The hunt for a gunman who killed 10 people at a Los Angeles-area ballroom dance club during Lunar New Year celebrations ended when authorities found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the van he used to flee after people thwarted his attempt at a second shooting. Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna identified the man as Huu Can Tran, 72. It was the fifth U.S. mass killing this month. Another 10 people were wounded and were taken to hospitals, said Capt. Andrew Meyer of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, reports the Associated Press. The shooting took place Saturday night in Monterey Park, a city of 60,000 on the eastern edge of Los Angeles composed mostly of Asian immigrants from China or first-generation Asian Americans. When officers arrived at the studio, people were “pouring out of the location screaming,” Meyer said. He said officers then went into the ballroom and found victims as firefighters treated the wounded.
The shooting happened in downtown Monterey Park, where red lanterns decorated the streets for the Lunar New Year festivities. The celebration is one of California’s largest and had attracted tens of thousands. Two days of festivities, which have been attended by as many as 100,000 people in past years, were planned. Officials canceled Sunday’s events. It was the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. since May 24, when 21 people were killed in a school in Uvalde, Tx. according to The Associated Press/USA Today database on mass killings in the U.S. The database shows that 2022 was also one of the nation’s worst years of mass killings, with 42 such attacks — the second-highest number since the creation of the tracker in 2006. The database defines a mass killing as four people killed, not including the perpetrator.