(Monterey Park) The shooter suspected of having killed 10 people in a city on the outskirts of Los Angeles on Saturday evening was surrounded by police on Sunday, according to several local media which broadcast live images taken by helicopter.
A white pickup truck believed to be in the suspect was blocked front and rear by armored police vehicles in the town of Torrance, south of Los Angeles, just over 25 miles from Monterey Park, predominantly Asian city where the shooting took place in a dance hall.
Law enforcement responded to initial emergency calls at 10:20 p.m. Saturday (Sunday 1:20 a.m. EST) and then discovered victims and patrons in the parking lot of the venue, said Sheriff Luna at a press conference Sunday morning in this city of 60,000 people on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
The police entered the scene and “found numerous shooting victims”.
The 10 people who died are five women and five men, but have not yet been identified, Luna said.
“At least 10 additional victims have been taken to hospital,” he said, adding that “their condition ranges from stable to critical.”
“At this time, our very preliminary description (of the suspect) is that of a male of Asian descent,” added the sheriff.
“New Chinatown”
Sheriff’s officers were still working on the crime scene in the early morning of Sunday, an AFP journalist noted, and the surrounding area was cordoned off by a security perimeter.
Nearby, the white tents of the night market organized to celebrate the Lunar New Year were still in the middle of the street. Above a row of red lanterns, a banner wished residents a ‘Happy Year of the Rabbit’.
“It’s really very sad,” said Ken Nim, who came to walk his dog in the early morning.
“It’s the first time they’ve held the festival since the pandemic,” the employee of an IT company, who has lived in Monterey Park for more than twenty years and learned the news, told AFP. wake.
PHOTO FREDERIC J. BROWN, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
The shooting occurred near a place where the Lunar New Year had just been celebrated in Monterey Park, a city of some 60,000 inhabitants, mostly of Asian origin.
According to him, this residential suburb, which he calls the “new Chinatown” of Los Angeles, is a “place where not much normally happens. »
Indicating to pray with his wife Jill for the victims of the shooting, US President Joe Biden said he was “monitoring the situation closely”, in a tweet.
Investigators were also verifying information about a possible link to an attempted shooting that same evening at another dance hall in nearby Alhambra.
“A suspect of Asian descent entered the scene with a weapon that was snatched from his hands before he fled,” Sheriff Robert Luna said.
The weapon found “is not an assault rifle,” he said.
Loaded with ammunition
Saturday evening, tens of thousands of people had just gathered near the scene of the shooting in Monterey Park for the Lunar New Year festivities, planned over two days and particularly important for the Asian community.
According to the owner of a nearby restaurant quoted by the Los Angeles Timesthree people ran into his establishment at the time of the shooting and asked him to lock the door.
These three people said that there was a man with a semi-automatic rifle and loaded with ammunition who reloaded his weapon regularly, Seung Won Choi told the newspaper.
According to Sheriff Luna, investigators do not yet know if this was an attack targeting the Asian community.
“All avenues are being considered. We don’t know if this is a hate crime as defined by law,” he said.
“Hate crime” in the United States refers to an act against a person targeted for elements of their identity such as race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or disability.
The United States pays a very heavy price for the spread of firearms in its territory and the ease with which Americans have access to them.
Around 49,000 people died from gunshot wounds in 2021, compared to 45,000 in 2020, which was already a record year. This represents more than 130 deaths per day, more than half of which are suicides.