Ten people were killed in a shooting Saturday night in a mostly Asian-populated Southern California town, police officials said Sunday.
• Also read: Six people shot dead in California, suspected gangs
The alleged perpetrator, a man, remains at large on Sunday, police said.
“The suspect fled the scene and is nowhere to be found,” Andrew Meyer of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office told reporters in Monterey Park.
Special investigators from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office “are assisting the Monterey Park Police Department in an investigation into a fatal shooting,” the statement said. “Nine people died.”
The alleged perpetrator of the shooting is a man, the press release confirms.
The shooting took place near where the Lunar New Year had just been celebrated, in Monterey Park, a town of about 61,000 people, mostly Asian, about 8 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.
According to press reports, the shooting took place in a hall on Saturday evening, an hour after the Lunar New Year holiday.
Tens of thousands of people had gathered for the two-day celebration, which is among the largest of its kind in Southern California, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Monterey Park resident Wong Wei told the Los Angeles Times his friend was at the club and in the bathroom when the shooting erupted. When she came out, she saw an armed man and three bodies – two women and a person he identified as the club boss.
The daily also quotes Seung Won Choi, the owner of a nearby restaurant, as saying that three people ran into the restaurant and told him to lock the door.
Those three people said there was a man with a semi-automatic rifle and loaded ammunition who regularly reloaded his gun, the restaurateur told the newspaper.
The United States pays a very high price for the proliferation of firearms on its territory and easy access by Americans to them.
The country has more individual guns than residents: one in three adults owns at least one gun and nearly one in two adults lives in a household where there is a gun.
The consequence of this proliferation is the very high rate of firearm deaths in the United States compared to other developed countries.
Around 49,000 people died from gunshot wounds in 2021, compared to 45,000 in 2020, which was already a record year. This equates to more than 130 deaths a day, more than half of which are suicides.