Calif. reeling from mass shootings
At least 19 killed in multiple attacks in less than 3 days
HALF MOON BAY, Calif. — A barrage of gun violence left the nation’s most populous state groping for answers Tuesday as the death toll from back-to-back mass shootings in California rose to at least 19 people in less than three days.
In Northern California, a 66-year-old man was in custody after the shooting deaths of seven people on Monday, including four at a mushroom farm near Half Moon Bay, a coastal community south of San Francisco, and three more at a nearby agricultural nursery. An eighth victim was hospitalized with gunshot wounds, recovering from surgery.
Officials at the San Mateo County Sheriff ’s Office said the suspect, Chunli Zhao, was an employee at one of the locations and called the shooting an incident of “workplace violence.”
In Southern California, investigators continued their search for a motive in the massacre on Saturday night at a ballroom dancing venue in Monterey Park, a Los Angeles suburb, where 11 people were killed and nine more were wounded. The suspected gunman — Huu Can Tran, 72, a former volunteer dance instructor who authorities said may have been driven by personal grievances — killed himself Sunday.
The cases, which bracketed celebration of the Lunar New Year, claimed the lives largely of immigrant victims: Asian Americans in their 50s, 60s and 70s at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio, and Asian and Latino agricultural workers around Half Moon Bay. The suspects were immigrant
Asian men in their 60s and 70s — a rare age bracket for assailants in mass shootings.
On Monday night, one person was killed and seven people were wounded in a gunbattle in Oakland.
The Los Angeles County coroner’s office Tuesday released the names of the 11 killed Saturday night.
The women killed were: Diana Tom, 70, Muoi Ung, 67, My Nhan, 65, Lilian Li, 63, Hong Jian, 62 and Xiujuan Yu, 57, according to the coroner’s office. The men were: Chia Yau, 76, Ming Ma, 72, Yu Kao, 72, Valentino Alvero, 68, and Wen Yu, 64.
Tran once frequented the ballroom and another dance hall he later targeted and griped about the way he thought people treated him there, a man who identified himself as a longtime friend told The Associated Press. Tran offered to teach new women at both clubs how
to dance for free so that he would have a partner.
Tran was perpetually distrustful and paranoid and would regularly complain that people at the clubs didn’t like him, according to the former friend who requested anonymity to speak about Tran.
“He always cast a dubious eye toward everything. He just didn’t trust people at all,” the friend said. “He always complained to me that the instructors ... kept distance from him, and according to what he said, many people spoke evil of him.”
Sheriff’s deputies from Los Angeles County searched Tran’s home in a gated senior community in Hemet, a little over an hour’s drive from the site of the massacre.
Officers found a .308-caliber rifle, an unknown number of bullets and
evidence he was making homemade firearm suppressors that muffle the sound of the weapons.
Authorities said Tran was once arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm in 1990 and had a limited criminal history, but could not immediately say if a gun arrest at a time when firearms laws were different would have barred him from owning weapons.
Officers arrested Zhao on Monday about two hours after first receiving reports of the shootings when they found him in his car in the parking lot of a sheriff ’s substation, San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus said.
Video showed three officers approaching a parked car with drawn weapons. Zhao got out of the car, and the officers pulled him to the ground, put him in handcuffs and led him away. A weapon was found in the vehicle, officials said. The video was captured by a Half Moon Bay resident who witnessed the arrest.
Authorities believe Zhao acted alone when he entered the Mountain Mushroom Farm in Half Moon Bay, California, where he worked, and opened fire with a semi-automatic handgun he legally purchased, killing four people and leaving another seriously wounded. He then drove to another nearby farm where he had previously worked, and killed another three people, said Eamonn Allen, a spokesman with the San Mateo County Sheriff ’s Office.
The dead were five men and two women. The eighth gunshot victim, a man, remained in the hospital.
At a news conference Tuesday, Allen declined to answer questions about why
Zhao had driven to the sheriff substation or whether he had any previous criminal history, saying, “there were no specific indicators that would have led us to believe he was capable of something like this.”
But it would not have been Zhao’s first fit of workplace rage, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Tuesday. In 2013, Zhao was accused of threatening to split a co-worker’s head open with a knife and separately tried to suffocate the man with a pillow, the Chronicle reported, based on court documents.
The two were roommates and worked at a restaurant at the time, and the man filed a temporary restraining order against Zhao, which was granted and is no longer in effect.