On Saturday, New Jersey congressman Bill Pascrell said that the man who’d killed himself after shooting a security guard at a federal building in Manhattan was a whistleblower who’d been given “a raw deal,” the Associated Press reports.

Pascrell, who represents New Jersey’s 8th district, said members of his staff had worked with the gunman, Kevin Downing, who, according to the AP, was fired in 1999 from his job at the New York City office of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to help resolve his case.

In 2013, Pascrell wrote a letter to the Labor Department criticizing Downing’s firing. “There is evidence to indicate Mr Downing’s termination was inappropriate because it was in retaliation for his communication with congressional staff regarding what he believed to be waste and abuse present in the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” Pascrell wrote.

This weekend, Pascrell said that the 68-year-old Downing had never shown any violent tendencies.

The security guard Downing killed on Friday, Idrissa Camara, was supposed to have left at 4pm but had agreed to work an extra shift, according to his employer.

There was no indication that the shooting was terrorism-related, James O’Neill, a chief with the NYPD, told the AP on Saturday. “We’re in the very early stages of the investigation and are working to establish his motive for coming here, if he had an intended target beyond the security officer, and what the motive was behind the crime.”

Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.