A white gunman was charged Wednesday with killing eight people at three Atlanta-area massage parlours in an attack that sent terror through the Asian American community, which has increasingly been targeted during the coronavirus pandemic.
ATLANTA (AP) A white gunman was charged Wednesday with killing eight people at three Atlanta-area massage parlors in an attack that sent terror through the Asian American community, which has increasingly been targeted during the coronavirus pandemic.
A day after the shootings, investigators were trying to unravel what might have compelled 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long to commit the worst mass killing in the U.S. in almost two years.
Long told police that Tuesday’s attack was not racially motivated. He claimed to have a “sex addiction,” and authorities said he apparently lashed out at what he saw as sources of temptation. But those statements spurred outrage and widespread skepticism given the locations and that six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent.
Mar 17, 2021
A police officer watches as a body is taken from the Gold Spa massage parlor after a shooting, late Tuesday in Atlanta. Shootings at two massage parlors in Atlanta and one in the suburbs left multiple people dead, many of them women of Asian descent, authorities said. A 21-year-old man suspected in the shootings was taken into custody in southwest Georgia this morning after a manhunt, police said. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
ATLANTA (AP) Georgia officials said this morning that the suspect in a series of shootings at Atlanta-area massage parlors that left eight people dead may have a “sexual addiction” and that it was too early to say if the attack was a hate crime.
ATLANTA – A white man accused of killing eight people, most of whom were of Asian descent, at massage parlours in the Atlanta area told police the attack was not racially motivated and that he potentially had a “sex addiction,” officials said Wednesday.
Still, authorities said they were investigating whether the deaths were hate crimes amid concerns over a wave of attacks on Asian Americans. Six of the victims were identified as Asian and seven were women.
It was not clear if Robert Aaron Long, 21, ever went to the parlours where the shootings occurred; one official said he had while another indicated he may have only visited businesses like them. Authorities also said he was planning to go to Florida in a plot to attack “some type of porn industry.”
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