough for her and their children to see him before he died proved to be a blessing, but a painful one. She is hopeful that eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy — commonly used to treat PTSD — will diminish her distressing flashbacks.
While Terra is a gun owner, she sees little gain adding her voice to the chorus of calls for reform. Instead, she wants to find practical ways to support future victims.
Terra says she was shocked to learn that Cassidy’s assets did not become the property of those he killed. In recent months, she has lobbied lawmakers for legislation that would allow this.
“I have two goals: To make sure our families are cared for, and to pass legislation to seize shooters’ assets,” she said. “After that, I’m out.”
***
In October, Terra made a handshake deal with a friend to sell Alex’s beloved Ford truck, and she and her sons — Justin, who’d started his senior year of high school, and Atticus, who’d gotten a job at GameStop — decided to redecorate their house.
They removed family photos from the living room walls, realizing it had become too painful to pass Alex’s face every day. They picked out a new couch and painted a purple accent wall.
Terra was mindful of a lesson that her relationship with her husband had taught her: Don’t get stuck in the past.
“When we got married, Alex was a man’s man,” she said. “He rode dirt bikes. He fixed things. He was old-school. For a long time, he thought that because he made the income, he knew better than I did.”
But Alex witnessed how Terra coped with the pain of two surgeries, how she managed their household and cared for two children. He saw that she kept up with him when they rode their matching KTM 450 dirt bikes. When she lost strength in her right foot due to her spinal injury, Alex adapted her bike so she could still ride.
“He started to see that ‘My wife is a badass,’ and she has value that I don’t. That we were partners and equals,” Terra said.
They began to have deeper conversations about the abuse Terra suffered growing up. Then came the #MeToo movement, and Atticus’ gender transition.
“Alex realized he hadn’t been the husband he wanted to be,” she said. “He hadn’t been the father he wanted to be, because no one had modeled that for him. He realized he had some traits that were harmful, and he was working on adjusting them.
“He was in the midst of growth,” Terra said. “It was really beautiful to watch.”
Realizing Alex’s personal journey was cut short was yet another cause of pain for Terra.
In early November, she took a solo trip to Tahoe. She rented a cabin in the woods with a hot tub and no cell phone reception. It was the first time in months she had let herself relax.
On her last day at the cabin, Terra woke up to find snow blanketing the treetops. In the distance, the mountains had turned white. She felt clarity.
“The fact is that when you are in the middle of your own hell, and you are put in an environment that is so much bigger, it makes you realize your hell is small. You can choose to see the hell or see the beauty,” she said. “I can suffer more or I can choose to change my perspective. I know which one Alex would want me to do.”
One day, when she’s ready, Terra plans to drive 60 miles southeast to the Panoche Inn, a hideaway bar her husband loved in the San Benito County community of Paicines. She’ll drink a cold beer, camp at his favorite spot nearby and scatter a handful of Alex’s ashes on the sun-scorched hills where they used to ride together.
“I would run and hide” in the event of a shooting at the VTA. “I would run and hide because you and the kids need me.”
Alex Fritch, as related by Terra Fritch, six months before the killings “I have two goals: To make sure our families
are cared for, and to pass legislation to seize shooters’ assets. After that, I’m out.”
Terra Fritch