Apple Inc security officials met with police in Palo Alto, California, this week to notify them that Steve Jobs was close to death, a spokeswoman with the police department said.
Following the meeting, the police devised a plan to put patrols in the area around the former Apple chief executive officer’s Palo Alto home once they heard from the company that he had died, according to Sandra Brown, the spokeswoman.
The Apple representatives told the police department there was “a possibility that it could happen this week,” Brown said in a phone interview. “It’s common sense for us to work together. If you think about who he was and his contribution to the world, people might come out in masses.”
Jobs, who resigned as Apple’s CEO on August 24, died October 5, the Cupertino, California-based company said. Jobs, 56, had been diagnosed in 2003 with a neuroendocrine tumor, a rare form of pancreatic cancer, and underwent a liver transplant in 2009. Apple unveiled the latest version of its iPhone, the product that accounts for almost half of the company’s sales, on October 4, the day before his death.
Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, declined to comment about the police meeting.
Jobs lived in a home that was modest, for a person of his means, on a public street open to pedestrians and traffic. The extra patrols were necessary for safety reasons, Brown said.
‘COMPOUNDS AND WALLS’
“There are other people here in town, they have compounds and walls,” said Brown. “He didn’t want to have security around.”
Apple was supposed to inform the police of Jobs’s death before making a public announcement so the department could prepare, said Brown. Instead, police learned he had died when the company issued a press release at about 4:30 pm local time on October 5.
As it turned out, Brown said, only about 40 people showed up around Jobs’s home that day.
“Here’s a guy who’s a billionaire and lives in a regular neighborhood, not behind a gated estate with all the security guards,” said Bruce Gee, a former Apple employee who drove up from his home a couple miles away. “On Halloween, people go trick or treating there like everyone else.”
Mourners gathered at Apple stores around the world and took to the Internet and social media to express their grief.
At the San Francisco Apple store near Union Square, Steve Streza, 24, stood holding an iPad displaying Apple’s homepage image of Jobs and the words “Steve Jobs: 1955-2011.”
“Macs were the reason I got into product development,” said Streza, a developer at readitlater.com who grew up with Mac computers. “If it weren’t for Steve Jobs and Macs, my life would probably be in a completely different place right now.”
