Rhon­dor Dowlat

The first day of skills train­ing at the MIC In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy (MIC-IT) in O’Meara, Ari­ma, yes­ter­day turned out to be trau­mat­ic for close to 70 trainees, af­ter a gun­man ran in, opened fire and held one of them hostage.

The gun­man had min­utes be­fore opened fire on a group of re­spond­ing po­lice of­fi­cers, who al­so re­turned fire as he was at­tempt­ing to elude them. Luck­i­ly, no one was in­jured dur­ing the or­deal.

The sus­pect, a 32-year-old San­ta Cruz man, was even­tu­al­ly sub­dued and ar­rest­ed by of­fi­cers af­ter a brief ne­go­ti­a­tion to get him to re­lease his hostage.

The in­ci­dent stemmed from an ar­gu­ment be­tween the sus­pect and a 20-year-old MIC trainee, who was on her first day of train­ing in a con­struc­tion tech­nol­o­gy pro­gramme.

One eye­wit­ness told the T&T Guardian that at about 7.40 am a taxi pulled up near MIC-IT. The young trainee and the sus­pect were in the taxi. How­ev­er, the taxi dri­ver made his way to the se­cu­ri­ty guard and in­formed them there was an on­go­ing heat­ed ar­gu­ment be­tween the two pas­sen­gers.

“The man told me that the woman was be­ing threat­ened and told by the man that he had a gun on him. It look like the man jumped in the taxi with her and an­oth­er trainee and when they reached here the man did not want the woman to go in­to the in­sti­tute and that’s how the ar­gu­ment be­gan,” the eye­wit­ness said.

The eye­wit­ness added that when the se­cu­ri­ty was alert­ed they con­tact­ed an of­fi­cial at the in­sti­tute’s of­fice, who called the po­lice.

“When the po­lice came the girl ran in­to the hall and the man be­gan run­ning to­wards the po­lice shoot­ing at them about five times. The of­fi­cers shot be­hind him but they missed. He then ran in­to the hall where the oth­er trainees were and that’s where it got worst,” the eye­wit­ness said.

An­oth­er eye­wit­ness, an in­struc­tor who wished not to be iden­ti­fied and/or record­ed, said when the gun­man ran in­to the hall, “he fired about three shots in the air and grabbed a male trainee who was sit­ting with his head down on the desk. That trainee who was tak­en hostage was wear­ing ear­phones, so he did not hear any of the com­mo­tion, so that is why he was held so easy be­cause the rest of trainees ran out and I es­cort­ed them to the muster point and tried to calm them down.”

Af­ter hold­ing the male trainee hostage for about ten min­utes, the sus­pect re­leased him and sur­ren­dered him­self to the po­lice around 9 am.

The man was then tak­en to the Ari­ma Po­lice Sta­tion for ques­tion­ing and short­ly be­fore 3 pm he was es­cort­ed to his home in San­ta Cruz as part of their on­go­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tions.

Arista Maraj, of MIC-IT’s cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions de­part­ment, told the T&T Guardian that a meet­ing has been called for Thurs­day “to dis­cuss the in­ci­dent with par­ents whose chil­dren at­tend the O’Meara Tech­nol­o­gy Cen­tre.” Maraj added that the Em­ploy­ee As­sis­tance Pro­gramme al­so re­mains in ef­fect for all em­ploy­ees and trainees who were in­volved in the trau­mat­ic in­ci­dent.

MIC-IT staff are al­so said to be as­sist­ing po­lice with their in­ves­ti­ga­tions.