A gunman suspected of shooting two women at an aviation maintenance college in Inglewood was identified Saturday as Jesse Figueroa, 40, of Monterey Park, who had recently been hired as a security guard at the campus.
Figueroa walked into an office at Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology on Friday and opened fire on the two victims with a handgun, said Inglewood Mayor James Butts, a former police chief for the city of Santa Monica.
“This was not any act of random violence in the city,” Butts told The Times. “This was an act of workplace violence.”
The suspect drove away from the campus in his car, but was taken into custody by Los Angeles police Friday night in Koreatown after Inglewood police shared a description of the suspect’s license plate and vehicle with partner agencies, according to Butts, who said Figueroa was in custody in Inglewood’s city jail.
He is being held on a $1-million bail in connection to the shooting, according to jail records.
The two victims were taken to a trauma center in Long Beach, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department, which didn’t release their names.
Butts said one of the victims was a dean at the college and was in critical condition. The other works at the college as a receptionist and she was taken to the hospital and was stable, he said.
“We feel terrible for the families of these two ladies,” the mayor said.
Butts said there wasn’t a clear motive for the shooting, but noted Figueroa has been employed at the Inglewood campus for a short time as an unarmed security guard.
The handgun believed to be used in the shooting is in Figueroa’s vehicle and police plan to search for the weapon once they secure a search warrant Saturday, Butts added. A 9mm shell casing was recovered at the campus.
“Situations like this are very jarring for a community because it promotes a sense of randomness and threatens safety,” Butts said. “This is a college campus; you see no reason that there would be this type of crime at school.”
Police spent more than an hour going from room to room on the campus in search of a suspect or additional victims, but did not find anyone, authorities said. Inglewood police said they cleared the campus about 5:15 p.m.
A student at the school told ABC7 News that he and his classmates were told to shelter inside a campus building for about 90 minutes.
“Everybody kind of got terrified at once and I just feel like we really couldn’t panic,” he told the station. “We really had to just kind of stay cool and the police were here to do their job and we just didn’t want to intervene, so I hope everybody that was involved is safe.”
Campus President Christopher Becker told ABC7 that there is 24/7 security on campus and regular safety drills, fire drills and earthquake drills.
“We’re an aviation school, so safety is one of the things that we focus on the most,” Becker told the outlet. “It’s a nice community of students and teachers and staff. We all get along really well, care about one another deeply and so this is hard on all of us.”
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