ATLANTA: Georgia police on Thursday were considering all motives including hate crime in the murders of eight people, six of them Asian women, at Atlanta-area spas as a lawmaker said the Asian-American community was “screaming out for help” to combat discrimination.
Robert Aaron Long has been charged with murdering four people at two spas in Atlanta and four more in Cherokee County about 40 miles (64 km) to its north on Tuesday.
“Our investigation is looking at everything, so nothing is off the table for our investigation,” Atlanta Deputy Police Chief Charles Hampton told a news conference in response to a question about whether police were looking at the killings as hate crimes.
Long, a 21-year-old white male, suggested to investigators that a sex addiction led him to violence. Lawmakers and anti-racism advocates have speculated the killings were motivated at least in part by anti-Asian sentiments.
In Washington, U.S. lawmakers, professors and actor Daniel Dae Kim said the Asian-American community was reeling from a year of heightened anti-Asian attacks.
“Our community is bleeding, we are in pain and for the last year we’ve been screaming out for help,” Democratic Representative Grace Meng, who is of Taiwanese descent, told a House of Representatives subcommittee.
Hate crimes against Asian Americans rose by 149% in 2020 in 16 major cities compared with 2019, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.
Civil rights advocates have connected the rise in incidents to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in China. Some Americans, including Republican former President Donald Trump, started calling the coronavirus the “China virus,” “the China plague” and even “kung flu.”
President Joe Biden ordered that the U.S. flag be flown at half-staff at the White House to honor the victims of Tuesday’s rampage. He and Vice President Kamala Harris will visit Atlanta on Friday to offer support to the Asian-American community.
Hampton said Long patronized the two Atlanta establishments he is accused of attacking using a 9mm gun. Authorities are not ready to release the names of the victims, he said.
Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department said on Wednesday that Long had confessed to the shootings and indicated he had a sex addiction and “wanted to eliminate” the temptation the establishments represented to him.
A former roommate who spent several months living with Long in a halfway house for recovering addicts told Reuters Long had been treated for sex addiction, was “deeply religious” and would become “very emotionally distraught that he frequented” spas for “explicitly sexual activity.”
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Coronavirus News here
Comments
0 comment