On Saturday night, thousands of people gathered in the nation’s first suburban Chinatown at a festival to welcome the Lunar New Year. Then a 72-year-old man who’d spent many hours in the Star Ballroom opened fire.
, which had served for more than three decades as the sweetest spot in town, where people in their 50s, 60s and well into their retirement years came together to show off their moves, learn the basics and be with each other. A family, many of them called their crowd.
When officers came into the parking lot, “it was chaos,” Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese said. “There were wounded people, there were people trying to flee out all of the doors.”The officers — some in their first months on the job, many still on the job after working the street festival — charged into a room of unspeakable carnage: Pools of blood, people shouting and wailing.
Fourteen miles away, on the Verdugo fire department’s radio channel, the dispatcher put out an alert: “Additional units requested, multiple victims, gunshot wounds.”More police arrived, ambulances, worried friends, people who had been at the festival — outside Star studio, a growing crowd; inside, a horrific crime scene.
Despite all the suffering, “This could have been so much worse,” said Rep. Judy Chu , who served three terms as Monterey Park’s mayor. An hour before the attack, thousands of people had gathered a block away for the Lunar New Year celebration. The gunman “was hitting me across the face,” Tsay said. “Bashing the back of my head. I was trying to use my elbows to separate the gun away from him, create some distance.” Tsay prevailed, pointed the gun at the man and ordered him to leave: “Get the hell out of here! I’ll shoot!”Tsay called the police, the gun still in his hand.
Around 11:30 p.m., Monterey Park’s mayor, Henry Lo, started receiving tweets from friends and residents, alerting him to a shooting in his city. Lo had spent Saturday at the festival, among the thousands who crowded downtown streets, swelling his community with revelers young and old. The atmosphere was joyful, brimming with hope that this new year could bring relief after theBut now, Lo didn’t know what to think.
“We thought we were finally getting back to normal, and then to have this horrible thing happen — it’s shattering,” said Chu, the congresswoman. Monterey Park is known for being a “safe and quiet place to live,” she added. “We think of it as the place to raise our children and to live high-quality lives.”
Around 10:40 a.m., an officer on the scene put out word on the radio: “Just a little bit of information: The Monterey Park case from last night — this is going to be related.” Back at Lai Lai in Alhambra, officers had another weapon, which Tsay said he had taken from the gunman. It was an assault pistol with an “extended-large capacity magazine attached to it,” said Luna, who later described the firearm as a “9mm MAC-10 assault weapon.”
Adam Hood, who said he met Tran about two decades ago and lived with him for several years, said Tran had grievances and “a lot of vendettas against people” over money, love and his alienation from people at the two dance studios he frequented — Star and Lai Lai.
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