SAN JOSEAfter the shooting stopped and the shouting ended and all his panicked co-workers had fled, Kirk Bertolet rushed through the maze of Building B, at the service yard for Santa Clara County’s light rail system.

He passed the parts cage, machine shop and a pair of supervisors’ offices, then worked his way toward the northwest corner of the Valley Transportation Authority building. That’s where he had heard the rapid-fire sound of gunshots early Wednesday morning.

Now, all was eerily quiet.

“Hey, you guys all right?” he shouted, his voice echoing in the cavernous building. Where were Jose, Lars, Alex? “Tim?” he yelled. “Do you need help?”

Tim Romo was the 49-year-old power crew foreman, the one who operated the crane whenever Bertolet, a 64-year-old Air Force veteran, and his guys were installing 1,000-pound switches. Only Romo and his crew had the special training to get close to the 800-volt overhead lines that powered the VTA light rail trains.

Minutes earlier, as he barricaded himself in the signal room, Bertolet had heard Romo yelling, “Call the police! Call the police!”

Now, in the petrifying silence, Bertolet was trying to find him. Alone, he turned down the empty hallway toward the power department, a 20-by-30-foot room where Romo’s crew kept computers and battery chargers and a coffee pot and where they crowded around a conference table each morning to plan out the fieldwork for the day.

Bertolet made it to the end of the hallway, running through the list in his mind of what he would do if he encountered the unthinkable: stop the bleeding, apply pressure, perform CPR. Instead, he reached the power room and gaped at the horror.

“I walked into something nobody should ever see.”

Six of his co-workers, all men, lay motionless on the floor in their blue work suits. He looked for signs of life, squeezing past the conference table to the far side of the room. But quickly he knew: “There was nothing you could do.”

MORGAN HILL, CA – May 29: Kirk Bertolet knew all the men that were killed Wednesday morning when police say Samuel Cassidy went on a shooting rampage, killing 9 employees at the VTA Rail Yard. He recalls from his Morgan Hill, Calif. home, Saturday, May 29, 2021, first hearing the shots and screams of his co-workers. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group) 

Highly disgruntled, heavily-armed

Four days later, authorities are still piecing together — and the close-knit community of transit workers is only beginning to process — the Bay Area’s deadliest mass shooting. The facts sound disturbingly familiar: A 57-year-old “highly disgruntled,” heavily-armed mechanic murders nine co-workers, then kills himself as officers confront America’s latest “active shooter.”

In interviews this past week with VTA workers and union representatives, relatives of the shooter and family members of his victims, a picture emerges of unbridled terror and true heroism on a day that started like any other, in a workplace that prides itself on toughness and grit.

As Samuel Cassidy carried out his slaughter, working his way from Building B next door to Building A, which houses operations, he deliberately chose his victims, authorities said. At one point, he reportedly told a survivor, “I’m not going to kill you today.”

Two men — supervisor Paul Megia and rail operator Taptej Singh  — alerted their co-workers to hide and ushered them to safety, then were killed themselves.

One woman — a substation maintenance worker who was in the same meeting where Bertolet’s six co-workers were slain — curled into a ball on the floor and was somehow spared. The gunman also showed mercy to union president John Courtney, who was in that meeting but hasn’t opened up publicly about what he called “this unfathomable tragedy.” In a letter to the 1,600 VTA workers who his Amalgamated Transit Union Local 265 represents, Courtney wrote: “There simply are no words to describe what happened and what I saw. It will stay with me forever.”

San Jose VTA light rail yard shooter’s neighbor Doug Suh captured surveillance video of Samuel Cassidy toting a duffel bag as he left for work on Wednesday, May 26, 2021. (Courtesy of Doug Suh) 

Black duffel bag, boxy blue jacket

Wednesday’s tragedy began unfolding at 5:39 a.m. when Cassidy emerged from his home on Angmar Court in South San Jose. A neighbor’s security camera across the street captured grainy images of Cassidy carrying a black duffel bag to his white Ford F-150 parked in the driveway. The camera zooms in as he fumbles with his keys and loads the bag into the passenger seat.

The video is fuzzy in the soft morning light just before sunrise, but the wide bands of reflective tape crisscrossing his back are clear. The boxy blue jacket he wore wasn’t part of his uniform — the heavy cotton shirt and pants he wore underneath — but instead, a distinctive Carhartt safety coat that co-workers said had been his signature.

The neighbor with the security camera told reporters that Cassidy lived alone, never had visitors and never said hello. When Doug Suh turned into his driveway once, he said, Cassidy yelled at him. Suh’s wife was scared of Cassidy.

Before Cassidy left the house that morning and drove the eight miles north to the job he held for 20 years, he put a pot full of bullets on the stove, authorities said, and placed an accelerant nearby.

In less than an hour, the house would be ablaze.

‘Started shooting everyone’

The fire erupted just as Cassidy unleashed a barrage of bullets in the VTA conference room. It’s not entirely clear what Cassidy did or said before he pulled out one of three semi-automatic handguns he was carrying and opened fire. A VTA spokesperson refuted reports that Cassidy was facing a disciplinary hearing that morning.

Bertolet would later hear a first-hand account of what happened in that room from the woman who survived. She said Cassidy got up and said something like, “This is how the union treats people,” then pulled a handgun from his satchel.

“She went down on the ground and curled up in a fetal position thinking she was going to die,” Bertolet said the woman told him. “And Sam looked at her. She looked up and saw him looking at her, and he moved beside her and started shooting everyone that was on the ground.”

Then, she told Bertolet, even after her fellow crew members were shot, Cassidy aimed at each one of them again and fired off “another couple of rounds for everyone.”

Bertolet had heard the shots and the screams from the signal room on the other side of the building. The walls don’t reach the ceiling in the warehouse-like building and sound travels easily.

He called the control center that connects directly with the county communications office. “We have an active shooter!” Bertolet exclaimed, as he and two co-workers piled carts and chairs against the door. He hid in the back of the room and texted “I love you” to his wife of 40 years, Diane, and their three children.

“I wanted to at least let them know how I felt if I didn’t make it,” Bertolet said, choking up.

He wished he had his own gun, he said, so he didn’t feel so helpless.

When the shooting stopped in his building, he heard over the radio that the shooter was heading across the yard to Building A, where the rail operators and supervisors work.

He had cooked up a plan in his mind: He would run outside, get in his red Dodge Ram and run over the shooter. “I was willing to take a 3,000-pound truck against a 9 mm (handgun) any day,” he said.

But when he stepped out the back door to find frantic people pouring out of Building A, he quickly realized, “I couldn’t do anything.”

Law enforcement officers respond to the scene of a shooting at a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) facility on Wednesday, May 26, 2021, in San Jose, Calif. Santa Clara County sheriff’s spokesman said the railyard shooting left multiple people, including the shooter, dead. (AP Photo/Noah Berger) 

Heroes in Building A

Cassidy, meanwhile, was heading up the stairs of Building A, where he used to work as an electro-mechanic.

Taptej Singh, a 36-year-old light rail operator with a wife and two young children at home, had heard the commotion on the VTA radios. He immediately started calling his co-workers to hide and shepherding others to safety, his relatives said they were told by survivors.

“He put a lady in a control room to make sure she was safe,” his brother, Bagga Singh, said.

Singh’s 42-year-old supervisor, Paul Megia, was doing the same. He hurried Cecilia Crowder into his office, locked the door from the outside, and told her “Don’t let anyone in.” Then he continued to try to help get others to safety.

It wasn’t long before Crowder said she heard gunfire outside the door.

In their efforts to save their co-workers, both Singh and Megia found themselves face to face with the killer.

“I’m really sorry,” Crowder told Megia’s family and loved ones at a vigil Friday. “Paul saved my life.”

Over the radio, Bertolet heard the pop, pop, pop of the shots that felled Singh and Megia in the next building. Another light rail operator, Adrian Balleza, was killed, too.

Then he heard a friend in the control room on the third floor shouting, “He’s up here!”

Somewhere in that building, as sheriff’s deputies closed in, Cassidy turned one of his three semiautomatic handguns on himself.

In under 10 minutes, he had fired 39 rounds. He had about 10 times that amount of ammunition when he arrived.

Valley Transportation Authority shooting victims: (Top) Abdolvahab Alaghmandan, Adrian Balleza, Alex Fritch, Jose Hernandez III. (Bottom) Lars Lane, Michael Rudometkin. Paul Megia, Taptejdeep Singh, Timothy Romo(Courtesy of Valley Transportation Authority) 

A familiar question

In the aftermath of the carnage, the familiar question that is asked again and again is: Why? Investigators and the VTA have not yet provided an answer.

But in interviews with the Bay Area News Group, Cassidy’s ex-wife, Cecilia Nelms, told reporters that he was always seething during their 10-year marriage that ended in 2005, took antidepressants and spoke more than once of killing his colleagues. His sister, Ann, told this news organization he was often tense and “quick to suspect bad intentions toward him, almost verging on paranoia.” He “seemed fine” to his parents two days earlier when he visited them at their Cupertino home to take his mother’s car for a smog check, and Ann wonders if something triggered him on Tuesday.

A month earlier, Cassidy blew up in a confrontation over the radio at work with an operations center employee who asked him about finishing a job.

“If you say something nasty to (Operations Control Center),” one worker told the Bay Area News Group, “they’re going to report it, and things are going to happen.”

If Cassidy was reprimanded, the VTA won’t say. The agency said it is reviewing all its records that involve him and whether there are any reports of Cassidy making employees “fearful or uneasy.”

Nothing has been easy in the last year for the VTA.

Two employees died of COVID and 150 others were sickened. Conflicts flared between management and the transit union over safety protocols and hazard pay. In March, California’s workplace safety regulator fined the authority for pandemic safety violations. In April, VTA’s computer systems were breached in a cyberattack, and in a random and bizarre incident, someone shot a long black arrow into the back of a VTA worker on a work break as he walked through a San Jose neighborhood.

Wednesday’s tragedy has indefinitely stopped the trains.

‘Brutal to each other’

Bertolet has been one of the few VTA workers who experienced the horrors of that day to tell his story. He has cast a light on a rough-and-tumble work culture that he says is not for the thin-skinned.

Working with high voltage electricity is some of the most dangerous work in the business. Fixing overhead lines in truck buckets, crews wear heavy cotton uniforms to protect themselves from burning arc flashes. Anything polyester would melt onto their skin.

“We’re basically brutal to each other. We’re a bunch of blue-collar guys and we beat up on each other all the time,” Bertolet said. Still, he said, “if you can’t deal with people who are going to talk straight up to you, you shouldn’t be there.”

For the most part, though, he said, crews get along, spending their breaks together, sharing meals and joking around. They often gather around outdoor barbecues at lunchtime, grilling thick steaks. Cassidy never joined them.

Cassidy had worked at the VTA for two decades, most recently as a substation maintenance worker, “but he never fit in,” Bertolet said.

Some of Cassidy’s co-workers knew him to harbor gripes, about being assigned undesirable jobs or working without a safety partner and, recently, about changes to vacation rules.

Bertolet didn’t often cross paths with Cassidy, but when he did, he remarked on Cassidy’s royal blue heavy-duty jacket.

“Most of us wore the issued uniform,” Bertolet said. “But he always wore that (jacket) over it.”

SAN JOSE, CA – May 27: A memorial for victims of the VTA train yard shooting grows, Thursday, May 27, 2021, in front of City Hall in San Jose, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group) (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

The friends he lost

Bertolet said he is haunted by discovering his mortally wounded friends: Romo, “always the life of the party” and “superman” to his wife and three kids; Abdolvahab “Abdi” Alaghmandan, the “gentle soul” who could fix anything; Jose Hernandez III, a mechanic following in his father’s and uncle’s footsteps at the VTA; Lars Kepler Lane, who loved to whip up gourmet meals; Michael Rudometkin, whose wife will miss his bad jokes and bear hugs; and Alex Fritch, who will miss his son’s high school graduation this week and a planned trip to Hawaii in September to renew vows with his wife, Terra. She crawled into his hospital bed to hold him just before he died Wednesday night.

Bertolet could see how they never stood a chance. With only one door and a tight squeeze around the conference table, “if you were in that room and somebody started shooting, you’re trapped.”

He sought counseling for the first time Friday. He wasn’t able to stop the shooter, but at least he could console the woman who had survived. He had tucked her into his truck as she cried.

When the shooting was over, law enforcement officers gathered the terrified workers together and escorted them across the parking lot. They followed a trail of blood, Bertolet said, past the shooter’s body. Officers had ferried it on the hood of a patrol car, then, at San Pedro Street, placed it on the curb.

Bertolet didn’t recognize the shooter at first — until somebody said, “That’s Sam.”

Then he noticed the royal blue jacket.

“Aw Christ,” he said, “that’s him.”

SAN JOSE, CA – May 27: Aubrey Romo consoles her brother Scott while he shared thoughts about his father, Timothy Romo, during a vigil for victims of yesterday’s VTA shooting, Thursday, May 27, 2021, at San Jose City Hall. They were joined by his brother Tristan and their mother Annette. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group) 

Staff writers David DeBolt, Leonardo Castañeda, Robert Salonga and Ethan Baron contributed to this report.