Southern California police launched a wide-ranging search Sunday for the Asian man suspected of opening fire at a nightclub during the Lunar New Year celebration in The Angelsleaving 10 dead and at least 10 wounded before escaping.
“The male suspect fled and is being searched for,” the Los County Sheriff said. angelsRobert Luna, at a press conference in Monterey Parkthe town near Los angels where the massacre occurred.
He warned that the description of the alleged attacker is still preliminary and did not give more details that would allow him to be identified. According to witnesses, he fired indiscriminately with a semi-automatic weapon.
Law enforcement responded to the first emergency calls on Saturday at 10:20 p.m. (0620 GMT on Sunday), and found people fleeing the scene. At the disco confirmed the death of 10 victimsfive women and five men.
Luna said 10 injured had been taken to various hospitals and were in stable to critical condition. She noted that she did not believe the shooter used an assault rifle, but did not identify what weapon it was.
The sheriff also described a second incident in the neighboring town of Alhambra regarding 20 minutes later, in which an Asian man carrying a gun entered a dance hall but was shot down and disarmed. He fled and no injuries were reported.
Luna said it was investigating whether the incidents were related.
In Monterey Parklocated regarding 13 km east of downtown Los angelsOfficials secured the crime scene and set up a security perimeter around the area, where most of the signs are in Chinese, an AFP reporter said.
A helicopter flew over the area, full of TV trucks and, at the entrance to the town, a banner was still placed to celebrate the arrival of the Year of the Rabbit.
Accident seek
About 60,000 people live in Monterey Park, the majority Asian or Asian American.
The president of the United States, Joe Biden, tweeted that he and his wife Jill were “praying for the dead and injured” and assured that he was following the situation “closely”.
The shooting was the deadliest in the United States since the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, that left 22 dead at an elementary school on May 24.
Wong Wei, who lives in the Monterey Park area, told the Los Angeles Times that a friend of hers had gone to that disco and was in the bathroom when the shots started.
When he came out, he saw a man carrying a long gun and shooting indiscriminately, as well as the bodies of three people, two of them women and the other someone he identified as the manager of the nightclub.
The newspaper reported that Seung Won Choi, the owner of a seafood restaurant near the scene of the killing, said three people ran into his restaurant and told him to lock the door.
The three said there was a man with a semi-automatic weapon that had several rounds of ammunition and would reload each time it ran out, Choi told the newspaper.
Tens of thousands of people had gathered earlier for Chinese New Year celebrations, which are among the largest in Southern California. The second day of the festivities, this Sunday, was canceled following the attack.
Judy Chu, the first Chinese-American elected to the United States Congress and former mayor of Monterey Park, declared on Twitter that she was “devastated by the victims, their families and the people of her hometown.”
“Too soon”
Andrew Meyer of the sheriff’s office said detectives didn’t know if the suspect knew his victims or was targeting a particular group.
“It’s too early in the investigation to know if this incident was a hate crime or not,” he said.
In USA there were more than 7,000 reported hate crimes in 2021, affecting more than 9,000 people, according to Justice Department data.
Two-thirds of those crimes were related to race.
Gun violence is a big problem in the United States, where according to the Gun Violence Archive website there were 647 mass shootings last year, defined as incidents involving four or more people shot or killed, not including the shooter.
More than 44,000 people died in the country from gunshot wounds in 2022, more than half of them by suicide.
America has more guns than people: one in three adults owns at least one gun, and nearly one in two adults lives in a home with a gun. (With information from AFP)
