(Trends Wide) — Investigators searching the home of the 72-year-old gunman who carried out a mass shooting in Monterey Park, Calif., on Saturday night found a .308 caliber rifle, hundreds of loose ammunition and items that led them to believe he was building homemade firearm suppressors, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said Monday.
Police recovered 42 shell casings and a high-capacity magazine at the dance studio that was the site of the shooting, Luna said. Investigators also found a handgun in the shooter’s white pickup truck, she said, adding that the firearm was registered to the suspect.
Despite the new evidence, authorities aren’t sure what motivated the attacker, Huu Can Tran, an elderly Chinese immigrant described as interested in dance and having a bad temper. Tran had a limited criminal record, including a 1990 arrest for illegal possession of a firearm, the sheriff said.
“We still don’t have a motive,” he said. “We want to know as much as all of you, and we are working very hard to achieve it.”
The shooter was “very familiar” with the dance studio where the shooting occurred, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón told Trends Wide. “There certainly is the appearance that this was targeted,” he added.
The sheriff announced the details at a news conference less than two days after the gunman opened fire at a Lunar New Year party in the majority Asian-American city, killing 11 people over the age of 50 and wounding others. nine.
At least one person was shot in a vehicle outside the Star Ballroom Dance Studio, and police believe that Tran shot that person first before entering the dance studio and opened fire on the crowd of civilians, firing 42 shots in total. said the sheriff.
Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese said officers arrived at the scene three to four minutes after the emergency call.
The suspect, still armed, fled the scene and headed to another dance studio in nearby Alhambra, where he was accosted and disarmed by a civilian. The suspect then fled the scene and was found by police a day later in a white pickup truck about 30 miles away in Torrance, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
To carry out the attack, he used a 9mm caliber MAC-10 semi-automatic pistol with a high-capacity extended magazine, Luna said. The disarmed weapon was traced back to the suspect and he provided authorities with his name and description.
The sheriff said the assault weapon appears to have been modified.
The whirlwind of blood turned one of the most auspicious days on the calendar for Asian Americans into a day of unfathomable tragedy, but it still could have been even deadlier.
The massacre, one of at least 39 mass shootings in the US so far this month, targeted members of the Asian community in particular, who have faced a spate of deadly attacks and harassment since the start of the covid-19 pandemic. About 65% of Monterey Park residents are of Asian descent and some 100,000 people from all over Southern California usually attend the Lunar New Year celebrations.
“We’ve been nervous in recent years as covid has increased and impacted our communities, and also the rise of Asian hate in our communities,” Monterey Park City Councilman Thomas Wong told Trends Wide. “And dealing with this on top of that, for our local community, has been tremendously tragic.”
All of the Monterey Park victims were over the age of 50.
All of the victims, five men and six women, were over the age of 50 and three were over the age of 70, according to the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.
Four of the victims were identified as My Nhan, a 65-year-old woman; Lilan Li, a 63-year-old woman; Xiujuan Yu, a 57-year-old woman; and Valentino Alvero, a 68-year-old man, the sheriff’s office said. The other victims were described as two women in their 60s, a woman in her 70s, a man in his 60s and three men in their 70s, the coroner’s office said.
Nhan, known as “Mymy,” loved to dance and spent many years in the dance studio where she was murdered, according to a statement from her family. Nhan was a “loving aunt, sister, daughter and friend” and was the family’s “biggest cheerleader,” the family said.
Tiffany Liou, a reporter for Trends Wide affiliate WFAA in Dallas, told Trends Wide and also posted on Twitter that Nhan was her husband’s aunt. “Mymy treated her nieces/her nephews like her own children,” Liou wrote on Twitter. “Your kindness from her is what is needed in this world.”
Nhan’s dance instructor, Maksym Kapitanchuk, told Trends Wide that she was a joy to be around.
“She was always smiling,” Kapitanchuk said. “I don’t even think I’ve ever seen her without her smile, even through her mask I can see her eyes smiling at her. She was the delight of the class, of any party, of any class.
Few details were available Monday about the other victims. At least one of the dead was a Chinese citizen, the Chinese Consulate General in Los Angeles said in a statement.
“The serious shooting in the Chinese community is shocking and deeply regrettable,” the Chinese consulate said in its statement, adding that the Chinese embassy and consulates in the US have been ordered to lower their flags to half mast.
One of the victims, Alvero, was a US citizen of Filipino descent, the Philippine Consulate General in Los Angeles said in a statement Monday.
“The Philippine Consulate General in Los Angeles expresses its shock and great sadness over the mass shooting incident,” the consulate said. “Our prayers are with the families of the victims and we mourn with them during this Lunar New Year festival, which is supposed to be a time of gathering and celebrating.”
The suspect used to frequent the ballroom, sources say
Mourners left flowers near the site of the massacre during Lunar New Year celebrations in Monterey Park. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
Authorities are working to piece together pieces of Tran’s life to understand how he got to the point of mass violence.
The sheriff’s department also obtained a search warrant for Tran’s home in The Lakes in Hemet West, a senior citizen community about 80 miles east of Monterey Park, a Hemet police spokesperson confirmed.
Hemet police said Tran had visited their office about two weeks ago and made serious allegations of wrongdoing.
“Tran visited the lobby of the Hemet Police Department on January 7 and 9, 2023, alleging prior allegations of fraud, theft, and poisoning involving his family in the Los Angeles area 10 to 20 years ago,” the statement said. police in a statement. “Tran said that he would return to the station with documentation on his allegations, but he never returned.”
Tran had once been a familiar face at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio, where he gave informal dance lessons, three people who knew him told Trends Wide. But it’s not clear how often he visited in recent years, if at all.
He even met his ex-wife there about two decades ago after he saw her at a dance, introduced himself and offered her free lessons, the ex-wife said. The two married shortly after they met, she said. She asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the case.
Tran worked as a trucker at times, he said. He was an immigrant from China, according to a copy of her marriage license that she showed to Trends Wide.
And Tran had a bad temper, his ex-wife and others said. Although he was never violent towards her, the ex-wife said, Tran would be upset if he missed a dance move because he felt he was making him look bad.
She filed for divorce in late 2005, and a judge approved the divorce the following year, Los Angeles court records show.
Another longtime acquaintance of Tran’s also remembers him as a regular patron of the dance studio. The friend, who also asked not to be named, was close to Tran in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when he said Tran would come to the dance studio “almost every night” from his home in nearby Saint Gabriel.
At the time, Tran often complained that the ballroom instructors didn’t like him and said “bad things about him,” the friend recalled. He said Tran was “hostile to a lot of people there.”
More generally, Tran was easily irritated, complained a lot and didn’t seem to trust people, the friend said.
Tran’s friend was “totally shocked” when he found out about the shooting, he said, noting that he hadn’t seen Tran in several years.
A civilian disarmed the attacker at the second location
Security footage from the Lai Lai Ballroom shows the suspect entering a door. (Credit: courtesy of Brenda Tsay)
The massacre could have been deadlier if not for the efforts of Brandon Tsay.
After Tran opened fire at the Monterey Park dance studio, he left and went to the Lai Lai Ballroom and Studio a few miles away in Alhambra. Tsay, whose family had owned the business for three generations, was working the ticket booth when Tran walked in, and she knew quickly that the man was trouble.
Tran was silent and stoic, appearing to be scanning the room, Tsay told Trends Wide’s Anderson Cooper on Monday night.
Then Tsay froze. He saw the man point a firearm at him, he said.
“I’m going to die. That’s it. This is the end for me,” Tsay recalled thinking. “But then something happened. Something got a hold of me.”
He lunged at Tran and wrestled with him for about 40 seconds, but said it felt like “much longer.” Tran hit him multiple times in the face, the back of the neck, the back and the hands, Tsay said.
“I was trying to deflect the gun away from me and the ballroom, toward the ground in case I fired,” he said.
In those seconds, while his life was on the line, Tsay thought to himself, “If I let go of this weapon, what would happen to me, to the people around me, to my friends, to my family?”
Tsay was eventually able to wrest the gun from the gunman, the first time he had ever held a gun, and told Tran to go away, he said. At first, it appeared Tran was considering attacking Tsay again, but then he stormed out of the lobby and ran back to his truck, Tsay said.
Sheriff Luna initially said there were two people who disarmed the man, but on Monday he corrected himself and identified Tsay as solely responsible.
“He is the hero who disarmed the suspect at the Alhambra site and, in my opinion, saved many lives,” he said. “What a brave man he is.”
— Elizabeth Wolfe, Chris Boyette, Joe Sutton, Alisha Ebrahimji, John Miller, Jeff Winter, Casey Tolan, Scott Glover, Matt Meyer, Melissa Alonso, Michelle Watson, Betsy Klein, Sarah Fortinsky y Taylor Romine de Trends Wide contribuyeron a este informe.
