Ten people were killed in a shooting Saturday night in a predominantly Asian-populated town in Southern California, law enforcement officials said Sunday.
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The alleged perpetrator, a man, remains at large on Sunday, police said.
“The suspect fled the scene and remains nowhere to be found,” Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office Capt. Andrew Meyer told reporters in Monterey Park.
Specialist investigators from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office are “assisting Monterey Park Police in an investigation into a fatal shooting,” according to a statement. “There are nine people who died.”
The alleged perpetrator of the shooting is a man, the press release confirms.
The shooting occurred near a location where the Lunar New Year had just been celebrated in Monterey Park, a city of some 61,000 mostly Asians, located about 8 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Angeles.
According to press reports, the shooting occurred in a hall on Saturday evening, an hour after the Lunar New Year holiday.
According to the daily The Los Angeles Timestens of thousands of people had gathered for the two-day festivities, which are among the largest of their kind in Southern California.
Monterey Park resident Wong Wei told the Los Angeles Times that her friend was in the club and was in the bathroom when the shots broke out. When she came out, she saw an armed man and three bodies — two women and a person he identified as the club boss.
The daily also quotes Seung Won Choi, the owner of a nearby restaurant, as saying that three people ran into the establishment and told 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, the restaurateur told the newspaper.
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.
The country has more individual weapons than inhabitants: one in three adults owns at least one weapon and nearly one in two adults lives in a home where there is a weapon.
The consequence of this proliferation is the very high rate of firearm deaths in the United States, unmatched by that of other developed countries.
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.