Chinese New Year party turned into worst nightmare in Monterey Park, California, where a 72-year-old man butchered ten people in their 50s and 60s in a dance hall, moved to another venue where he was disarmed by hero clients and then fled in a van in which he committed suicide after being stopped by the police.
The horror in the town 13 kilometers from Los Angeles, where the majority of the population is of Asian origin, began shortly after 10pm on Saturday evening.
An Asian man, Huu Can Tran, broke into the Star Ballroom Dance Studio armed with a "powerful assault rifle", according to some police sources, and shot dead 5 men and 5 women on the floor.
10 other people were injured.
About twenty minutes after the massacre, the attacker moved three kilometers from the site of the massacre, in the Alhambra, and entered another Chinese restaurant, the Lai Lai, with a different weapon from the one used in Monterey, probably a pistol , but was blocked and disarmed by brave clients, "heroes" as the police chief called them.
He then fled in a white van and traveled 50 km before being stopped in Torrance by special teams.
The officers asked him to leave and then they heard a shot.
After about an hour they smashed the windows of the van and found the lifeless body of the killer.
The attacker's suicide will make it more difficult for the investigators to establish the motive for the massacre.
"All leads are open," said Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna, who spoke of "domestic violence" but did not rule out the "hate crime" hypothesis.
Mystery also on the weapons used for the massacre.
Law enforcement sources spoke of an assault rifle, but the sheriff explained that two weapons were found: a handgun and "a semi-automatic pistol with a high reloading capacity" recovered in the second location.
US President Joe Biden expressed his closeness to the families of the victims and ordered the flags to be flown at half-mast in all public buildings in the United States.
