The author of killings in Asian massage parlors in Atlanta and its suburbs was sentenced on Tuesday to life imprisonment for the first part of his attack. He remains liable to capital punishment for the continuation of his murderous spree.
Robert Aaron Long, 22, pleaded guilty to the four murders committed on March 16 at an establishment in Acworth, 50 km from Atlanta, according to court documents seen by AFP. After a hearing in the presence of relatives of the victims, a judge sentenced him to life imprisonment for this bloodbath.
On March 16, he had attacked two other salons, located in the large southern city, claiming four additional lives. These shootings, having taken place in another jurisdiction, are the subject of a separate procedure.
Unlike the authorities in charge of the first part, the prosecutor of the county of Fulton, which includes Atlanta, considered that Robert Aaron Long had a racist motive, six of his eight victims being of Asian origin. Prosecutor Fani Willis has announced that she will seek the death penalty because of the “horrific and inhumane” nature of these murders. No trial date has yet been set.
“Sex obsessed”
The young man, a devout Christian follower of weapons, has always acknowledged the facts, but he told investigators that he did not have a racist motive, presenting himself as a “sex maniac” anxious to remove “a temptation”.
According to the Atlanta-Journal-Constitution, he repeated the speech Tuesday before Judge Ellen McElya. He said he bought a gun with the idea of ending his life out of ‘shame’, parked in the parking lot of a massage parlor he used to frequent and drank alcohol for an hour . He claimed to have had the idea of entering it to kill its occupants at that time. “I wanted to stop what is happening there and punish people,” he said, according to comments reported by the local newspaper.
This line of defense has always aroused skepticism and anger among Asian Americans who have denounced the amalgams and prejudices weighing on women in their community. Without predicting the outcome of the investigation, Democratic President Joe Biden had considered “very worrying” the resurgence of violence once morest Asian Americans since the start of the pandemic.
