SAN JOSE, Calif. — One year after a disgruntled employee killed nine Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority light rail coworkers and himself, the family of one of the victims has filed suit against the transit agency, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office, and a private security firm for failing to prevent the mass shooting.
Courthouse News Service reports the family of Lars Kepler Lane filed the wrongful death suit on Thursday — the one-year anniversary of the shooting — saying the VTA should have fired gunman Samuel Cassidy because he displayed a pattern of unstable behavior and had several altercations with coworkers.
The suit claims the VTA was “aware of fears amongst co-0wokers that if anyone were to ‘go postal,’ it would be Cassidy. Despite this direct knowledge, SCVTA failed to properly investigate and/or discipline Cassidy. As a direct result, Cassidy was able to perpetrate this mass murder.”
The Sheriff’s Office was included because it had a $50 million contract to provide security for the transit agency, along with private security firm Universal Protection Service. The suit alleges those entites failed to maintain weapon detection systems that could have prevented the shooting.
Nine men ages 29 to 63 were the victims of the May 26, 2021, shooting. The light rail system was shut down for months in the aftermath of the shooting [see “Santa Clara VTA nears resumption …,” Trains News Wire, Aug. 25, 2021], and the building where most of the deaths occurred was demolished earlier this month [see “San Jose light rail building, site of 2021 mass shooting, is torn down,” News Wire, May 16, 2022].
I agree. In today’s society you can find a lawyer to file a suit even tho maybe a dozen turned it down. It has to do the “free shot” plaintiffs have against losing a case and thus having a judgement for defense costs against them. You just rarely ever see that happening. Until that changes this kind of crap will just keep happening.
Why not the designer of the building that made it easy for the shooter to get in and shoot persons? That I suspect is one reason the building being torn down.
He worked there, the design had nothing to do with how he got in…employees are allowed access into the buildings they work in as far as I know. Still, when are Judges going to start throwing out cases like this…if anything, sue the perpetrators estates and relatives, since they’re the ones more directly responsible than the 3 being sued(except that two of them are government agencies and the third a private company…$$$).