ATLANTA SHOOTING SUSPECT CHARGED WITH EIGHT COUNTS OF MURDER

Thu 18 March 2021:

The suspect in the Atlanta massage parlors shooting spree has been charged with eight counts of murder, The New York Times reported citing local authorities.

At least eight people were shot dead late Tuesday at massage parlors around the Atlanta metropolitan area in the US state of Georgia.

Police have taken the suspected gunman, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, into custody.

Long was also charged with one count of aggravated assault in connection with the shootings.

The authorities said four of the murder counts and the assault charge originated from the first shooting incident, in Cherokee County, and the remaining four murder counts were connected with shootings at two massage parlors in the city of Atlanta shortly after.

Aaron’s car was then spotted about 30 miles (48 kilometers) away in Atlanta, where a call came in about a robbery at Gold Spa and three women were shot to death. Another woman was fatally shot at the Aromatherapy Spa across the street.

Long was arrested hours later by Crisp County deputies and state troopers. He refused to stop on a highway and officers bumped the back of his car, causing him to crash, Sheriff Billy Hancock said.

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.

The shootings appear to be at the “intersection of gender-based violence, misogyny and xenophobia,” said state Rep. Bee Nguyen, the first Vietnamese American to serve in the Georgia House and a frequent advocate for women and communities of color.

The attack was the sixth mass killing this year in the U.S., and the deadliest since the August 2019 Dayton, Ohio, shooting that left nine people dead, according to a database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.

It follows a lull in mass killings during the pandemic in 2020, which had the smallest number of such attacks in more than a decade, according to the database, which tracks mass killings defined as four or more dead, not including the shooter.

The killings horrified the Asian American community, which saw the shootings as an attack on them, given a recent wave of assaults that coincided with the spread of the coronavirus across the United States. The virus was first identified in China, and then-President Donald Trump and others have used racially charged terms to describe it.

President Joe Biden called the attack “very, very troublesome.”

“We don’t yet know the motive, but what we do know is that the Asian-American community is feeling enormous pain tonight. The recent attacks against the community are un-American. They must stop,” Biden tweeted Wednesday.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black and South Asian woman in that office, expressed support to the Asian American community, saying, “We stand with you and understand how this has frightened and shocked and outraged all people.”

Over the past year, thousands of incidents of abuse have been reported to an anti-hate group that tracks incidents against Asian Americans, and hate crimes in general are at the highest level in more than a decade.

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