The 72-year-old man who massacred ten people between the ages of 50 and 60 in a dance hall in Monterey Park, California, took his own life and moved to another club where he was disarmed by hero customers and then flee in a van. Yet another mass shooting in the United States is the bloodiest since the tragedy at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last May.
The horror in the town 13 kilometers from Los Angeles, where the majority of the population is of Asian origin, began shortly after 10pm on Saturday evening. The streets, festively decorated to welcome the coming of the Year of the Rabbit, were crowded with thousands of people.
Huu Can Tran broke into the Star Ballroom Dance Studio armed with a "powerful assault rifle", according to some police sources even if there is still no official confirmation, and killed five men and five women on the dance floor. Ten other people were injured and are hospitalised.
About twenty minutes after the massacre, the attacker moved three kilometers from the site of the massacre, in the Alhambra, and entered another Chinese restaurant, the Lai Lai, with a different weapon from the one used in Monterey, probably a pistol , but was blocked and disarmed by brave customers. He then fled in a white van and traveled 50 kilometers before being stopped in Torrance by special teams.
The officers asked him to leave and then they heard a shot. After about an hour they smashed the windows of the van and found the lifeless body of the killer lying on the steering wheel.
A suicide that will make it more difficult for the investigators to establish the motive for the massacre. "All leads are open," said the Los Angeles County Sheriff, Robert Luna, who spoke of "domestic violence" but did not rule out the hypothesis of "hate crime": in recent years the Asian community in the United States she was the victim of several episodes of violence, the worst of which was on March 16, 2021, when eight people were killed, including six women, in three different massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia.
US President Joe Biden has expressed solidarity with the families of the victims and ordered the flags to be flown at half-mast in all public buildings in the United States.
(Unioneonline/D)
