California copes with 3rd shooting
Monterey Park, Calif. — In the wake of the worst massacre in Los Angeles County history, the California governor was meeting gunshot victims in the hospital when he was pulled away and briefed on a mass shooting at the other end of the state.
Word that a gunman had killed seven people at two mushroom farms in a scenic coastal stretch of Northern California came just hours after Gavin Newsom spoke of his fatigue and frustration with mass shootings.
“I can’t keep doing them,” he told reporters earlier in the day in Monterey Park. “Saying the same thing over and over and over again, it’s insane.”
Yet he was in Half Moon Bay on Tuesday to address the third mass shooting in just over a week in a state with some of the nation’s toughest gun laws and lowest gun death rates.
“Tragedy upon tragedy,” is how Newsom described the killings after learning of the most recent one.
A 66-year-old farmworker faced murder and attempted murder charges after shooting eight people, killing seven, in a crime authorities said was a case of workplace violence in the rich agricultural area that lies between the Pacific Ocean and coastal mountains.
In Monterey Park, 11 people were killed and nine wounded when a 72-year-old gunman shot up a dance hall in an Asian American community that had been celebrating Lunar New Year’s Eve on Saturday night. The gunman later took his own life.
A week earlier, at least two assailants fatally shot a 16-year-old mother clutching her 10-month-old baby, and killed four others in a brazen attack in a central California farming community that remained unsolved.
The recent slayings moved California up five slots to 26th place on the number of fatal mass shootings per capita in the U.S. since 2006, according to a USA TODAY/AP/Northeastern University mass killing database. The database only counts killings of at least four people.
While California has the highest number of fatal mass shootings — 49, including the recent three — it had ranked 31st beforehand when adjusted for being the nation’s most populous state with nearly 40 million residents.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control lists California as having the 10th lowest gun mortality rate in the country per 100,000 residents. It’s 20th lowest in terms of homicide rate.
With the back-to-back killings, detectives at both ends of the state were trying to answer the question that often goes unanswered in the face of senseless violence: Why?
Los Angeles Sheriff Robert Luna called the dance hall gunman, 72-year-old Huu Can Tran, a “mad man” and said investigators were looking into whether he had relationships with the people who were shot at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio.
Tran fired 42 rounds at the ballroom popular with older Asian Americans. He then drove to another nearby dance hall where an employee wrested a modified 9 mm submachine gun-style weapon away from him, Luna said.
Tran fatally shot himself Sunday as officers surrounded the van he was inside. A handgun was recovered from the van, which matched descriptions of the vehicle he used to get away from the dance studio.
So far, there have been six mass killings this year in the U.S., and the Monterey Park shootings were the deadliest attack since May 24, when 21 people were killed in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
The Half Moon Bay slayings came less than 48 hours later when 66-year-old Chunli Zhao shot five people at Mountain Mushroom Farm, where he worked, killing four, authorities said. He then drove to nearby Concord Farms, where he once worked, and fatally shot three other people.
The victims were Asian and Hispanic, and some were migrant workers.
“We’ve never had one in this county of this many deaths at one scene or one time,” District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said.
Zhao was arrested after officers found him in his car in the parking lot of a sheriff’s substation.
Eamonn Allen, a spokesperson for the San Mateo County sheriff, declined to answer whether Zhao had a criminal history, but said “there were no specific indicators that would have led us to believe he was capable of something like this.”