Following a Lunar New Year celebration on Saturday night, a shooter opened fire, killing 10 people and injuring 10, according to authorities. The incident sparked a manhunt for the culprit, who fled the scene and was still at large as of Sunday morning.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna stated during a news conference that survivors gave conflicting descriptions of the attacker during their initial interviews with officials, despite the preliminary investigation indicating the suspect is a male of Asian heritage.
According to Luna, the investigation shows that the suspect entered a dance establishment in Monterey Park and started shooting before being disarmed by customers.
Assailants are looking into a “white cargo vehicle” that was seen in the vicinity and may or may not be connected, according to Luna. “He stepped in there with a firearm and other individuals pulled the firearm away from him, and that individual took off,” Luna said.
Although the investigation is still underway, Luna stated that authorities “don’t believe [the weapon] was an assault rifle at this point.”
Officers responded to a report of gunfire shortly after 10 p.m. and discovered 10 injured people outside the institution. According to Luna, the 10 injured people were taken to nearby hospitals where they are currently listed in stable to serious condition.
Five men and five women were among the 10 people slain, and all of them passed away at the site, according to Luna.
As they continue their hunt for the culprit, homicide investigators are collaborating with the FBI, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, the Monterey Park Police Department, and other law enforcement agencies.
Luna, who termed the crime “one of the county’s most terrible instances,” said, “We’re going to use every resource available to us because we need to get this person off the street as quickly as possible.” She added, “There is a lot more that we don’t know than what we know at this moment.”
At the easternmost point of Los Angeles, there are around 60,000 residents in the city of Monterey Park. Asian immigrants or their descendants, the bulk of whom are Chinese, make up the majority of the population. On Garvey Avenue, the major road of Monterey Park, the dancing studio is just a few blocks from the city hall. Garvey Avenue is lined with strip malls that are full of small companies, many of which have signage in both English and Chinese. Chinese holidays are observed, Cantonese and Mandarin are frequently spoken, and Chinese movies are shown in the city.
President Biden has been informed of the shooting, according to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who also noted that federal agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives are aiding local police on the scene.
On Twitter, Jean-Pierre announced that the Homeland Security Advisor has briefed the President on the Monterey Park massacre. He instructed her to ensure that the FBI is fully assisting the local authorities and to keep him routinely updated when new information becomes available.
According to local resident Wong Wei, his friend had been inside the dance club and was in the restroom when the shooting started. When she came out of the restroom, she discovered a shooter and three bodies: two women and the man he claimed to be the club’s manager.
Around 11 p.m., the friend left the scene and went home, according to Wei, who also mentioned that his buddies had told him that the gunman appeared to use a long rifle and fire randomly. He told the newspaper, “They don’t know why, so they run.
According to CBS Los Angeles, authorities also confirmed there had been a “event” in Alhambra, and police were looking into it to determine whether it was related to the shooting that had taken place two miles away in Monterey Park. According to police, nobody was wounded at the second scene.
I JUST IN: Authorities say they are aware of an incident in Alhambra and are looking into if it was related in any way to the mass shooting in Monterey Park. In Alhambra, no one was harmed.
January 22, 2023, KCAL News (@CBSLA)
Capt. Andrew Meyer of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department said early on Sunday, “We are aware of an event that occurred in Alhambra and we have investigators on scene trying to ascertain if there is a connection.” “On this case, the detectives are pursuing all leads. We are watching every surveillance footage and investigating every lead. We won’t skip a beat in our investigation.”
According to a neighbor who spoke to CBS Los Angeles, the gunshots sounded like fireworks, but at the moment, he did not give it much thought because of the nearby celebrations.
According to officials, the celebration in Monterey Park has been postponed for Sunday.
Videos that were shared on social media showed people being put into ambulances on stretchers. Other images depicted Monterey Park firefighters attending to bandaged and bloodied victims in a parking area.
Three people rushed into Seung Won Choi’s seafood restaurant, the proprietor of which he informed the Los Angeles Times. He claimed that the witnesses had reported the presence of a shooter with a semiautomatic weapon who had reloaded after firing.
Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia tweeted, “Our sympathies go out to families who lost loved ones tonight in our neighboring city, Monterey Park, where a terrible shooting just occurred.”
According to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today on mass homicides in the United States, the incident was the fifth mass shooting to occur in the country this month and the bloodiest since 21 people were slain in a school in Uvalde, Texas. Two months after five people were slain at a nightclub in Colorado Springs, there was further violence.
According to the website Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an occurrence where four or more persons are shot or killed, excluding the shooter, 647 mass shootings occurred in the United States last year.
In the United States, there are more firearms than citizens: one in three individuals possesses at least one firearm, and almost one in two persons reside in homes with firearms.