Mental illness: VTA shooter’s family speaks out; father says his son was bipolar

CUPERTINO >> In their first extended interview, the family of the VTA shooter who unleashed the Bay Area’s deadliest mass shooting this week said Friday he felt “lost” to them for months.

He was often tense, said his sister, Ann, “quick to suspect bad intentions toward him,” and “verging on paranoia.”

But when Sam Cassidy showed up to his parents house on Monday to take his mother’s car for a smog test, “he seemed fine,” his father said Friday.

There was “no hint,” 89-yearold James Cassidy said, that about 36 hours later, his son would go on a shooting rampage at the Valley Transportation Authority rail yard in San Jose, killing nine coworkers before turning the gun on himself in a burst of violence that has once again shaken the nation.

“Something must have hap

pened” at work Tuesday to set him off, his younger sister, Ann, told the Bay Area News group, in emails and interviews Friday afternoon.

“I imagine he spent all night Tuesday night pacing and ruminating and making his plans,” she wrote. “That he didn’t feel he could call me that night is by far the worst part.”

“In recent months, he has felt lost to me,” Cassidy’s sister wrote in an email. “But now I have to live with the fact that I didn’t try harder.”

Earlier Friday, her father spoke to the Bay Area News Group from his driveway, apologizing to the victims’ families for his son’s unthinkable

acts.

“I don’t think anything I could say could ease their grief,” he said, unloading groceries onto his walker in the driveway. “I’m really really very sorry about that.”

He spoke of his son’s mental health problems. “I didn’t realize how bad his bipolar was. When we saw him, he was generally an ordinary guy.”

But Ann, who asked that her married name not be used, said no one in her family really knew whether her older brother was ever diagnosed with bipolar disorder or other mental health issues. “If he had been, Sam was way too private of a person to share this with us,” she said.

Armed with three handguns and dozens of rounds of ammunition early Wednesday

morning, Samuel Cassidy, 57, called “highly disgruntled” by authorities, killed six coworkers from his own morning crew before gunning down three other employees — two light rail operators and a supervisor — in an adjacent building. When police arrived minutes later, he turned the gun on himself. On Friday authorities released a shocking photo of the arsenal of ammunition and weapons they later seized from Sam Cassidy’s home.

In the three days since the massacre, which left the families of nine victims bereft and making funeral arrangements Friday, the family has holed up in the modest Cassidy family home in Cupertino. Ann flew down from Oregon to be with her elderly parents.

“Every hour that ticks by I’m learning something new and disturbing about my brother,” she wrote.

She called her brother “a very reclusive person,” especially since his divorce about 15 years ago. His ex-wife has told this news organization that he had an explosive temper and was often angry about work.

Ann said she and her parents had “absolutely no idea about his private life” and rarely saw him. He often canceled plans to join them for dinner.

“Every once in a while he would open up a bit and we’d get a glimpse at what he was feeling (at work, with his neighbors, or just random injustices of the world),” she wrote. “He seemed to really struggle with the basic coping skills of managing stress.

He tended to make too much out of an innocent comment and was quick to suspect bad intentions toward him, almost verging on paranoia.”

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Cassidy was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection as he was returning to the U.S. from the Philippines in 2016, carrying “books about terrorism and fear and manifestos … as well as a black memo book filled with lots of notes about how he hates the VTA,” according to a Department of Homeland Security memo circulated after the shooting. Local authorities say they were not previously aware of such a report.

Videotape from a neighbor’s security camera showed Cassidy loading up a black duffel bag into his truck early Wednesday morning. He apparently set a timing device to ignite a fire at his home in South San Jose, which burned so hot that the second floor collapsed.

Ann said that after the initial shock of her brother’s role in the deadly attack, “the horror of it really set in.”

“Now new horrors come every hour as I learn more and more about my brother,” she wrote. She harbors her own guilt for not reaching out more to her brother, she said.

“I was uncomfortable with getting too close to his pain,” she wrote.

“And now it’s done and the families of the victims will never be the same,” she wrote. “The surviving coworkers will never be the same. My family are still trying to figure out what, if anything, we can do.”