Monterey Park, Calif., Jan. 25 (U.S.): In the aftermath of the worst massacre in Los Angeles County history, the California governor was meeting with gunshot victims at the hospital when he was pulled over and briefed on one mass shooting on the other. state end.
Word that a gunman has killed seven people on mushroom farms in a scenic stretch of coast in Northern California came just hours after Gov. Gavin Newsom spoke of his exhaustion and frustration with mass shootings.
“I can’t keep doing it,” he told reporters earlier on Monday in Monterey Park, where 11 people were killed at a dance studio. “Saying the same thing over and over, it’s crazy.”
Still, Newsom was in Half Moon Bay on Tuesday addressing the third mass shooting in just over a week in a state that has some of the nation’s strictest gun laws and one of the lowest rates of gun deaths.
His voice tinged with anger and emotion at times, Newsom said he consulted notes he’d used in previous mass shootings: the killing of 12 people in the Thousand Oaks country and Western Strip in 2018; Three killed and 17 injured at the 2019 Gilroy Garlic Festival; Nine workers killed in a San Jose rail yard in 2021.
“I started writing in Monterey Park,” Newsom said. “And now I have to write, ‘Half Moon Bay.’ What the hell is going on?”
A 66-year-old farm worker has been booked on murder and attempted murder charges after shooting eight people, killing seven, in what authorities said was a case of workplace violence in a rich farming region wedged between the Pacific Ocean and coastal mountains.
In Monterey Park, a 72-year-old gunman opened fire on a ballroom in an Asian American community that was celebrating Lunar New Year’s Eve Saturday night, injuring nine people in addition to killing 11. The gunman later committed suicide.
A week ago, at least two assailants shot and clutched a 16-year-old mother with her 10-month-old baby, and killed four others in a brazen attack in an as-yet-unsolved Central California farming community.
“Our hearts are with the people of California,” President Joe Biden said Tuesday at a meeting with Democratic congressional leaders. “It’s been a rough and tough two days.”
Biden noted that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has imposed a ban on assault weapons, and urged lawmakers to pass it.
Newsom also called for stronger gun safety laws and specifically targeted high-capacity magazines like those of a dance studio guy and what he called “the damned weapons of war”.
“It’s said all the time: only in America,” he said. “No. 1 in gun ownership, No. 1 in gun killing. It’s not complicated.”
The recent killings have moved California five places to the 26th most fatal mass shooting per capita in the United States since 2006, according to the USA TODAY/AP/Northeastern University mass killing database. The database only counts the killings of at least four people.
While California has the highest number of fatal mass shootings, 49, including the last three, it was previously ranked 31st when adjusted for being the most populous state in the country with nearly 40 million residents.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists California as having the 7th lowest rate of firearm deaths in the country per 100,000 residents, according to the most recent statistics available from 2020. It is the 20th lowest in terms of homicide rate, which is not limited to shootings.
With killings in succession, detectives on both sides of the country have been trying to answer the question that often goes unanswered in the face of blind violence: Why?
Los Angeles Sheriff Robert Luna called armed dancehall man Hou Kan Tran, 72, a “madman” and said investigators are looking into whether he had ties to the people shot at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio.
Tran fired 42 shots at the ballroom dance popular with older Asian Americans. Luna said he then went to another nearby dance hall where a staff member snatched a modified 9mm submachine gun away from him.
Tran shot himself Sunday when officers surrounded the truck he was in. A gun was recovered from the truck, which matches the description of the car he used to get away from the dance studio.
Piles of flowers, including dozens of yellow and white mums, were left in front of the closed studio gates on Tuesday. On a brick pillar next to the gates, someone taped a piece of blue paper that read “Ban Semi-Automatic Guns” and below it a translation in Chinese.
Hundreds of people turned out Tuesday night for a candlelight vigil at Monterey Park City Hall. Wooden hearts bore the names of the victims. One woman helped her young daughter lay flowers at the memorials. “There’s a lot,” she said with a trembling voice. “We will never have enough.”
So far, there have been six mass killings this year in the United States, and the Monterey Park shootings were the deadliest since May 24, when 21 people were killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Authorities said the killings in Half Moon Bay came less than 48 hours after 66-year-old Chunli Zhao shot five people at a mushroom farm where he worked, killing four. He then drove to a farm where he worked nearby, and killed three more people.
The victims were Asians and Hispanics, some of whom were migrant workers.
One of the workers killed was Marciano Martinez Jimenez, 50, his brother, Servando Martinez Jimenez, told the Associated Press. He was from the Mexican state of Oaxaca and had lived in the United States for 28 years.
“He was a good guy,” Martinez Jimenez said in Spanish. “He was polite and friendly to everyone. He never had any issues with anyone. I don’t understand why all this happened.”
The ranch shooting was the largest mass killing in San Mateo County.
“We’ve never had a single death in this county in one scene or all at once,” said Attorney General Steve Wagstaff.
Chow was arrested after officers found him in his car in the parking lot of a police substation.
Eamonn Allen, a spokesman for the San Mateo County sheriff, declined to answer whether Chow had a criminal history, but said “there are no specific indications that would lead us to believe he is capable of something like that.”
However, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Chow was accused 10 years earlier of threatening to slash a co-worker’s head with a knife and separately attempting to suffocate the man with a pillow, based on court documents.
Authorities have not shared much about Tran, who briefly owned a trucking company in Monterey Park from 2002 to 2004, according to California business records.
Luna said he was once arrested for illegal possession of a firearm in 1990 and has a limited criminal record. The sheriff could not immediately determine if a gun arrest at a time when different gun laws were different would have prevented him from owning guns.
Tran once frequented the ballroom and another ballroom he later targeted and caught up to how he thought people were being treated there, a man who identified himself as an old friend told the Associated Press.
Tran was always paranoid and paranoid and regularly complained that people in clubs didn’t like them, according to the ex-boyfriend who asked not to be identified to speak about Tran because he wanted to avoid the media spotlight.
Investigators were also looking into reports Tran gave twice this month to police in the city where he lived that his family members tried to poison him, defrauded him of a decade or two ago in the Los Angeles area, Hamid police spokesman Alan Reyes told the newspaper. The British Guardian. News agency. Tran never came back with the documents he promised to provide.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies on Monday searched Tran’s home in a large gated community in Hemet, just over an hour’s drive from the site of the massacre. 308 caliber rifle, an unknown number of bullets, and evidence that he was making homemade firearm suppressors that silenced the weapons.
Newsom said he deliberately avoided press conferences in Los Angeles to meet with residents of the community, and the gun-wielding hero, Brandon Tsai, who disarmed Tran.
While he was in Monterey Park, a tearful mother pulled up in her car and begged him to reassure her three daughters that everything would be okay. Her 8-year-old heard the gunfire and knew it wasn’t firecrackers. The mother said that she did not sleep at night and was afraid to go to school.
“It’s going to get better,” Newsom told the girl.
But in front of a group of dozens of politicians, law enforcement officers and reporters gathered in Half Moon Bay, he said he was relieved she didn’t make him lock his pinky fingers and promised like his 8-year-old daughter would. “Because I wasn’t sure.”