On Monday, California police continued their investigations to find out what prompted a 72-year-old man of Asian descent to shoot inside a dance hall in Monterey Park, near Los Angeles, during a celebration of the Lunar New Year, in an armed attack that killed 11 people and committed suicide in its wake. striker.
California police are still trying to find out his motive.
US media said that the suspect, Hou Kan Tran, was a regular frequenter of the Star Dance Studio in Monterey Park, where he gave informal dance lessons.
Tran used a semi-automatic pistol to fire 42 rounds around the dance floor.
The Los Angeles Times reported that investigators are focusing on Tran’s past relationships at dance clubs and looking into whether jealousy over a relationship motivated the killing.
A friend of the suspect told CNN, on condition of anonymity, that his friend thought the other teachers were saying “evil things about him.”
And “CNN” pointed out that the number of times that Tran went to the disco in recent years is not known.
It is likely that he arrived at the discotheque on Saturday night at around 22:20 local time, and opened fire inside, killing 11 people, all of them between the ages of 50 and 70, and wounding 9.
It seems that he later went to another discotheque in nearby Alhambra, where the authorities believe that he intended to carry out a second attack, but he was unable to do so as a 26-year-old employee stopped him and took his weapon from him.
Video footage obtained by ABC television showed the two men fighting in the lobby of the Lay Lay club and studio in Alhambra.
“It was clear that he was looking for people, by his body language, facial expressions and eyes,” employee Brandon Tsai told the New York Times.
Tsai grabbed the weapon from the suspect, pointed it at him and shouted, “Go, get out of here,” he told the newspaper.
The suspect fled, then shot himself in a white car in Torrance, a few kilometers south, during a police pursuit on Sunday afternoon.
According to CNN, Tran met his ex-wife 20 years ago in the studio in Monterey Park, a city inhabited by a majority of Asian Americans.
The network did not identify the ex-wife, but noted that they met when Tran saw her and offered her dance lessons.
Tran is an immigrant from Vietnam who came to the United States via China, according to CNN. The marriage did not last long, as the couple divorced in 2006.
The ex-wife said that Tran was never violent with her, but indicated that he was frustrated when she missed a dance step, for example.
And CNN interviewed an old friend of Tran’s who said that the latter went to the disco “every night” at a certain time.
“Tran was hostile to a lot of people there,” he added.
It was not clear if Tran continued to go regularly to the Monterey Park studio.
As for Tsai, who told the New York Times that he is a programmer and works a few days a week in his family’s dance studio in Alhambra, he confirmed that he had never seen Tran before.
The authorities initially feared that the attack was a hate crime targeting Asian Americans.
On Sunday, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna told reporters, “We don’t know if this particular crime is a hate crime under the law… but who walks into a discotheque and shoots about 20 people?”
Luna asked: “What prompted a mad man to do this? We don’t know the reason, but we will look for him,” according to the Associated Press.
Monterey Park is located a few kilometers from the center of Los Angeles and is home to about 60,000 people, most of whom are Asians or Asian Americans.
Tens of thousands of people had previously gathered to celebrate the two-day Lunar New Year festival. However, activities scheduled for Sunday were canceled in the aftermath of the attack.