Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Jan 22: At least 10 people were killed and around the same number of people wounded in a mass shooting in a ballroom dance club following a Lunar New Year celebration in a largely Asian city in southern California, the police said on Sunday.
The mass shooting tragedy set off a massive manhunt for the suspect who is still reported to be at large hours later. The gunman opened fire at a dance venue in Monterey Park, as the local community were celebrating Lunar New Year, police said.
Captain Andrew Meyers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said officers had responded to emergency calls around 10:20pm on Saturday and found people pouring out of the premises. He said the wounded were taken to hospitals where their conditions ranged from stable to critical. He said the 10 people died at the scene in the city of Monterey Park.
Mr. Meyer said people were “pouring out of the location screaming” when officers arrived on the scene at around 10:30 p.m. He said officers then went into the dance ballroom as firefighters treated the wounded. The Lunar New Year celebration had attracted thousands. Monterey Park is a city of about 61,000 people with a large Asian population about 16 kilometres from downtown Los Angeles.
Seung Won Choi, who owns the Clam House seafood barbecue restaurant across the street from where the shooting happened, said three people rushed into his business and told him to lock the door. The people also told Mr. Choi that there was a shooter with a gun who had multiple rounds of ammunition on him. Mr. Choi said he believes the shooting took place at a dance club.
Wong Wei, who lives nearby, also said his friend was in a bathroom at the dance club that night when the shooting started. When she came out, he said, she saw a gunman and three bodies. The friend then fled to his home at around 11 p.m., Mr. Wei said, adding that his friends told him that the shooter appeared to fire indiscriminately with a long gun. “They don’t know why, so they run,” he said.
Saturday was the start of the two-day Lunar New Year festival and tens of thousands of people had gathered earlier in the day for one of the largest festivities in Southern California.
Videos posted on social media showed people being loaded onto stretchers and placed into ambulances. Other photos showed bloodied and bandaged victims being treated by Monterey Park firefighters in a parking lot.
It marked the fifth mass shooting in the U.S. this month and the deadliest since 21 people were killed in a school in Uvalde, Texas. The latest violence comes two months after five people were killed at a Colorado Springs nightclub. Gun violence is a huge problem in the United States, which saw 647 mass shootings last year, according to the Gun Violence Archive website, defined as an incident with four or more people shot or killed, not including the shooter.