Gunman in Lunar New Year massacre found dead; motive unclear
Associated Press (archive.ph)
By Amy Taxin and Damian Dovarganes
2023-01-23 14:06:33GMT
MONTEREY PARK, Calif. (AP) — Authorities searched for a motive for the gunman who killed 10 people at a Los Angeles-area ballroom dance club during Lunar New Year celebrations, slayings that sent a wave of fear through Asian American communities and cast a shadow over festivities nationwide.
The suspect, 72-year-old Huu Can Tran, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Sunday in the van that authorities say he used to flee after being prevented from attacking another dance hall. The mayor of Monterey Park said Tran may have frequented the dance hall he attacked.
The massacre was the nation’s fifth mass killing this month — and it struck one of California’s largest celebrations of a holiday observed in many Asian cultures, dealing another blow to a community that has been the target of high-profile violence in recent years.
It was also the deadliest attack since May 24, when 21 people were killed in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Authorities said Saturday’s assault could have been even more deadly. A man whose family runs the venue confronted the assailant in the lobby and wrested the gun from him, The New York Times reported.
Authorities have shared very little about Tran.
“We do understand that he may have had a history of visiting this dance hall and perhaps the motivation has to do with some personal relationships, but that’s something that I think investigators are still uncovering and investigating and we’ll probably find out more in the hours ahead or even days ahead,” said Monterey Park Mayor Henry Lo. Public records show Tran once had addresses in the city and neighboring ones.
But Lo and Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna stressed that the motive remained unclear for the attack, which also wounded 10 people. Speaking at a Sunday evening news conference, Luna said all of the people killed appeared to be over 50. No other suspects were at large, according to the sheriff.
The suspect was carrying what Luna described as a semi-automatic pistol with an extended magazine, and a second handgun was discovered in the van where Tran died.
Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese said Sunday evening that within three minutes of receiving the call, officers arrived at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park. There, they found carnage inside and people trying to flee through all the doors.
“When they came into the parking lot, it was chaos,” Wiese said.
About 20 minutes after the first attack, the gunman entered the Lai Lai Ballroom in the nearby city of Alhambra.
Brandon Tsay was in the lobby at the time, and he told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that he thought he was going to die.
“Something came over me. I realized I needed to get the weapon away from him, I needed to take this weapon, disarm him or else everybody would have died,” Tsay said. “When I got the courage, I lunged at him with both my hands, grabbed the weapon and we had a struggle.”
Once Tsay seized the gun, he pointed it at the man and shouted: “Get the hell out of here, I’ll shoot, get away, go!”
The assailant paused, but then headed back to his van, and Tsay called the police, the gun still in his hand.
While Luna told reporters on Sunday that two people wrested the weapon away from the attacker, Tsay, who works a few days a week at the dance hall his grandparents started, told The New York Times that he acted alone. Stills from security footage shown on “Good Morning America” showed only the two men struggling for the gun.
Witnesses said the suspect fled in a white van.
The van was found in Torrance, another community home to many Asian Americans.
After surrounding the vehicle for hours, law enforcement officials swarmed and entered it. A person’s body appeared to be slumped over the wheel and was later removed. Members of a SWAT team looked through the van’s contents before walking away.
The sheriff’s department earlier released photos of an Asian man believed to be the suspect, apparently taken from a security camera.
Congresswoman Judy Chu said she still has questions about the attack but hopes residents now feel safe.
“The community was in fear thinking that they should not go to any events because there was an active shooter,” Chu said, speaking at Sunday’s news conference.
“What was the motive for this shooter?” she said. “Did he have a mental illness? Was he a domestic violence abuser? How did he get these guns and was it through legal means or not?”
Monterey Park is a city of about 60,000 people on the eastern edge of Los Angeles and is composed mostly of Asian immigrants from China or first-generation Asian Americans. The shooting happened in the heart of its downtown where red lanterns decorated the streets for the Lunar New Year festivities. A police car was parked near a large banner that proclaimed “Happy Year of the Rabbit!”
The celebration in Monterey Park is one of California’s largest. Two days of festivities, which have been attended by as many as 100,000 people in past years, were planned. But officials canceled Sunday’s events following the shooting.
Tony Lai, 35, of Monterey Park was stunned when he came out for his early morning walk to learn that the noises he heard in the night were gunshots.
“I thought maybe it was fireworks. I thought maybe it had something to do with Lunar New Year,” he said. “And we don’t even get a lot of fireworks here. It’s weird to see this. It’s really safe here. We’re right in the middle of the city, but it’s really safe.”
An Associated Press/USA Today database on mass killings in the U.S. shows that 2022 was one of the nation’s worst years with 42 such attacks — the second-highest number since the creation of the tracker in 2006. The database defines a mass killing as four people killed, not including the perpetrator.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom visited Monterey Park on Sunday, meeting with victims and their families as well as local officials.
President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland were briefed on the situation, aides said. Biden said he and first lady Jill Biden were thinking of those killed and wounded.
The Star Ballroom Dance Studio’s website said it was hosting an event Saturday called “Star Night” from 8 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. The studio is a few blocks from city hall on Monterey Park’s main thoroughfare of Garvey Avenue, which is dotted with strip malls of small businesses whose signs are in both English and Chinese. Cantonese and Mandarin are both widely spoken, Chinese holidays are celebrated and Chinese films are screened regularly in the city.
Wynn Liaw, 57, who lives about two blocks from the Monterey Park studio, said she was shocked that such a crime would happen, especially during Lunar New Year’s celebrations.
“Chinese people, they consider Chinese New Year very, very special” — a time when “you don’t do anything that will bring bad luck the entire year,” she said.
---
https://twitter.com/LACoSheriff/status/1617241146710962178 (archive.ph)
archive.ph
Updated: 2023-01-22T09:05:04
Police were responding to reports of a shooting that left multiple casualties in Monterey Park on Saturday night, according to a law enforcement source.
Few details were available, including the number of people shot. Internal police communications said there had been some fatalities.
The shooting took place sometime after 10 p.m. near the site of a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration. Tens of thousands had gathered Saturday for the start of a two-day festival, one of the largest Lunar New Year events in the region.
Earlier in the day, crowds were enjoying skewers and shopping for Chinese food and jewelry. Saturday’s Lunar New Festival hours were scheduled from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
John, 27, who declined to give his last name, lives near the shooting site. He got home around 10 p.m. and heard about 4-5 gunshots. Then, he heard police cruisers “smashing” down the street. He went downstairs at around 11:20 p.m. to see if the shooting occurred at the Lunar New Year festival.
“My first concern was I know they’re having a Lunar New Year celebration,” he said. But he said he saw that the festival had already been cleaned up for the day when he arrived. He went to the scene of the shooting and saw one person being put on a stretcher. Another person had a bandage on their arm.
Video on social media showed police and fire units swarming an area on Garvey Avenue and treating victims.
Injured people were taken to multiple hospitals in the area.
It was unclear if a suspect was in custody.
Associated Press (archive.ph)
By Amy Taxin and Damian Dovarganes
2023-01-23 14:06:33GMT
MONTEREY PARK, Calif. (AP) — Authorities searched for a motive for the gunman who killed 10 people at a Los Angeles-area ballroom dance club during Lunar New Year celebrations, slayings that sent a wave of fear through Asian American communities and cast a shadow over festivities nationwide.
The suspect, 72-year-old Huu Can Tran, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Sunday in the van that authorities say he used to flee after being prevented from attacking another dance hall. The mayor of Monterey Park said Tran may have frequented the dance hall he attacked.
The massacre was the nation’s fifth mass killing this month — and it struck one of California’s largest celebrations of a holiday observed in many Asian cultures, dealing another blow to a community that has been the target of high-profile violence in recent years.
It was also the deadliest attack since May 24, when 21 people were killed in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Authorities said Saturday’s assault could have been even more deadly. A man whose family runs the venue confronted the assailant in the lobby and wrested the gun from him, The New York Times reported.
Authorities have shared very little about Tran.
“We do understand that he may have had a history of visiting this dance hall and perhaps the motivation has to do with some personal relationships, but that’s something that I think investigators are still uncovering and investigating and we’ll probably find out more in the hours ahead or even days ahead,” said Monterey Park Mayor Henry Lo. Public records show Tran once had addresses in the city and neighboring ones.
But Lo and Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna stressed that the motive remained unclear for the attack, which also wounded 10 people. Speaking at a Sunday evening news conference, Luna said all of the people killed appeared to be over 50. No other suspects were at large, according to the sheriff.
The suspect was carrying what Luna described as a semi-automatic pistol with an extended magazine, and a second handgun was discovered in the van where Tran died.
Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese said Sunday evening that within three minutes of receiving the call, officers arrived at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park. There, they found carnage inside and people trying to flee through all the doors.
“When they came into the parking lot, it was chaos,” Wiese said.
About 20 minutes after the first attack, the gunman entered the Lai Lai Ballroom in the nearby city of Alhambra.
Brandon Tsay was in the lobby at the time, and he told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that he thought he was going to die.
“Something came over me. I realized I needed to get the weapon away from him, I needed to take this weapon, disarm him or else everybody would have died,” Tsay said. “When I got the courage, I lunged at him with both my hands, grabbed the weapon and we had a struggle.”
Once Tsay seized the gun, he pointed it at the man and shouted: “Get the hell out of here, I’ll shoot, get away, go!”
The assailant paused, but then headed back to his van, and Tsay called the police, the gun still in his hand.
While Luna told reporters on Sunday that two people wrested the weapon away from the attacker, Tsay, who works a few days a week at the dance hall his grandparents started, told The New York Times that he acted alone. Stills from security footage shown on “Good Morning America” showed only the two men struggling for the gun.
Witnesses said the suspect fled in a white van.
The van was found in Torrance, another community home to many Asian Americans.
After surrounding the vehicle for hours, law enforcement officials swarmed and entered it. A person’s body appeared to be slumped over the wheel and was later removed. Members of a SWAT team looked through the van’s contents before walking away.
The sheriff’s department earlier released photos of an Asian man believed to be the suspect, apparently taken from a security camera.
Congresswoman Judy Chu said she still has questions about the attack but hopes residents now feel safe.
“The community was in fear thinking that they should not go to any events because there was an active shooter,” Chu said, speaking at Sunday’s news conference.
“What was the motive for this shooter?” she said. “Did he have a mental illness? Was he a domestic violence abuser? How did he get these guns and was it through legal means or not?”
Monterey Park is a city of about 60,000 people on the eastern edge of Los Angeles and is composed mostly of Asian immigrants from China or first-generation Asian Americans. The shooting happened in the heart of its downtown where red lanterns decorated the streets for the Lunar New Year festivities. A police car was parked near a large banner that proclaimed “Happy Year of the Rabbit!”
The celebration in Monterey Park is one of California’s largest. Two days of festivities, which have been attended by as many as 100,000 people in past years, were planned. But officials canceled Sunday’s events following the shooting.
Tony Lai, 35, of Monterey Park was stunned when he came out for his early morning walk to learn that the noises he heard in the night were gunshots.
“I thought maybe it was fireworks. I thought maybe it had something to do with Lunar New Year,” he said. “And we don’t even get a lot of fireworks here. It’s weird to see this. It’s really safe here. We’re right in the middle of the city, but it’s really safe.”
An Associated Press/USA Today database on mass killings in the U.S. shows that 2022 was one of the nation’s worst years with 42 such attacks — the second-highest number since the creation of the tracker in 2006. The database defines a mass killing as four people killed, not including the perpetrator.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom visited Monterey Park on Sunday, meeting with victims and their families as well as local officials.
President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland were briefed on the situation, aides said. Biden said he and first lady Jill Biden were thinking of those killed and wounded.
The Star Ballroom Dance Studio’s website said it was hosting an event Saturday called “Star Night” from 8 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. The studio is a few blocks from city hall on Monterey Park’s main thoroughfare of Garvey Avenue, which is dotted with strip malls of small businesses whose signs are in both English and Chinese. Cantonese and Mandarin are both widely spoken, Chinese holidays are celebrated and Chinese films are screened regularly in the city.
Wynn Liaw, 57, who lives about two blocks from the Monterey Park studio, said she was shocked that such a crime would happen, especially during Lunar New Year’s celebrations.
“Chinese people, they consider Chinese New Year very, very special” — a time when “you don’t do anything that will bring bad luck the entire year,” she said.
---
https://twitter.com/LACoSheriff/status/1617241146710962178 (archive.ph)
Police respond to reports of multiple people shot in Monterey Park
Los Angeles Times (archive.org)
By Summer Lin, Jeong Park, Rebecca Ellis, Richard Winton, Libor Jany , Rong-Gong Lin II, Julia Wick, Hayley Smith
Updated: 2023-01-22 18:05:55GMT
The gunman who opened fire at a ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park on Saturday night, killing 10 people and injuring 10 others, remained on the loose Sunday morning, authorities said.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said a “very preliminary description” was that the suspect is an Asian man aged 30 to 50, but he did not provide further details.
“We are utilizing every resource to apprehend this suspect in what we believe to be one of the county’s most heinous cases,” Luna said.
The shooting occurred on Lunar New Year’s Eve about seven miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Luna said it was too early to tell whether the festival was connected to the shooting.
A law enforcement source briefed on the matter said the gunman used a high-powered assault rifle at close range. Some witnesses described a white cargo van, which Luna said should be considered “a van of interest.”
The mass shooting, one of California’s worst in recent memory, happened around 10:22 p.m. in the 100 block of West Garvey Avenue, at what appears to be a business known as Star Dance Studio.
“When officers arrived on scene, they observed numerous individuals, patrons ... pouring out of the location, screaming. The officers made entry to the location and located additional victims,” sheriff’s Capt. Andrew Meyer told reporters Sunday morning.
Firefighters pronounced 10 people dead at the scene, including five men and five women, Luna said. At least 10 others were taken to numerous hospitals, and their conditions range from stable to critical.
About 20 minutes after the shooting, a “male Asian suspect” with a firearm walked into another dance hall in the neighboring suburb of Alhambra, Luna said. “Some individuals wrestled the firearm from him, and that individual took off,” he said.
Officials are still working to determine whether there is a connection between the two incidents.
Law enforcement were on scene Sunday morning in Alhambra at the Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio in the 100 block of South Garfield Avenue, about two miles north of the Monterey Park shooting. It was not clear whether the police activity at that site was the incident referenced by authorities.
Seung Won Choi, who owns a seafood barbecue restaurant on Garvey Avenue across from where the shooting happened, said three people rushed into his restaurant and told him to lock the door.
They said there was a man with a semiautomatic gun in the area. The shooter, they said, had multiple rounds of ammunition, so that once his ammunition ran out he reloaded, Choi said.
Wong Wei, who lives nearby, said his friend had gone to the dance club that night with a few friends. His friend was in the bathroom when the shooting started.
When his friend came out, she told him she saw a gunman and three bodies — two women and one person who was the boss of the club, Wei said, adding that his friend escaped to his home around 11 p.m.
The shooter was carrying a long gun and appeared to fire indiscriminately, his friend told him.
“They don’t know why, so they run,” he said.
The shooting occurred near the site where tens of thousands had gathered Saturday for the start of a two-day Lunar New Year festival, one of the largest holiday events in the region.
Earlier in the day, crowds were enjoying skewers and shopping for Chinese food and jewelry. Saturday’s New Year festival hours were scheduled from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Monterey Park’s two-day Lunar New Year festival had been scheduled to conclude Sunday. But the day’s events are canceled “out of an abundance of caution and in reverence for the victims,” Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese said.
Officials indicated that the shooting may have been a hate crime.
“As you know, hate crime is nothing new,” L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis said. “We know this is a problem, and we have to confront it.”
Luna said, “Everything is on the table.
“Who walks into a dance hall and guns down 20 people?” he said.
Hate crimes against Asian Americans in California increased 177.5% in 2021, according to the California Department of Justice.
John, who declined to give his last name, lives near the shooting site. The 27-year-old got home around 10 p.m. and heard four or five gunshots, he said. Then he heard police cruisers and “smashing” down the street. He went downstairs around 11:20 p.m. to see whether the shooting occurred at the festival.
“My first concern was I know they’re having a Lunar New Year celebration,” he said. But he said he saw that the festival had already been cleaned up for the day when he arrived. He went to the scene of the shooting and saw one person being put on a stretcher. Another person had a bandage on their arm.
Video on social media showed police and fire units swarming an area on Garvey Avenue and treating victims.
The violence left many in the area stunned.
Edwin Chen, a 47-year-old delivery dispatcher, rushed over from Woodland Hills to Monterey Park around 12:30 a.m. after hearing the news. Chen said he grew up in the area, and about a dozen of his relatives and friends live there.
He said he was saddened this happened just as the community was celebrating Lunar New Year.
“This is [supposed to be] a happy time,” he said. “I want to find out as much as possible. It’s still shocking.”
“Our hearts go out to those who lost loved ones tonight in our neighboring city, Monterey Park, where a mass shooting just occurred,” Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia, the first Asian American to hold citywide office in L.A., said on Twitter.
Monterey Park, a city of 61,000 in the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles, is 65% Asian American, 27% Latino and 6% white, according to census data.
One of the anchor suburbs in the San Gabriel Valley, Monterey Park is a hub of Asian American supermarkets and restaurants.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted that President Biden has been briefed on the shooting. The tweet said Biden directed his Homeland Security advisor, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, “to make sure that the FBI is providing full support to local authorities, and to update him regularly today as more details are known.”
The shooting is one of the worst in modern Los Angeles County history. One of the last mass shootings of this scale happened Christmas Eve in 2008, when a man dressed as Santa Claus entered a home in Covina, armed with five handguns. Nine people were killed in that rampage, including the gunman’s former wife and her parents. The gunman took his life hours later.
Other recent mass shootings in California include the massacre at a San Ysidro McDonald’s in 1984, where a gunman killed 21 people; and the terrorist attack that resulted in 14 deaths in San Bernardino in 2015.
In 2018, 12 people were killed during a mass shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks.
Saturday’s shooting comes five days after six people — including a 10-month old baby, his 16-year-old mother and a grandmother — were killed in the Central Valley farming community of Goshen in Tulare County.
“I hope we can make a determination as to whether this was a hate crime,” Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) said, describing the Lunar New Year as a time to celebrate with family. “This tore a hole through all of our hearts.”
By Summer Lin, Jeong Park, Rebecca Ellis, Richard Winton, Libor Jany , Rong-Gong Lin II, Julia Wick, Hayley Smith
Updated: 2023-01-22 18:05:55GMT
The gunman who opened fire at a ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park on Saturday night, killing 10 people and injuring 10 others, remained on the loose Sunday morning, authorities said.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said a “very preliminary description” was that the suspect is an Asian man aged 30 to 50, but he did not provide further details.
“We are utilizing every resource to apprehend this suspect in what we believe to be one of the county’s most heinous cases,” Luna said.
The shooting occurred on Lunar New Year’s Eve about seven miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Luna said it was too early to tell whether the festival was connected to the shooting.
A law enforcement source briefed on the matter said the gunman used a high-powered assault rifle at close range. Some witnesses described a white cargo van, which Luna said should be considered “a van of interest.”
The mass shooting, one of California’s worst in recent memory, happened around 10:22 p.m. in the 100 block of West Garvey Avenue, at what appears to be a business known as Star Dance Studio.
“When officers arrived on scene, they observed numerous individuals, patrons ... pouring out of the location, screaming. The officers made entry to the location and located additional victims,” sheriff’s Capt. Andrew Meyer told reporters Sunday morning.
Firefighters pronounced 10 people dead at the scene, including five men and five women, Luna said. At least 10 others were taken to numerous hospitals, and their conditions range from stable to critical.
About 20 minutes after the shooting, a “male Asian suspect” with a firearm walked into another dance hall in the neighboring suburb of Alhambra, Luna said. “Some individuals wrestled the firearm from him, and that individual took off,” he said.
Officials are still working to determine whether there is a connection between the two incidents.
Law enforcement were on scene Sunday morning in Alhambra at the Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio in the 100 block of South Garfield Avenue, about two miles north of the Monterey Park shooting. It was not clear whether the police activity at that site was the incident referenced by authorities.
Seung Won Choi, who owns a seafood barbecue restaurant on Garvey Avenue across from where the shooting happened, said three people rushed into his restaurant and told him to lock the door.
They said there was a man with a semiautomatic gun in the area. The shooter, they said, had multiple rounds of ammunition, so that once his ammunition ran out he reloaded, Choi said.
Wong Wei, who lives nearby, said his friend had gone to the dance club that night with a few friends. His friend was in the bathroom when the shooting started.
When his friend came out, she told him she saw a gunman and three bodies — two women and one person who was the boss of the club, Wei said, adding that his friend escaped to his home around 11 p.m.
The shooter was carrying a long gun and appeared to fire indiscriminately, his friend told him.
“They don’t know why, so they run,” he said.
The shooting occurred near the site where tens of thousands had gathered Saturday for the start of a two-day Lunar New Year festival, one of the largest holiday events in the region.
Earlier in the day, crowds were enjoying skewers and shopping for Chinese food and jewelry. Saturday’s New Year festival hours were scheduled from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Monterey Park’s two-day Lunar New Year festival had been scheduled to conclude Sunday. But the day’s events are canceled “out of an abundance of caution and in reverence for the victims,” Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese said.
Officials indicated that the shooting may have been a hate crime.
“As you know, hate crime is nothing new,” L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis said. “We know this is a problem, and we have to confront it.”
Luna said, “Everything is on the table.
“Who walks into a dance hall and guns down 20 people?” he said.
Hate crimes against Asian Americans in California increased 177.5% in 2021, according to the California Department of Justice.
John, who declined to give his last name, lives near the shooting site. The 27-year-old got home around 10 p.m. and heard four or five gunshots, he said. Then he heard police cruisers and “smashing” down the street. He went downstairs around 11:20 p.m. to see whether the shooting occurred at the festival.
“My first concern was I know they’re having a Lunar New Year celebration,” he said. But he said he saw that the festival had already been cleaned up for the day when he arrived. He went to the scene of the shooting and saw one person being put on a stretcher. Another person had a bandage on their arm.
Video on social media showed police and fire units swarming an area on Garvey Avenue and treating victims.
The violence left many in the area stunned.
Edwin Chen, a 47-year-old delivery dispatcher, rushed over from Woodland Hills to Monterey Park around 12:30 a.m. after hearing the news. Chen said he grew up in the area, and about a dozen of his relatives and friends live there.
He said he was saddened this happened just as the community was celebrating Lunar New Year.
“This is [supposed to be] a happy time,” he said. “I want to find out as much as possible. It’s still shocking.”
“Our hearts go out to those who lost loved ones tonight in our neighboring city, Monterey Park, where a mass shooting just occurred,” Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia, the first Asian American to hold citywide office in L.A., said on Twitter.
Monterey Park, a city of 61,000 in the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles, is 65% Asian American, 27% Latino and 6% white, according to census data.
One of the anchor suburbs in the San Gabriel Valley, Monterey Park is a hub of Asian American supermarkets and restaurants.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted that President Biden has been briefed on the shooting. The tweet said Biden directed his Homeland Security advisor, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, “to make sure that the FBI is providing full support to local authorities, and to update him regularly today as more details are known.”
The shooting is one of the worst in modern Los Angeles County history. One of the last mass shootings of this scale happened Christmas Eve in 2008, when a man dressed as Santa Claus entered a home in Covina, armed with five handguns. Nine people were killed in that rampage, including the gunman’s former wife and her parents. The gunman took his life hours later.
Other recent mass shootings in California include the massacre at a San Ysidro McDonald’s in 1984, where a gunman killed 21 people; and the terrorist attack that resulted in 14 deaths in San Bernardino in 2015.
In 2018, 12 people were killed during a mass shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks.
Saturday’s shooting comes five days after six people — including a 10-month old baby, his 16-year-old mother and a grandmother — were killed in the Central Valley farming community of Goshen in Tulare County.
“I hope we can make a determination as to whether this was a hate crime,” Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) said, describing the Lunar New Year as a time to celebrate with family. “This tore a hole through all of our hearts.”
Multiple casualties reported after shooting in Monterey Park - Los An…
archived 22 Jan 2023 09:22:45 UTC
Police were responding to reports of a shooting that left multiple casualties in Monterey Park on Saturday night, according to a law enforcement source.
Few details were available, including the number of people shot. Internal police communications said there had been some fatalities.
The shooting took place sometime after 10 p.m. near the site of a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration. Tens of thousands had gathered Saturday for the start of a two-day festival, one of the largest Lunar New Year events in the region.
Earlier in the day, crowds were enjoying skewers and shopping for Chinese food and jewelry. Saturday’s Lunar New Festival hours were scheduled from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
John, 27, who declined to give his last name, lives near the shooting site. He got home around 10 p.m. and heard about 4-5 gunshots. Then, he heard police cruisers “smashing” down the street. He went downstairs at around 11:20 p.m. to see if the shooting occurred at the Lunar New Year festival.
“My first concern was I know they’re having a Lunar New Year celebration,” he said. But he said he saw that the festival had already been cleaned up for the day when he arrived. He went to the scene of the shooting and saw one person being put on a stretcher. Another person had a bandage on their arm.
Video on social media showed police and fire units swarming an area on Garvey Avenue and treating victims.
Injured people were taken to multiple hospitals in the area.
It was unclear if a suspect was in custody.
Police were responding to reports of a shooting that left multiple causalities in Monterey Park on Saturday night, according to a law enforcement source.
Few details were available, including the number of people hit.
The shooting took place sometime after 10 p.m. around the location of a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration that had taken place earlier in the evening.
Tens of thousands had gathered Saturday afternoon for a two-day long Monterey Park Lunar New Year Festival, which is considered one of the largest in the region. Earlier in the day, crowds were enjoying skewers and shopping for Chinese food and jewelry.
Video on social media showed police and fire units swarming an area on Garvey Avenue and treating victims.
Injured people were taken to multiple hospitals in the area.
This is breaking news story. It will be updated as more information becomes available.
Few details were available, including the number of people hit.
The shooting took place sometime after 10 p.m. around the location of a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration that had taken place earlier in the evening.
Tens of thousands had gathered Saturday afternoon for a two-day long Monterey Park Lunar New Year Festival, which is considered one of the largest in the region. Earlier in the day, crowds were enjoying skewers and shopping for Chinese food and jewelry.
Video on social media showed police and fire units swarming an area on Garvey Avenue and treating victims.
Injured people were taken to multiple hospitals in the area.
This is breaking news story. It will be updated as more information becomes available.
Last edited by a moderator:
