Shock, grief, trying to cope after deadly rampage

‘When people go to work in the morning and tell their wife or husband goodbye, they don’t think it’s goodbye forever’

SAN JOSE >> Early Wednesday morning, not long after Michael Hawkins Sr. watched his wife pull out of the driveway for her morning shift as a VTA train mechanic, a call came in from an unknown number.

He didn’t answer. But when he listened to the voicemail, he had to replay the panicked message three times just to understand it. It was Rochelle, his wife.

“Something was wrong,” Hawkins said. “She was out of breath. She couldn’t get out what she wanted to say.”

All he heard was something about an active shooter at the VTA rail yard, and that she had dropped her own phone when she fled for her life.

At about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, that maintenance yard on the edge of downtown San Jose became the scene of the deadliest mass shooting in the Bay Area in nearly three decades. Eight people were killed from the same work crew, plus the shooter — a fellow employee armed and apparently loaded with resentments.

The rampage was so chaotic that in the frantic escape, John Courtney, head of the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union, left his phone behind, too. Throughout the day, calls from desperate friends and family members went unanswered. At the union headquarters in Campbell on Wednesday afternoon, he opened the door a crack but held back on commenting, he said, “out of respect for the families.”

Only one of the victims — 36-year-old Taptej Singh of Union City — had been identified by late Wednesday afternoon, and authorities remained tightlipped about what might have motivated the 57-year-old they identified as Samuel Cassidy to kill his co-workers, then turn the gun on himself.

But in its aftermath, this mass shooting had all the hallmarks of so many others across the country: yellow police tape roping off blocks, lines of huddled workers escorted across parking lots, a “reunification” center for relatives to find loved ones — and the heartbreaking screams that came pouring outside.

Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen, whose office in the county administration building is a block away from the VTA rail yard and across the street from the Sheriff’s Department, took a seat in that crowded conference room. Families and co-workers held hands and wept.

“It’s very raw. People are grieving. They’ve lost their husband, brother or son. It’s awful,” Rosen said in the plaza outside. “When people go to work in the morning and tell their wife or husband goodbye, they don’t think it’s goodbye forever.”

San Jose is the capital of Silicon Valley, a city of more than a million people.

But in many ways, it’s a small town. City Councilman Raul Peralez, who the night before had celebrated the approval of a landmark Google project for the edge of downtown San Jose, was trying to confirm Wednesday whether a childhood friend was among the dead 2½ miles away. Peralez and his 40-year-old friend — an overhead line worker who was just finishing his shift — stood up in each other’s weddings.

“I’m having odd emotions because we don’t have anything confirmed at the moment,” Peralez said Wednesday afternoon. “So it’s sort of where you’re waiting to hear and still trying to remain hopeful but it’s not a good outlook given the number of individuals who are deceased there and those who have yet to be accounted for.”

Throughout the day and throughout the Bay Area, VTA workers and their families were left stunned and bewildered that this was now their story. One man held his head in his hands on the edge of First Street, wiping away tears as he spoke with his wife on the phone. He didn’t know the victims personally, he said, “but they’re still my co-workers and I mourn the loss of their lives. That could have been me.”

VTA management, he said, “told us to go home.”

They also told the workers not to talk to the media or identify themselves to reporters. But for some workers close to the tragedy, the horror was too great to keep in.

“The whole crew is gone. The whole shift is gone,” said one man wearing a dark VTA uniform. “It’s horrible.”

By midmorning, Hawkins and his 19-year-old son, Michael Jr., arrived at the reunification center to give Rochelle the hugs she desperately needed. Her own car was in the parking lot cordoned off by police tape. Her phone remained inside the building, just where she left it when the gunshots rang out.

She has worked for the VTA for 16 years. She knows many of the victims.

As she walked across the intersection Wednesday, her husband and son on either side of her, she asked for one thing: “I would hope everyone should pray for the VTA family,” she said. “Just pray for us.”