Eight people have been shot, two of them fatally at an office building at 1000 Legion Place in dowtown Orlando. Police are looking for a suspect wearing a blue shirt and blue jeans. A witness tells FOX 35 the shooter is a former worker who was employed in the building.
He is 40-year-old Jason Rodrigues, driving a Silver 2002 Nissan SUV. Update: The gunman has been arrested. He is reported to be a disgruntled ex-employee of a company in the building on which he opened fire. He was fired in 2007.
Asked by a reporter outside the police station why he did it, Rodriguez replied: "Because they left me to rot." Mike Bernos, spokesman of the engineering firm Reynolds, Smith and Hills, said Rodriguez was an entry-level engineer who was fired in June 2007 after working there for a year. "His performance wasn't up to our standards, so we terminated him," Bernos said. There had been no contact between the company and Rodriguez since then. In an interview with FOX News' Shepherd Smith, a woman who identified herself as Rodriguez's former mother-in-law described the suspect as a tremendously jealous and paranoid individual. "He was a little unpredictable. Very jealous. He would imagine things sometimes, like for example: 'People are after me, people are looking for me, they hate me,'" recalled the woman, who did not give her name. "He was under medication...to help his mind," "If I am not mistaken, they had him in a mental [facility] about six months ago," "I know he had mental problems," "He was crazy. He was crazy,"