Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said: A van that had a wanted notice was tracked down and when the agents approached, they heard a shot inside the vehicle.
“The suspect suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound and was pronounced dead at the scene,” detailed. He identified the deceased as Huu Can Tran, 72 years old.
“I can confirm that there are no outstanding suspects for the mass shooting,” added Luna, who said the motive for the attack, which left 10 dead, is still unknown.
“The investigation is still ongoing. Homicide detectives…are working around the clock to gather additional information and determine the motive behind this extremely tragic incident,” he said.
What happened
Law enforcement responded to the first emergency calls on Saturday at 10:20 p.m. (0620 GMT on Sunday), and went to the Monterey Pakr nightclub.
Upon arrival, they found people fleeing the place. Once inside the premises, the agents verified the death of 10 victims, five women and five men.
Sheriff Luna said they also found 10 injured who were taken to various hospitals and were in stable to critical condition. He also noted that he did not believe the shooter used an assault rifle, but did not identify which weapon it was.
Luna also described a second incident in the neighboring town of Alhambra about 20 minutes later, in which an Asian man carrying a gun entered a dance hall but was knocked down and disarmed. He fled and no injuries were reported.
Luna said it was investigating whether the incidents were related.
In Monterey Park, located about 13 km east of downtown Los Angeles, officers 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.
The deadliest since Uvalde
About 60,000 people live in Monterey Park, the majority Asian or Asian American.
The president of United States, Joe Biden tweeted that he and his wife Jill were “praying for the dead and injured” and claimed to be 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 the nightclub 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.
All three said there was a man with a semi-automatic weapon. that he had several rounds of ammunition and that he reloaded each time he 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 after 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.”
ongoing research
Andrew Meyer of the sheriff’s office said that detectives did not 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 the United States there were more than 7,000 reported hate crimes in 2021which affected more than 9,000 people, according to data from the Department of Justice.
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.
Source: Ambito
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