Massacre in Monterey Park: Video of the moment a citizen disarms the attacker

Just two days after a gunman killed 11 people at a dance studio in the Los Angeles area, seven more people were killed in a rural area near San Franciscotwo bloody incidents that rocked California, USA.

Authorities have said they have yet to determine a motive for the two mass shootings, which are all the more puzzling to them, in part because the perpetrators were men of retirement age, much older than the perpetrators of such massacres usually are.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he was visiting survivors of Saturday’s massacre in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park when he was told of Monday’s incident in northern California. “One tragedy after another,” he tweeted.

However, the two incidents do not seem to have anything in common other than the age of their perpetrators.

Monday’s was in the seaside town of Half Moon Bay, about 50 kilometers south of San Francisco, when a man opened fire on farm workers about a mile apart. Seven people were killed and one was seriously injured.

The attacker, identified as 67-year-old Chunli Zhao, was arrested a short time later when he was spotted by authorities sitting in his car parked outside a police station, where he is believed to have gone to surrender.

A semiautomatic handgun was found in his car, San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus said.

According to Corpus, the suspect, who is “fully cooperating” with investigators, has worked on one of the two farms.

In a separate, low-profile incident in the San Francisco Bay Area, one person was killed and seven others were injured Monday night “in an exchange of gunfire between several individuals,” Oakland police said. The police attributed the incident to clashes between gangs.

News of the massacre at Half Moon Bay broke when the police was continuing to investigate the incident at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, where a gunman killed 11 people and wounded nine others.

Authorities said the attacker, 72-year-old Hu Can Tran, also went to a neighboring town and tried to break into a second dance studio, but he was stopped by his manager who grabbed his gun.

Tran, who frequented the Star Ballroom, fled and disappeared. He shot himself in his car on Sunday morning12 hours after the massacre and after police had surrounded him in the city of Torrance.

Chinese new year

Saturday’s carnage came amid Chinese New Year celebrations in Monterey Park, an area of ​​southern California with a large Asian community, initially raising fears of a racially motivated attack. The second day of events was cancelled.

It is one of the bloodiest incidents ever recorded in Los Angeles County, according to Hilda Solis, a member of the county Board of Supervisors.

In 1984, 21 people were killed at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Diego, the deadliest attack ever to take place in California, as reported by Reuters and relayed by the Athens News Agency.

Fourteen people were killed in San Bernardino, Los Angeles County in 2015 by a couple. According to the authorities, they were extremists inspired by foreign terrorist organizations. They were killed a few hours later in a shootout with the police.

The two most recent incidents also stand out because of the age of their perpetrators.

Of the 185 incidents of armed attacks from 1966 to 2022 recorded by the non-governmental organization Violence Project, only one involved a perpetrator over the age of 70: in 1981 a retired coal miner killed five people in Kentucky.