SAN JOSE, Calif. — Before a disgruntled employee opened fire on his colleagues at the Valley Transportation Authority’s light rail yard early on the morning of May 26, the agency’s workers had been trained by law enforcement on how to respond to an active shooter.
It was the kind of training that has become widespread in this era when mass shootings happen with numbing regularity, and when workplaces are among the most frequent targets.
Not nearly as common, experts in workplace violence say, are the kinds of programs that could prevent a shooting from happening in the first place — training to help workers spot potential warning signs and “threat assessment teams” that could help divert employees who may be heading down a violent path.
VTA has instituted only some of those practices.
In addition to the active shooter training, authority officials in an emailed statement said workers receive “Violence Free Workplace Training” that “provides employees with the knowledge and skills to prevent, recognize, appropriately respond to and recover from workplace violence.” The authority’s sexual harassment training also covers abusive conduct.
But VTA does not have a threat assessment team that might evaluate troubling behaviors from its employees, provide a go-to resource for colleagues to report concerns, connect troubled workers with help or even fire those believed to pose too great a risk.
“These are the sorts of things that need to happen in order for us to hopefully never get to the point where we need to use our training for active shooters,” said Chris Geier, CEO of the personnel services consulting firm Sikich, which created a threat assessment team years ago and is now developing a training program for other companies to implement.
Investigators have not revealed what may have led 57-year-old Samuel Cassidy to kill nine co-workers and then himself in a rampage that would become the deadliest mass shooting in San Francisco Bay Area history.
Still, family members of some of the victims have questioned whether VTA ignored red flags from Cassidy.
Matt Doherty, the former special agent in charge in the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center and now a senior vice president with the security firm Hillard Heintze, said Cassidy exhibited many of the warning signs of people who carry out violence in the workplace.
“He was obviously escalating,” Doherty said.
Cassidy’s employers never learned that customs agents reportedly found terrorist literature and notes detailing hatred for VTA among Cassidy’s possessions when he returned from a trip to the Philippines in 2016, or that his ex-wife — as she said in interviews after the killings — knew he had harbored grudges against co-workers for years.
But the VTA was well aware of Cassidy’s growing problems on the job. According to a trove of internal emails VTA released earlier this month in response to a public records request by the Bay Area News Group, Cassidy had five contentious run-ins with management over seemingly minor workplace issues in the two years before the shooting.
Among them: Cassidy refused to complete a sign-out form for his radio in 2019, leading to a two-day suspension for insubordination. He shouted at a co-worker in January 2020 during a sign-up for vacation time, after which another colleague expressed a concern Cassidy would “go postal.” Less than four months before the rampage, Cassidy was reprimanded for using the VTA radio system inappropriately to air another complaint about vacation policies and his bosses.
To Doherty, the incidents paint a picture of Cassidy as a disgruntled worker, a “grievance collector” and someone whose outbursts instilled fear.
“Those warning signs were likely observed, but not reported to an entity that could handle a situation like that,” Doherty said.
One month after the shooting, there are still many unanswered questions about how VTA responded to Cassidy’s behavior; both the authority and the union that represented Cassidy have declined to answer key questions about his history.
In the documents it has released publicly, VTA redacted the names of employees who sent and received messages about Cassidy, making it impossible to tell whether anyone knew he was repeatedly getting into disputes, or if each case was handled individually. The authority refused a request from the Bay Area News Group to release unredacted emails.
While Geier declined to specifically discuss the VTA shooting, he said a key component of threat assessment teams is that they centralize the response to workplace incidents, so that managers can spot any patterns of troubling behavior.
At Sikich, a team from human resources, legal and other departments consults when needed with psychologists or law enforcement outside the company. Employees are trained to recognize warning signs — such as colleagues who are irritable, hostile or frequently blaming others, and formerly engaged co-workers who are becoming more withdrawn — and are told they can contact the team with concerns.
Doherty noted that many colleges and universities, including the University of California system, have had similar teams handle concerning behavior by students, faculty and staff since the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech.
Asked whether VTA was considering changing any practices in the wake of the shooting, authority officials wrote, “We will be reviewing all applicable policies, programs and procedures.”
There are challenges to implementing threat teams — Geier acknowledged they require a bigger commitment of time and resources than active shooter training, for instance. The larger efforts could also face pushback from workers or the unions that represent them, which may be skeptical of the idea that colleagues would be expected to report on one another, with reprimands or even firing as a potential outcome.
But Geier and Doherty said the point of the teams is not to terminate every worker who is irritable or loses their temper once. Instead, they described how the teams can talk with employees whose behavior is concerning others, learn more about what stresses they might be facing outside of work and, ideally, help them resolve the problem before it gets more serious.
The goal, Doherty said, is to “find out what’s motivating that person to come to your attention.”
“That is your best hope,” he added.
