Last week’s massacre at the Valley Transportation Authority might have been prevented, the county’s top law enforcement official said Thursday, if federal agents had told local authorities what they knew about Samuel Cassidy.
The federal government never disclosed that customs agents reportedly found terrorist literature and notes detailing hatred for the transit agency in Cassidy’s possession five years ago, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said. The 57-year-old light rail mechanic was virtually unknown to local law enforcement until he opened fire on his colleagues last Wednesday, killing nine people in the deadliest mass shooting in Bay Area history.
“Had this information been shared with local law enforcement, there would have been an intervention with Mr. Cassidy,” Rosen said in an interview with this news organization. “After speaking with Mr. Cassidy, there may at that point have been enough evidence for a gun-violence restraining order, there may have been information for them to refer Mr. Cassidy to mental-health services or some other therapeutic alternative.”
Under California’s “red flag” law, such a restraining order allows law enforcement to seize a person’s firearms if they can cite reasonable grounds that person poses a significant danger.
Rosen added: “Could that intervention have put Mr. Cassidy on a different path such that he didn’t murder his coworkers? We’ll never know because we were not provided that information.”
Rosen said his office continues to seek details from the Department of Homeland Security about what federal customs agents learned when they detained Cassidy upon his return from a trip to the Philippines in 2016. According to a DHS memo circulated after the shooting last Wednesday and obtained by the Wall Street Journal, agents found Cassidy with “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.”
San Jose police and Rosen’s office have confirmed that they were never notified about the incident. DHS has not responded to repeated requests for comment over the last several days.
“We’re in the process of figuring out why they stopped him and what they found,” Rosen said. “I want to know why the information was not shared with local law enforcement. And will Customs and Border Protection act differently in the future? I’m in the process of getting answers to those questions.”
If San Jose police had been alerted to the circumstances of Cassidy’s detainment, police said, investigators would have performed a threat assessment including a criminal background check, evaluation of any threatening social media messages, and an inventory of any registered firearms in Cassidy’s possession as well as any specific skills indicating proficiency with weapons, explosives, or both.
In the wake of the shooting at the San Jose light rail yard, investigators have found that Cassidy amassed a large cache of weapons — including three handguns and 32 high-capacity magazines he was carrying with him when he carried out the massacre, as well as a dozen firearms including rifles, shotguns and handguns, improvised explosives and more than 25,000 rounds of ammunition found at his home. The guns were legal, but the high-capacity magazines were not.
Use of the red flag law has increased steadily, with 1,110 requests to remove a person’s firearms filed in 2019, according to the state Department of Justice. In some cases, the law allows citizens to file such requests, which must be approved by a judge. In Santa Clara County, that jump was from seven in 2016 to 122 in 2019. San Jose is the largest applicant of the orders in Santa Clara County, in part because it has the largest portion of the region’s population.
Local authorities have credited the law with disrupting potential threats, including several people who hinted at workplace shootings, and in some cases their guns were returned after a judge deemed that they were not an ongoing danger.
Although current federal officials have remained mum about their encounter with Cassidy, John Sandweg, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told this news organization that there are no specific procedures for what customs officials are supposed to do when they detain a U.S. citizen with potentially deadly intentions.
Sandweg said that, generally, unless there’s an imminent threat, Customs and Border Patrol agents would just record details of the encounter in the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, a database accessible to federal agencies. The agents might also flag the FBI but not typically local or state authorities.
“There’s just not as much coordination or interaction between the customs officers … and local law enforcement,” he said. “A U.S. citizen presenting a threat like this is just very unusual.”
Depending on what materials Cassidy was detained with, it’s possible they were flagged as terror-affiliated but still didn’t merit a warning to the FBI, according to agency spokesperson Prentice Danner.
“If it were just literature and it wasn’t a specific threat that would not necessarily be flagged to us,” he said.
But the nature of what CBP agents found on Cassidy — including his comments about his hatred for the VTA in interviews with agents — should have been enough to warrant a heads up to local law enforcement agencies, Rosen said.
“It may not be a crime to have books about terrorism and to have notes about how you hate your coworkers, not in and of itself,” Rosen said. “However, it certainly warrants intervention from law enforcement to determine if he was planning a mass shooting.”
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