The gunman behind the deadly dance hall shooting within the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park can have been targeting his ex-wife on the Lunar Recent Yr, the California city’s mayor said Monday.
That revelation got here because the death toll from Saturday’s shooting climbed to 11, with no less than nine wounded people still being treated for his or her injuries, officials said.
Huu Can Tran, the 72-year-old suspected shooter, apparently thought his ex-wife was on the Star Ballroom Dance Studio when he burst inside and opened fire on a festive crowd, police said.
“My understanding is that he can have come because his ex-wife was reveling, celebrating the Lunar Recent Yr, and it seemed like there was a history of domestic violence, which is unlucky,” Monterey Park Mayor Henry Lo told NBC News’ Kate Snow.
Tran filed for divorce in 2005 in Los Angeles County, records show. NBC News has reached out to the person believed to be the shooter’s ex-wife for comment.
Police on Monday continued searching the suspect’s home in Hemet, a small city about 85 miles east of Los Angeles, and didn’t disclose a motive.
Alan Reyes, the general public information officer for the Hemet Police Department, said their records show that Tran contacted them a decade ago and alleged his family was attempting to poison him. The allegation was never investigated because Tran never presented any proof to back up his claims, he said.
Tran died some 12 hours after the massacre of a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a white van as a SWAT team closed in on him, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said Sunday.
“The unimaginable happened in our community last evening,” Lo said in a press release Sunday, calling the deadly shooting a “horrible tragedy.”
Meanwhile, because the mostly Asian community braced for a wave of funerals, the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office released the names of two of the victims: My Nhan, 65, and Lilan Li, 63. It was not immediately clear in the event that they knew the gunman.
A vigil shall be held Tuesday in Monterey Park in memory of the dead.
“We imagine that it’s important for our community to come back together to recollect and heal,” Lo said in an official statement.
A short while afterward, the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services announced that one among the 4 patients being treated on the LAC+USC Medical Center “has succumbed to their extensive injuries.”
The DHS didn’t discover the victim.
At 72, Tran didn’t fit the age profile of a mass shooter. The median age over the past six many years is 32, based on data compiled by The Violence Project, which is a nonprofit research center funded by the National Institute of Justice.
Some half-hour after Tran opened fire within the Star Ballroom Dance Studio, he turned up at one other dance studio within the nearby town of Alhambra, police said. There, Tran was stripped of what police described as a “semi-automatic assault pistol,” before he could harm anybody, by a member of the family that operates the venue.
“When he was looking across the room, it gave the impression of he was on the lookout for targets, people to harm,” Brandon Tsay, 26, said of the shooter in an interview Monday with ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Tran was capable of get away, police said. And a couple of dozen hours after the bloodshed in Monterey Park, police tracked Tran’s white van to a parking lot 30 miles away within the suburb of Torrance where the suspect killed himself.
Several pieces of evidence linking Tran to the carnage were found contained in the van, Luna said. A handgun was also present in the van, he added.
Early on, police raised the likelihood that the massacre can have been a hate crime.
“We do not know if that is specifically a hate crime defined by law, but who walks right into a dance hall and guns down 20 people?” Luna said earlier Sunday “The outline we’ve got now’s of a male Asian. Does that matter? I do not know. I can inform you that the whole lot’s on the table.”
A resource center was established at Monterey Park’s Langley Senior Center, he said, adding that mental health resources were available for “anyone who needs support.”
Families and friends gathered at the middle through much of Sunday, waiting to listen to news of family members who they feared may need been among the many people killed or injured.
“I attempted to achieve her, but I didn’t get any response,” Monterey Park resident Vivian King said of a friend she last heard from earlier within the weekend.
“It’s difficult not knowing what is going on on,” said Juan Pablo Pinzon, a tourist from Colombia, who said his cousin had been out with friends in the world Saturday night and had not responded to texts and calls. “Hopefully, we’ll hear something soon.”
