Three shootings and 21 deaths in four days. A man killed three people before committing suicide on Tuesday in the US state of Washington, police said. Two shootings had mourned California, doing 11 and 7 dead less than 48 hours apart, and particularly striking the Asian community, from which most of the victims came.
This new killing took place around 3:30 a.m. Tuesday around and inside a grocery store at a gas station in Yakima, a city of 97,000 people two hours drive from Seattle. The 21-year-old suspect, Jarid Haddock, had no particular reason to attack his victims, according to the police. “There was no apparent conflict between the people. The man just walked in and started shooting,” Yakima Police Chief Matthew Murray said earlier Tuesday.
“I killed these people”
He then shot two people outside the store, before stealing a car and fleeing. A manhunt followed, the authorities warning that the suspect was “armed and dangerous”. Then the police received a call from a woman saying that the wanted individual had borrowed her phone.
He “called his mother and made several incriminating statements such as ‘I killed these people'” before saying he was going to kill himself, Matthew Murray told reporters. Officers dispatched to the scene arrived just in time to hear gunshots. They tried to resuscitate him, without success.
The bereaved Asian community in California
On Monday, seven farm workers were gunned down at two farms in Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco. An eighth person was seriously injured by a 60-year-old named Chunli Zhao. A former employee of one of the two farms, he was arrested by the authorities with a semi-automatic pistol in his vehicle.
And on Saturday night, in Monterey Park near Los Angeles, Chinese New Year celebrations turned into carnage when a septuagenarian of Asian descent, Huu Can Tran, killed eleven people, mostly seniors, in a popular dance hall. by an Asian clientele. He then tried to attack a second ballroom, before committing suicide in his van, surrounded by the police. Investigators were still busy Tuesday to determine the motives of these two attacks.
39 shootings in January
There have already been 39 mass shootings in January, according to statistics compiled by The Gun Violence archive, which defines them as gun attacks resulting in at least 4 dead or injured, not including the shooter. Since 2020, for reasons still poorly understood, there has been a clear increase with nearly 600 shootings per year, while between 2013 and 2019, the United States was between 250 and 400.
The FBI uses a much more restrictive definition of “active shooting” which, with law enforcement involvement, excludes most gang violence and many score settlings. The FBI identified 61 in 2021, an increase of 50% compared to 2020 (40), which already represented a 33% increase compared to 2017, 2018 and 2019 (around thirty).