Chief defends delay telling public about mass shooter

MONTEREY PARK >> The police chief in the California city where 20 people were shot — 11 fatally — at a ballroom dance hall defended his decision not to warn the public for hours that a killer was on the loose, saying Wednesday he didn’t have enough information to effectively alert residents.

Monterey Park Chief Scott Wiese said police in the region were alerted and it didn’t make sense to send out a warning at night to residents in the predominantly Asian American city even after learning the suspect may have targeted a nearby dance club after the massacre.

“I’m not going to send my officers door to door waking people up and telling them that we’re looking for a male Asian in Monterey Park,” Wiese told The Associated Press. “It’s not going to do us any good.”

The shooting at Star Ballroom Dance Studio at 10:22 p.m. Saturday occurred just an hour or so after tens of thousands of people attended Lunar New Year festivities in the city. The public wasn’t notified of the mass shooting for five hours, raising questions about why an alert wasn’t sent to people in the area.

Huu Can Tran, 72, who was said to frequent the dance hall and fancied himself as an instructor, carried out the shooting with a submachine gun-style semi-automatic weapon with large capacity magazine, authorities said.

Tran fled in a white van before officers arrived at the scene of chaotic carnage and about 20 minutes later he entered another dance hall in nearby Alhambra, where an employee confronted and disarmed him during a brief struggle.