ORLANDO, Fla. — A man so broke that he said he didn’t have the money to visit his son 30 minutes away opened fire Friday at the engineering firm that fired him two years ago, killing one person and wounding five, authorities said.
As officers led a handcuffed Jason Rodriguez into a police station, a reporter asked the divorced 40-year-old why he had attacked his former colleagues.
“Because they left me to rot,” said Rodriguez, who recently told a bankruptcy judge he was making less than $30,000 a year at a Subway sandwich shop and owed nearly $90,000.
The shooting on the eighth floor of an office tower paralyzed downtown Orlando for three hours. Police tracked Rodriguez to his mother’s home, spotted him through a window and ordered him to come out.
He surrendered peacefully and was in custody Friday evening. Police said he apologized as officers handcuffed him.
“I’m just going through a tough time right now. I’m sorry,” officers quoted him as saying.
Police say he will be charged with first-degree murder and other crimes. Officials said he could make an initial court appearance today.
All the victims worked at the firm of Reynolds, Smith and Hills, where Rodriguez was an entry-level engineer for 11 months before he was let go in June 2007, the company said.
Witnesses told police they recognized Rodriguez when he entered the company’s eighth-floor lobby. They said he pulled a handgun from a holster under his shirt and shot an employee standing next to the receptionist’s desk, killing him. The slain victim, identified by police as 26-year-old Otis Beckford, was hit by at least two bullets. The gunman then went into the common work area and fired several shots, witnesses said, wounding five other employees.
The five wounded people were in stable condition at Orlando hospitals and police say all are expected to survive.
Rodriguez worked on drawings in the firm’s transportation group, but his supervisors said his performance was not up to their standards, and when he did not improve, he was fired. The company did not hear from him again.
“This is really a mystery to us,” said Ken Jacobson, the firm’s general legal counsel and chief financial officer. “There was nothing to indicate any hard feelings.”
He did not know why Rodriguez would say the company had left him “to rot.”
“It’s been 2 1/2 years,” Jacobson said. “We don’t know where he’s been or what he’s done.”
Rodriguez told detectives that the company had fired him without cause and had made him look incompetent. He told them he was unemployed for a year and a half before getting a job at Subway, where worked until recently.
He told them the shop couldn’t give him enough hours, and he later filed for unemployment. He expected to get a check recently but when it didn’t arrive he blamed Reynolds, Smith and Hills, thinking it was harming his efforts to qualify, police said. He told them he could no longer support his family. Police said he then invoked his right to remain silent.
“I used to tell my daughter he was crazy,” his ex-wife’s mother, America Holloway, said.
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