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The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office has released chilling bodycam footage from the police response to the mass shooting at a light-rail yard in San Jose in northern California.
The gunman, 57-year-old Samuel Cassidy, worked at the railyard and killed nine of his colleagues before turning the gun on himself.
A team of Sheriff’s deputies and San Jose police officers arrived at the building minutes after the first reports of a shooting.
Shots were still being fired at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority bus and rail yard when law enforcement arrived.
The body camera footage shows the team of officers climbing the stairs on the outside of the building to the third floor, where a VTA supervisor comes out with his arms in the air.
He then gives his keycard to the law enforcement officials, allowing them to enter the building. The officers and deputies then search the building with their guns raised.
Just minutes later, the officers hear a gunshot, followed by another, and then two more. One of the officers looks through a small window as they come upon another door and says: “I’ve got somebody down.”
The team of officers opens the door and one yells: “Let me see your hands!”
What could be another two gunshots can be heard. The bodycam footage then shows a man slumped over in a chair, holding a gun.
The window in a door into the dispatch centre across from him has been destroyed by gunfire.
Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith said the gunman had shot himself in the chin and then in the side of his head.
While it remains unclear whether the gunman knew that officers were getting closer to him, he may have seen the lights from their flashlights and heard them yelling to each other as they moved through the building, the sheriff said.
Sheriff Smith said they had used an active shooter protocol pushed by a lieutenant who had been in Colorado during the 1999 Columbine school shooting, which took place south of Denver.
The sheriff said deputies and officers “hardly spoke a word to each other” as they went into the building as “they knew what their job was”. She praised them for their courage.
“There were over 100 VTA employees on site that morning, and I believe the bravery of all of law enforcement personnel really prevented the loss of additional life,” she said.
“There is no consideration of bringing light rail service back right now,” VTA spokeswoman Stacey Hendler Ross told The Mercury News.
The return of the rail service “will be a matter of weeks or months, and not days”, she added.
The Guadalupe Yard is the hub of the rail network and is now a crime scene controlled by the Sheriff’s department.
Ms Hendler Ross said the agency would focus on providing support for traumatized employees who lost co-workers.
A recently released report from the FBI shows that California saw the most active shooters in the country over the course of the last 20 years, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
California is the most populous state and has some of the strictest gun laws in the US. In another recent California shooting, an off-duty firefighter shot and killed one co-worker, injuring another before taking his own life.
While law enforcement is still trying to figure out the motive behind Cassidy’s actions, acquaintances and his ex-wife have said that he spoke about hating his job at least a decade ago. He could also be angry and unpredictable.
“We’re beginning to piece things together. But we’ve talked with hundreds of witnesses,” Sheriff Smith said.
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