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Tran had killed 10 people and injured 10 more in the attack, which took place during a Lunar New Year celebration in the predominantly Asian American community of Monterey Park.
Chinese New Year Mass Shooting in California: What we know so far
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said during a Sunday afternoon press conference the motive for the shooting was not known. “We want to know, we want to know how something this awful can happen,” Luna told reporters.
Luna said Tran turned a handgun on himself on Sunday morning as police approached a white van he was driving in Torrance, about 20 miles (34 km) from the site of the shooting at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park.
Five of the victims were male and five were female, Luna said. Their identities have not been made public. Another ten people were shot, and seven of them remain hospitalized, with at least one person in critical condition, authorities said.
Monterey Park is a city of about 60,000 people on the eastern edge of Los Angeles and is composed mostly of Asian immigrants from China or first-generation Asian Americans. The shooting happened in the heart of its downtown where red lanterns decorated the streets for the Lunar New Year festivities. A police car was parked near a large banner that proclaimed “Happy Year of the Rabbit!”
The celebration in Monterey Park is one of California’s largest. Two days of festivities, which have been attended by as many as 100,000 people in past years, were planned. But officials canceled Sunday’s events following the shooting.
The shooting sent fear through Asian American communities in the area and cast a shadow over Lunar New Year celebrations across the country. The incident is the fifth mass killing in the US this month and the deadliest attack since May 2022.
President Joe Biden condemned the killings in a written statement and said he had directed his Homeland Security adviser to mobilize federal support to local authorities.
Mass shootings are recurrent in the United States, and the attack in Monterey Park was the deadliest since May 2022, when a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas. The deadliest shooting in California history was in 1984 when a gunman killed 21 people at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, near San Diego
(With inputs from agencies)Watch California Mass Shooting: 72-year-old suspect Huu Can Tran kills self as police surround him
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