Nasa to review security after hostage murdered

Nasa is concentrating on a review of its security procedures as officials try to figure out today how a contract worker smuggled a handgun into the Johnson Space Centre, where he killed another employee and himself.

The gunman, armed with a snub-nosed revolver, barricaded himself in a building that houses communications and tracking systems for the space shuttle.

In addition to killing a man before taking his own life, he had duct-taped a woman to a chair, holding her for hours, police said. The woman hostage escaped, suffering minor injuries.

“Right now we’re trying to understand why this happened, how this happened,” Mike Coats, director of the Johnson Space Centre, said in a news conference.

He said Nasa officials had reviewed their procedures earlier this week because of the Virginia Tech shootings.

“But of course we never believed this could happen here to our family and our situation.”

Space agency spokesman John Ira Petty said Nasa was conducting what he called a continuous review of security procedures. Petty would not discuss specifics, saying the apparent murder-suicide was a police matter.

To enter the space centre, workers must show an ID badge as they drive past a security guard. The badge allows workers access to designated buildings.

Nasa and police identified the gunman as 60-year-old William Phillips. He apparently had a dispute with the murdered man, police chief Harold Hurtt said.

Nasa identified the victim as David Beverly, a 62-year-old Nasa worker. Beverly was shot in the chest, probably “in the early minutes of the whole ordeal”, police said.

Beverly’s wife, Linda, said her husband of 41 years was an electrical parts specialist who felt working at Nasa was his calling.

“His intellect and his knowledge, David really felt he was contributor,” she said.

Her husband had mentioned Phillips before, but she declined to say in what regard. Linda Beverly said it wouldn’t be fair to Phillips.

The woman hostage, identified by Nasa as Fran Crenshaw, a contract worker with MRI Technologies, worked in the same general area and was presumably taken hostage after Beverly was shot, Hurtt said.

“She was very courageous, a calming influence in this whole issue and apparently was a very positive relationship between her and the suspect because he at no time that we know of threatened to do injury to her,” Hurtt said.

Phillips, an employee of Jacobs Engineering of Pasadena, California, had worked for Nasa for 12 to 13 years and “up until recently, he has been a good employee,” Coats said.

He was unmarried, had no children and apparently lived alone.

The gunman left telephone numbers and names of people to contact and wrote a note on a board in the room, police said.

“I don’t recall what was on it,” Hurtt said.

During the confrontation, Nasa employees in the building were evacuated and others were ordered to remain in their offices for several hours. Roads within the 1,600-acre campus were also blocked off, and a nearby school kept its teachers and students inside as classes ended. Doors to Mission Control were locked as standard procedure.