Florida shooting suspect was angry at the company: police

Jason Rodriguez was taken into custody several hours after the shooting Friday at a downtown Orlando office tower, and police say he will be charged with first-degree murder and other crimes.

Police said Rodriguez told detectives he blamed the firm for recent trouble he had in receiving unemployment benefits. As officers led him handcuffed 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 US$30,000 a year at a Subway sandwich shop and had debts of nearly US$90,000.

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 fired in June 2007, the company said.

Witnesses told police Rodriguez entered the company's eighth-floor lobby, pulled a handgun from a holster and fatally shot an employee standing next to the receptionist's desk. 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 opened fire on his other victims.

The five wounded people were in stable condition at Orlando hospitals and police say all are expected to survive.

Hours after the shootings that paralyzed downtown Orlando, police tracked Rodriguez to his mother's home and ordered him to come out. He surrendered peacefully, apologizing as officers handcuffed him, police said.

“I'm just going through a tough time right now. I'm sorry,” officers quoted him as saying.

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.”

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 a Subway, where he 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 police he could no longer support his family.

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, said Rodriguez had worked for one of the sandwich shops in the Orlando area until six weeks ago. He would not say whether Rodriguez was fired.

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