Ten people were killed and ten others were hurt when a gunman opened fire at a ballroom dance club near Los Angeles after a Lunar New Year party. The incident is the latest mass shooting in America.
Captain Andrew Meyer of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department said Sunday that the injured people were taken to hospitals and that their conditions ranged from stable to critical. He said that the 10 people who died did so at the scene in Monterey Park.
Meyer said that when police arrived around 10:30 p.m., people were “running out of the place screaming.” He said that after that, the officers went into the dance ballroom while the firefighters took care of the injured.
People from all over came to celebrate the Lunar New Year. About 16 kilometres (10 miles) from downtown Los Angeles, Monterey Park is a city of about 60,000 people with a large Asian population.
It was the fifth mass shooting in the US this month and the deadliest since 21 people were killed in a school in Uvalde, Texas. This information comes from a database put together by The Associated Press and USA Today. Two months ago, five people were shot and killed in a Colorado Springs nightclub.
The owner of the restaurant across the street from where the shooting happened, Seung Won Choi, told the Los Angeles Times that three people ran into his business and told him to lock the door.
People also told Choi that there was a shooter with a gun who was carrying a lot of bullets. Choi said that he thinks that the shooting happened at a dance club.
Wong Wei, who lives nearby, told The Los Angeles Times that his friend was in a dance club bathroom when the shooting started that night. He said that when she came out, she saw someone with a gun and three dead bodies.
Wei said that the friend ran home around 11 p.m., and his friends told him that the shooter seemed to shoot randomly with a long gun. He told the newspaper, “They don’t know why, so they run.”
The shooting happened near where tens of thousands of people had been celebrating the Lunar New Year. The two-day festival, which started on Saturday, is one of the biggest Lunar New Year celebrations in Southern California.
People were put on stretchers and put into ambulances in videos that were shared on social media. In other photos, firefighters in Monterey Park were treating injured people in a parking lot. These people were bloodied and had bandages on them.