Articles Trend

ORLANDO -- The gunman in an Orlando office building entered the complex through an unguarded parking garage Friday before he opened fire on former colleagues at an engineering firm that fired him two years ago, according to a witness who works in the 16-story Gateway Center where the incident occurred.
William Blake, a 28-year-old engineer was on the 11th floor when police officers armed with assault rifles interrupted a company meeting and said ``we needed to get up and leave [because] there's an active shooter and we needed to calmly listen to their orders.''
Blake was one of two witnesses who described to The Miami Herald what they saw and heard when the lone suspected gunman, identified as Jason Rodriguez, walked into his old engineering company and opened fire -- killing one person and wounding five.
The Associated Press reported that as officers led Rodriguez into a police station, a reporter asked the divorced 40-year-old why he had attacked his former colleagues.
LEFT `TO ROT'
``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 AP said.
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 taken into custody.
The shootings occurred inside the Gateway Center, an office building on South Ivanhoe Boulevard in downtown Orlando near Interstate 4.
Blake told The Miami Herald that he and his office colleagues were escorted out of the building by police and then held at the nearby Orlando Chamber of Commercee a block away from the Gateway Center.
Once at the chamber, blake said he spoke with a Gateway Center security guard who told him he had been working at the main desk of the Gateway Center Friday when the gunman arrived.
Blake said the security guard told him the suspect entered the building through the parking garage on foot and forced open with his hands the garage's electronic gate arm.
Blake added that the security guard also said he ``saw the individual enter the garage on the security camera.''
Then the individual, according to the security guard's account to Blake, shoved open the gate arm ``as if he was angry.''
A co-worker, Blake said, told him that he saw one of the victims in the stairwell, shot in the black and bleeding profusely from the mouth.
Another employee at the Gateway Center, David Popper, a 58-year-old lawyer originally from South Miami, was working on the 12th floor when a call alerted them to the incident.
``We got a call from our receptionist that there was a shooter,'' Popper said. ``They asked us to lock our doors, which we did, and then, 20 minutes later, the police came and knocked on our doors and entered every office with [assault rifles] and escorted us out.
``There were more cops over here in five minutes,'' Popper said.
AP said 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.
Police, AP said, disclosed Rodriguez used a handgun, but did not release additional details, including how he got inside the building, whether he said anything to people in the office or how he initially escaped.
The five wounded people were in stable condition at Orlando hospitals. The person who died was not identified.
AP said Rodriguez worked on drawings in the firm's transportation group, but his supervisors said his performance was not up their standards, and when he did not improve, was fired. The company did not hear from him again.
NO SIGNS
``This is really a mystery to us,'' Ken Jacobson, the firm's general legal counsel and chief financial officer, was quoted as saying. ``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 ½ years,'' Jacobson said. ``We don't know where he's been or what he's done.''
But AP said that Rodriguez' bankruptcy filing and his former mother-in-law suggested he was plagued by money woes.
Les Winograd, a spokesman for Milford, Conn.-based Subway Restaurants, was quoted as saying by AP that Rodriguez had worked for one of the company's sandwich shops in the Orlando area until six weeks ago.
He would not say whether Rodriguez had left or was fired.