Courtney Vinopal Courtney Vinopal. Eight people, including six Asian women, are dead following a series of shootings at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area Tuesday evening. The shootings are the latest acts of violence against Asian people living in the U.
While authorities have yet to determine a motive in this latest attack, the fact remains that six Asian people are dead as a result, and this compounds fears the community faces on a daily basis, advocates say. Five people were shot, four of whom died. Atlanta Police responded to a robbery about an hour later at Gold Spa in northeast Atlanta, where they found three women dead from apparent gunshot wounds, according to a statement.
After hearing shots fired from another business across the street, they found another woman shot dead inside of Aromatherapy Spa. Robert Aaron Long, a year-old Georgia resident who is white, was arrested in connection with the shootings and charged with eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault. Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said his office was able to identify Long from surveillance video footage of the shooting in Acworth and put a call out on social media.
One additional victim, Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, was injured in the shooting. They are Soon C. Park, 74; Hyun J. Grant, 51; Suncha Kim, 69; and Yong A. Yue, Authorities did not give many details of the victims in the news conference Wednesday morning, other than to say that two were white and six were Asian.
Authorities said that Long, who lives in Woodstock, Georgia, told police that he has a sex addiction. They said he claimed that the killings were not racially motivated, drawing outrage across the country from Asian Americans and others who said racism has historically been deeply rooted in the sexualization of Asian women. Despite what Long told police, racism has not been eliminated as a motive in the shootings. Georgia state Rep. Other Asian Americans challenged the idea that sex addiction could rule out the possibility that racism was also at play, including Millie Tran, the chief product officer at the Texas Tribune.
