On May 19, the San José Police Department’s Covert Response Unit (CRU) and MERGE Unit took Bryan Velasquez into custody without incident and he has been charged with felony stalking. Several firearms, including two AR pattern assault rifles, high capacity magazines, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, tactical body armor, and materials to manufacture and assemble privately made firearms or ghost guns were seized.
Last month, the San José Police Department received a report from a local construction company regarding a former employee that had been engaging in stalking behavior towards multiple co-workers. The suspect, identified as Bryan Velasquez, had been terminated from the company in January 2022.
Velasquez engaged in escalating behavior of cyber stalking, including posting pictures of himself pointing firearms on social media, sending e-mails to employees with threats littered with profanity, while intermixing intimate knowledge of his former co-workers residences’ and their daily patterns of behavior. A records check also revealed that suspect Velasquez had several firearms registered to him. Based on the preliminary investigation, Detectives worked closely with the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office to walk through an arrest warrant for Velasquez, charging him with felony stalking, and obtained a gun violence restraining order (GVRO) to seize all his firearms.
Nearly a year ago on May 26, 2021, Samuel Cassidy shot and killed 10 co-workers at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) rail yard in San Jose.
