MONTEREY PARK – Asian Americans were reeling yesterday after two mass shootings in California targeting members of their community left 18 people dead – with the alleged gunmen in both cases being older men of Asian descent.
The killings came in a span of just 48 hours – so close together that California governor Gavin Newsom was at a hospital meeting with victims of the first when he was pulled away to be briefed about the second.
“Tragedy upon tragedy,” he tweeted.
Hours later news emerged of another shooting in Washington state, where a gunman killed three people at a convenience store, in an act police said appeared to be random.
The carnage prompted President Joe Biden to renew calls for Congress to act quickly on an assault weapons ban. A group of senators on Monday reintroduced a federal assault weapons ban and legislation that would raise the minimum purchase age for assault weapons to 21.
China’s Foreign Ministry called for its citizens in the United States to “pay close attention to the local security situation” and “avoid going to places where people gather” in the wake of the killings.
Investigators are still probing the motives behind the two incidents, which stood out among the scourge of mass shootings in America both for the community impacted – gun violence is usually seen as rare among Asians and Asian Americans – and for the age of the suspects, 67 and 72.
The nonpartisan Violence Project says 79% of mass shooters from 1966 to 2020 were under the age of 45. It says a mere 6.4% of mass shooters in that time are Asian.
The Monday bloodshed occurred at two farms around Half Moon Bay, a rural coastal community south of San Francisco.
San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus said yesterday six men and one woman – a mixture of Hispanic and Asian – were killed, and that 67-year-old Half Moon Bay resident Chunli Zhao had been taken into custody.
A semi-automatic handgun had been recovered.
“The only known connection between the victims and suspect is that they may have been co-workers,” she said.
“All the evidence we have points to this being an instance of workplace violence.”
Corpus said children were present at one of the sites.
Zhou was arrested in the parking lot of a sheriff’s substation in Half Moon Bay, where ABC7 crews captured dramatic footage of him being pulled to the ground by armed officers.
Last dance
That tragedy unfolded as detectives in southern California were still probing what drove 72-year-old Huu Can Tran to shoot dead 11 people gathered for Lunar New Year at a suburban dance hall on Saturday night.
He then drove to a second nearby dance hall but was tackled and disarmed by an employee there in a move officials have credited with saving lives.
Los Angeles county sheriff Robert Luna said Tran, who had been arrested decades earlier for unlawful possession of a firearm, fired 42 rounds in the attack in Monterey Park.
“What drove a madman to do this?” he said.
Luna confirmed officers had been told Tran may have been known to some of his victims.
Information about Tran remained unclear. CNN reported that, according to his marriage license, he had immigrated from China; while the New York Times cited immigration documents saying he was a naturalised US citizen of Vietnamese origin.
A former friend described Tran as a vengeful loner.
“Two simple words that cover the whole thing: He’s a person of distrust. He distrusts people around him. Second word is hate. He hates people around him, especially if he thought someone was doing bad to him,” the friend said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“He would say, ‘someday I will get back at you, get even, get revenge’.
“I think his life was so miserable and desperate that he chose that day to end his life and meanwhile he wanted to get people he didn’t like or hated to go with him,” the man said.
The family of one of his victims, 65-year-old My Nhan said the tragedy is “still sinking in”.
“She spent so many years going to the dance studio in Monterey Park on weekends,” a statement said.
“It’s what she loved to do. But unfairly, Saturday was her last dance.” – AFP, January 25, 2023
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