Return of VTA light rail will take ‘weeks or months’

San Jose rail yard, site of mass shooting, remains a crime scene

It may take months to resume service on the Valley Transportation Authority’s light rail system following last week’s mass shooting that left 10 workers dead, an agency spokeswoman said Tuesday.

The service was suspended indefinitely hours after a disgruntled maintenance worker opened fire last Wednesday morning at VTA’s light rail yard in San Jose, killing nine of his co-workers before taking his own life. On Tuesday the agency discontinued the buses that were temporarily running along the light rail’s three lines — leaving transit riders to rely on the rest of the South Bay’s bus routes to get around.

Now, both physically and emotionally, VTA faces a long, difficult and delicate task to get the trains that once carried over 25,000 riders each weekday running again.

The Guadalupe Yard, which functions as the nerve center of the light rail network, is a crime scene. Traumatized VTA workers who survived

the shooting have funerals to attend — and beyond that may be reluctant to return to the buildings where their friends were killed and they fled the sounds of gunfire.

“There is no consideration of bringing light rail service back right now,” VTA spokeswoman Stacey Hendler Ross said, with the agency instead focused on supporting the workers who lost colleagues.

Light rail’s return “will be a matter of weeks or months, and not days,” she said.

There is no timeline for when law enforcement investigators will turn the light rail yard — where trains are stored, serviced and dispatched — back to VTA, said Deputy Russell Davis, a spokesman for the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office. It’s unclear how badly damaged the buildings are and what can — or must — be done to clean, repair or relocate facilities that until last Wednesday served as the hub of daily activity.

“The whole system is run out of that light rail yard,” said Hendler Ross.

During the May 26 rampage, 57-year-old Samuel Cassidy killed his colleagues in a maintenance building, then walked across the yard and continued shooting inside the three-story building that houses offices and VTA’s Operations Control Center. Employees have been able to retrieve their cars from the property, Davis said, but have not been allowed inside its buildings since the shooting.

Hendler Ross said VTA officials are considering how they might be able to run the light rail system without using the Guadalupe Yard, because its operations control center can be moved to other VTA facilities. But she said that will be a challenge, because trains regularly need maintenance that must be done there.

VTA is having to confront a question that Americans have grappled with at schools, workplaces, churches, shopping centers and countless other public spaces across the country: What do you do with the scene of a mass shooting?

At Columbine High School in Colorado, Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and Umpqua Community College in Oregon, officials demolished and rebuilt the places where gunmen carried out massacres, according to The Washington Post.

At Virginia Tech, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard, the Post reported buildings went through extensive renovations that ranged from several months to upward of a year.

There are some examples of mass shooting sites reopening quickly.

The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, held Sunday services four days after a 2015 massacre by a White supremacist gunman. A UPS distribution center in San Francisco reopened within weeks of a 2017 workplace shooting, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, which reported that weeks later, most drivers refused to go back in the building.

There are fewer examples of carnage that unfolded inside a piece of critical infrastructure that thousands of people depend on each day.

While ridership on VTA’s three light rail lines dropped by over 70% during the pandemic, the system that extends from Mountain View to Milpitas to South San Jose remained a core piece of the South Bay’s public transit network. Many of those who have continued to ride public transportation through the pandemic do so because they don’t own cars and depend on buses and trains to get around.

“I know we’ve got to respect the families, but we also have to respect the people that still (need) to go forward,” said Emily, a VTA rider who declined to give her last name as she stood at the Civic Center station a few blocks from the Guadalupe Yard on Tuesday. With no light rail train available, she was looking for a car on a ride-hailing app while her husband scanned the VTA bus map.

Another rider said the lack of light rail service meant she had to take three different bus lines to get to work, adding an hour to her commute each way.

VTA’s interim General Manager Evelynn Tran acknowledged in a statement Monday that public service would suffer while the agency tended to the emotional needs of its traumatized workforce.

Asked whether the Amalgamated Transit Union — which represents nearly 1,600 VTA workers, including eight of the victims in last week’s shooting — was in talks about how to reopen the Guadalupe Yard, Arturo Aguilar, chairman of the union’s California Conference Board, declined to comment.

For now, agency and union said they were mainly encouraging workers to take advantage of grief counseling and 24hour support services offered in person or via hotline.

“We are working to balance what we understand are important needs from our passenger and our riding public that depend on public transportation … with the needs of our employees, which are taking priority right now,” Hendler Ross said. “People are still grieving.”