Two days after the shooting that took place during Chinese New Year festivities near Los Angeles, USA, there are still many unanswered questions. Monday, January 23, the Americans are still wondering about the motivations which prompted Saturday evening a septuagenarian of Asian origin to kill eleven people in a dance hall in Monterey Park, in the south of California, before attempting to continue his carnage in another dance hall, whose customers also celebrated the Chinese New Year.
Initially raised to the number of ten dead, the death toll has been revised to eleven people, the LAC + USC medical center in Los Angeles announced on Monday. “We are saddened to announce that one of the victims has succumbed to his injuries”said the hospital, which was treating four of the ten injured in the massacre, in a press release sent to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
US President Joe Biden expressed his outrage on Sunday evening and ordered the flags to be flown at half-mast until the evening of January 26 “as a sign of respect for the victims of the senseless acts of violence perpetrated on January 21, 2023 in Monterey Park, California”according to a statement from the White House.
First victim identified
After an extensive manhunt, which police say ended in the shooter’s suicide, Los Angeles County investigators were still working to unravel the details behind the Monterey massacre. Park.
In this city of 60,000 people, many could not believe such an act could have taken place in this predominantly Asian suburb of Los Angeles, renowned for its tranquility, which celebrated the Lunar New Year on Saturday evening.
“All avenues are being examined”, Sheriff Robert Luna assured Sunday. In particular, investigators have not yet determined why the victims, most of them in their 60s and 70s, had been targeted.
Among the victims identified by a Los Angeles County official, as stated in a statement to AFP, was Mymy Nhan, a 65-year-old woman who was the first person killed in the dance hall. “We enter the Lunar New Year with broken hearts. We had no idea she could die so suddenly.”his family said in a statement posted on social media.
The track of jealousy studied
The 72-year-old Asian suspect was identified as Huu Can Tran after his death Sunday in Torrance, about 45 kilometers from Monterey Park. According to media, Mr. Tran was a former regular at the dance hall, where he had even met his ex-wife.
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Monterey Park resident Chester Hong told Agence France-Presse that a domestic dispute over an invitation to a Lunar New Year party may have been the cause of the tragedy. “The wife was invited to the party but the husband could not be invited”he said on Sunday. “And the husband might be angry and jealous. »
Huu Can Tran had emigrated to the United States from China, told CNN his ex-wife, met two decades earlier in this same Star Ballroom Dance Studio. The couple got married quickly, but the union did not last. He was not violent, according to her, but he sometimes lost patience if he felt humiliated, if she missed a dance step for example.
According to a former friend, also interviewed by the American channel, the killer assiduously frequented the dance hall, where he was nevertheless “unfriendly towards many people”which he accused of saying “mean things about him”. His mobile home in Hemet, nearly 140 km east of Los Angeles, was searched on Sunday, according to the press. For a neighbor interviewed by local television, “He was just a dude with no history”.
His white van was blocked by armored police vehicles, and his body was later found, showing traces of a gunshot fired from inside the vehicle. The weapon found after he killed himself in his vehicle was not an assault rifle, Sheriff Luna said, but “a semi-automatic assault pistol (…), which was fitted with a high-capacity magazine”.
A young man averted a second bloodbath
After killing eleven people and injuring ten others in Monterey Park, the shooter went to another nearby dance hall on Saturday evening, with the aim of killing other victims. However, he was prevented from doing so after being disarmed by a young man, described on Monday as “hero” by the American media.
Brandon Tsay, a 26-year-old employee at the Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio in the city of Alhambra, was at the entrance of the establishment, frequented mainly by Asian customers, when the shooter entered and pointed a gun on him. “My heart stopped, I knew I was going to die”he told the New York Timesadding: “At this moment, it’s the survival instinct” who took over.
The young man said he lunged at the man and grabbed the barrel of the gun, engaging in what he describes as the “fight of his life”. On CCTV footage released by the ABC string On Monday, Brandon Tsay can be seen wrestling with the beanie-wearing shooter, with the weapon indistinguishable in the melee. He finally managed to seize it, and the suspect then fled.
This shooting is the deadliest in the United States since a gunman killed 21 people in May 2022 at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
The United States pays a very heavy price for the dissemination of firearms on its territory and the ease with which Americans have access to them. Around 49,000 people died from gunfire in 2021 in the country, compared to 45,000 in 2020, which was already an unprecedented year in this area. This represents more than 130 deaths per day, more than half of which are suicides.