Array
— Law enforcement on Sunday described the gunman wanted for killing 10 people and wounding at least 10 more at a dance club following a Lunar New Year celebration as a man of Asian descent as they continued their frantic search for the suspect.
The motive behind the “heinous” crime at the Star Dance Studio in the Asian-American enclave of Monterey Park Saturday night was still unknown, but investigators were probing whether the massacre was driven by hate.
Five men and five women were slain during the rampage at the ballroom dance club, about eight miles outside downtown Los Angeles, according to police. Ten others were wounded and being treated at local hospitals — their conditions ranging from stable to critical, officials said.
The “assumption” is that the victims were “probably” of Asian descent, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said at a press briefing. The victims had not yet been identified and it was not immediately clear how old they were, Luna said.
A manhunt was underway for the unidentified suspect, who police described only as an Asian man between the age of 30 to 50.
“There is a male suspect that fled the scene, has been described as a male Asian,” Luna said.
“It’s taken us a while and please be patient with us because as we are interviewing witnesses and victims we’ve gotten different descriptions of one suspect.”
Police were also looking into if he was the same man who walked into a “rival” dancehall in nearby Alhambra with a firearm about 20 minutes after the mass murder.
The suspect was disarmed by people at the Lai Lai Ballroom, according to police, and no shots were fired at that location, which is about three miles away from Star Dance Studio.
It was unclear what type of caliber weapon was used in the Monterey Park attack. The would-be shooter in Alhambra was not armed with an assault rifle and possibly fled the scene in a white cargo van, Luna said.
The mass murder was the deadliest in the US since the massacre at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school that killed 21 people last May, and was the fifth such horrifying incident in the country thus far in 2023.
Police first received a 911 call at 10:22 p.m., a little more than an hour after a Lunar New Year festival that attracted up to 100,000 people had wrapped up a short distance away from the dancehall.
“We were just wrapping up the final shutdown of the Lunar New Year event,” said Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese.
“I had dozens of officers here throughout the day and the evening at the Lunar New Year event, so our response to the scene was within minutes,” he said.
