MONTEREY PARK, Calif. — The burst of pops sounded, at first, like the firecrackers expected to cap a day of celebration.
It was late Saturday night in Monterey Park, and the city’s Lunar New Year festival had ended an hour earlier. People were still strolling through downtown when the noise echoed from a ballroom dance studio tucked into a strip mall.
Three people sprinted across Garvey Avenue and into the Clam House, a seafood restaurant, where they begged owner Seung Won Choi to barricade the door. They said they just escaped from a class at Star Ballroom Dance Studio, where a gunman had opened fire.
Their faces were pale with terror — “hot white,” Choi recalled.
The mass shooting — one of the worst in the modern history of L.A. Los Angeles County — left 10 people dead and at least 10 more wounded in a storied hub of Southern California’s Chinese community during a weekend of celebration, now truncated by terror and grief. Monterey Park canceled the second day of its festival and, instead, on Sunday morning police officers with long guns stood guard beneath a string of red lanterns and a big banner.
“Happy Year of the Rabbit!” it proclaimed — a year of peace shattered before it even began.
It was late Saturday when Monterey Park police officers — including some rookies who had been on patrol for only a couple of months — rushed to the bloody scene, but the suspect was gone. About 20 minutes later, the gunman barged into another dance studio, the Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio in nearby Alhambra, but two people managed to wrestle the gun away from the suspect, who fled in a white cargo van, according to witnesses.
Alerts went out and authorities across the region searched for the vehicle. Sheriff’s officials put out a bulletin identifying the suspect as an adult Asian man and asking anyone who recognized the man pictured wearing a black leather jacket, beanie and glasses to contact investigators.
Sunday midmorning law enforcement vehicles surrounded a white 1999 Chevy Express in a Torrance parking lot, where officials said the gunman fatally shot himself as officers approached the vehicle.
Authorities later identified the shooter as Huu Can Tran, 72, who, according to public records and law enforcement sources, had been living at a trailer park in Hemet, described by its sign as an “A 55+ active living community.”
Images and aerial footage of the Torrance parking lot showed what appeared to be two bullet holes in the driver’s-side window of the van. A SWAT team swarmed the vehicle around 1 p.m.
“I can confirm that there are no outstanding suspects,” L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna said at a news briefing Sunday evening, adding that seven victims remained hospitalized with injuries.
The shooter’s motive, Luna said, remained under investigation.
“We want to know how something this awful can happen,” he said.
