‘So much grief.’ Community reels after 10 slain at Lunar New Year celebration
A gunman who killed 11 at a Monterey Park dance studio during Lunar New Year celebrations has been identified as a 72-year-old Hemet man, authorities told news outlets.
Huu Can Tran died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound Sunday, Jan. 22, during a standoff with police in a strip mall parking lot in Torrance, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Tran killed 10 people and wounded at least 10 more at a Monterey Park dance studio around 10:20 p.m. on Saturday, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department news release said.
He was later disarmed by a bystander at another dance studio in nearby Alhambra and fled, KABC reported. On Sunday, police boxed in Tran’s white van in Torrance and he shot himself.
One of the injured later died, bringing the death toll to 11, the Orange County News reported Monday, Jan. 23.
“We still are not clear on the motive,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna told the Los Angeles Times. “We want to know how something this awful can happen.”
The Monterey Park attack followed a Lunar New Year’s Eve celebration attended by tens of thousands of people in the predominantly Asian community.
“It’s supposed to be families gathering together to enjoy and to just have some time to get together,” Yingying Guan told KTLA. “So many innocent victims.”
Mayor Pro Tem Jose Sanchez told the station that more than 100,000 people turned out for the celebration, the first after three years of cancellations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When something like this happens — and I never thought it would happen in our community — it’s very hard to process,” Sanchez said. “There’s so much grief.”
“It was just the most terrible thing,” Lynette Ma told KTLA. “It’s just awful because you never expect it to happen somewhere so close to home.”
Police arriving at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio on Saturday night following the shooting described a chaotic scene of panicked patrons fleeing the facility, the sheriff’s release said.
Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese said officers discovered carnage inside the dance studio “that none of them had been prepared for,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
The gun seized by bystanders at the Alhambra dance studio was a “magazine-fed semiautomatic assault pistol, with an extended magazine” that is illegal in California, authorities told the publication.
A Lunar New Year celebration scheduled for Sunday in Monterey Park was canceled.
Hemet is a city of 90,000 people in the San Jacinto Valley about 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles.
This story was originally published January 23, 2023 at 9:48 AM with the headline "‘So much grief.’ Community reels after 10 slain at Lunar New Year celebration."