10 SHOT DEAD BY GUNMAN IN CLUB
Mass murderer’s ‘suicide in stand-off with cops’
A SUSPECT thought to have massacred 10 people in a dance club was last night believed to have shot himself during a police stand-off.
A gunman fled the scene after killing five men and five women at a ballroom club on Saturday night during Lunar New Year celebrations, police said.
Ten others were injured in the shooting spree in Monterey Park, California. Hours after the killings, SWAT teams in nearby Torrance boxed in a white van they had been hunting.
As officers ordered the occupant to exit the vehicle, they heard a shot and soon after reported finding a body.
Describing the scene when they arrived, Captain Andrew Meyer of the Los Angeles Sheriff ’s Department said people were “pouring out of the location, screaming” at 10:30pm.
Capt Meyer said police were investigating any possible connection to a similar incident in the nearby city of Alhambra.
There a man walked into a dance hall with a firearm. He was disarmed by individuals and fled. No one was killed.
He added that it was too early to know whether the killer knew any people at the ballroom. The suspect was described as an Asian man aged 30-50.
After initial fears of a race-hate crime, Sheriff Luna said all the victims were “probably” also of Asian descent.
Monterey Park is a city of around 60,000 people with a large Asian population, seven miles east of Los Angeles.
Celebrations for Lunar New Year, also called Chinese New year, had attracted thousands. Seung Won Choi, who owns the Clam House restaurant opposite the shooting site, said three people rushed in and told him to lock the door.
They told him there was an armed man supplied with ammunition.
Wong Wei, who lives nearby, said his friend was in a bathroom at the dance club when the shooting started.
When she came out, he said, she saw a gunman and three bodies.
Friends told him the man appeared to fire indiscriminately with a long gun. “They don’t know why, so they run,” he told a local newspaper. Saturday was the start of a two-day festival, one of the largest in Southern California.
Videos posted on social media showed injured people being put on to stretchers and loaded into ambulances.
Other photos showed bloodied and bandaged victims being treated by Monterey Park firefighters in a car park.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called the shooting “absolutely devastating”.
President Biden said he was praying for the victims. It was the fifth mass shooting in the US this month.