The motive for the Monterey Park mass shooting remains unclear; The shooter had no criminal past: authorities

MONTEREY PARK, California. Authorities were looking for a motive for the perpetrator who killed 10 people at a ballroom dance club in the Los Angeles area during Lunar New Year celebrations, murders that have sparked fear in Asian American communities and cast a shadow over festivities across the country.

The suspect, 72-year-old Huu Kang Tran, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Sunday in the van that authorities say he escaped from after attempting to attack a second dance hall. The mayor of Monterey Park said Tran may have haunted the first dance hall he targeted.

The massacre was the fifth nationwide massacre this month and was one of California’s largest celebrations of the holiday, celebrated in many Asian cultures, dealing another blow to a community that has been the target of high-profile violence in recent years.

It also became the deadliest attack since May 24, when 21 people were killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Law enforcement officials said the riots could have been even more deadly. The man, whose family runs the second dance hall, confronted the assailant in the lobby and snatched the gun from him.

Authorities have said little about Tran.

“We understand that he may have had a history of going to this dance hall and perhaps the motivation comes from some personal relationship. But I think investigators are still figuring it out and investigating it,” Monterey Park Mayor Henry Lo said. According to public records, Tran once had addresses in and around the city.

But Los Angeles County Mayor and Sheriff Robert Luna stressed that the motive for the attack, which also injured 10 people, remains unclear. Speaking at a press conference Sunday evening, Luna said that all those killed were over 50 years old. There were no other suspects at large, the sheriff said.

The suspect had what Luna described as a semi-automatic pistol with an extended magazine, and a second pistol was found in the van where Tran died.

Within three minutes of receiving the call, officers arrived at the Star Ballroom in Monterey Park, Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese said.

There they found a carnage inside and people trying to escape through all the doors.

“When they came to the parking lot, it was chaos,” Wiese said.

Approximately 20 minutes after the first attack, the gunman entered the Lai Lai ballroom in the nearby city of Alhambra.

Brandon Tsey was in the lobby at the time and told ABC’s Good Morning America that he thought he was going to die.

“Something came over me. I realized that I needed to take the weapon from him, I needed to take this weapon, disarm it, otherwise everyone would have died, ”Cai said. “When I mustered up the courage, I threw myself at him with both hands, grabbed my weapon, and we got into a fight.”

One day, Tsai grabbed a gun, pointed it at a man, and yelled, “To hell with it, I’ll shoot, get away, go!”

The assailant paused, but then returned to his van, and Tsai called the police, gun still in hand.

While Luna told reporters on Sunday that two men snatched the weapon from the attacker, Tsai, who works several days a week at a dance hall founded by his grandparents, told The New York Times he acted alone. Footage from video footage shown on Good Morning America shows only two men fighting for a gun.

The suspect’s white van was found in Torrance, another area with a high Asian American population.

After the car was surrounded for several hours, law enforcement officers surrounded it and entered it. The man’s body appeared to have fallen onto the wheel and was later removed. Members of the SWAT team looked through the contents of the van before leaving.

Congresswoman Judy Chu said she still has questions about the attack, but she hopes residents feel safe now.

“The community was in fear, thinking they shouldn’t go to any events because there was an active shooter,” Chu said at a news conference Sunday.

“What was this shooter’s motive?” she said. “Did he have a mental illness? Was he a domestic rapist? How did he get this weapon and was it legal or not?

Monterey Park is a city of approximately 60,000 people on the eastern edge of Los Angeles populated mostly by Asian immigrants from China or first-generation Asian Americans. The shooting took place in the heart of the city, where red lanterns decorated the streets in honor of the Lunar New Year celebration. The police car was parked near a large banner reading “Happy Year of the Rabbit!”

The celebration in Monterey Park is one of the largest in California. Two days of festivities were planned, attended by up to 100,000 people in previous years. But officials canceled Sunday events because of the shooting.

The Associated Press/USA Today database of massacres in the US shows that 2022 was one of the worst years for the country, with 42 such attacks, the second highest number since the tracker was created in 2006. The database defines an overkill as four people killed, not counting the perpetrator.

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Associated Press journalists Andrew Dalton, Jae S. Hong and Eugene Garcia of Los Angeles and Julie Watson of San Diego contributed to this report.

© 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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