Nearly one and a half years after a disgruntled mechanic killed nine of his coworkers, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority on Thursday announced an $8 million settlement with the widows, children and other family members left grieving in the wake of the Bay Area’s deadliest mass shooting.
The agreement — reached with eight of the nine victims’ families — is split evenly among them. Along with the settlement, victims’ families have previously received one year of their loved one’s salary and workers’ compensation death benefits. The agency also agreed to pay $4.9 million in retirement benefits in the form of monthly payments totaling $3,000 or more.
The settlement is far less than the hundreds of millions of dollars in initial damage claims families filed in November 2021. And for some family members, the agreement has done little to heal wounds left from the shooting, while the lack of accountability leaves a bitter taste in their mouths.
“Some of the families, they don’t know if they want more money or they want more apologies from them,” said Jose Hernandez, whose 39-year-old son, Jose Dejesus Hernandez III, dreamed of leaving the VTA and starting his own auto repair business. “It’s about accepting responsibility, and VTA will never admit that they did something wrong.”
After the shooting on May 26, 2021, family members say there still are no answers from VTA management or the main union as to why the gunman was kept on the job after a series of red flags, including berating a colleague so aggressively that a VTA worker worried he could “go postal.” Parallel investigations by the VTA and the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s department have yielded no public results.
Gary Gwilliam, who represented the eight families, said the settlement number remains low because victims’ families had limited options to sue the VTA outside the workers’ compensation process. “The case against VTA was extremely tenuous and difficult,” said Gwilliam. “These settlements are a fraction of what we think they should be worth in terms of what the families have lost.”
Gwilliam and other attorneys who represented the families will collect about 40% of the settlement in fees, according to two people familiar with the agreement.
Gwilliam said the families are still pursuing legal claims against the Santa Clara County sheriff and Allied Universal, a private security company contracted to protect VTA facilities. In those lawsuits, the families accuse the sheriff and Allied Universal of failing to provide adequate security at the Guadalupe rail yard, where the gunman, Samuel Cassidy, opened fire in a break room before turning the gun on himself. They say Cassidy should have been screened by security personnel before entering the premises with a duffle bag full of weapons and ammunition.
The families agreed to withdraw wrongful death lawsuits against VTA, according to the terms of the settlement.
The nine victims, all of them men, were: Hernandez III, Abdolvahab Alaghmandan, Adrian Balleza, Alex Ward Fritch, Paul Delacruz Megia, Lars Kepler Lane, Timothy Michael Romo, Michael Joseph Rudometkin, and Taptejdeep Singh.
The family of Lars Kepler Lane, 63, has not settled with the VTA. Daniel Schaar, attorney for the Lane family, said they “did not feel that the offer made to the Lane family was sufficient.” He said there are “additional facts” that have yet to come to light that “weigh against VTA in their liability in this shooting.”
The mass shooting also left a hobbled agency struggling to restore transit service and rebuild trust between management, a traumatized workforce and the agency’s main union. While the VTA has worked to hire a consultant to revamp the workplace, the agency and the union have been at loggerheads over vaccine mandates, and a bus driver was recently forced to retire after allegedly threatening “some shooting” in June.
“VTA will continue to work together with families, our employees, and the community to honor those who lost their lives,” VTA General Manager Carolyn Gonot said in a statement. “We remain committed to moving VTA forward for our community in a meaningful and successful way.”
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