On Tuesday, eight people were shot dead in the Atlanta area, including at least six Asian women, at a massage parlor and two-day spas, and a man accused of carrying out all of the attacks was arrested hours later in southern Georgia, according to police.
A shooting at Young’s Asian Massage in Cherokee County, about 40 miles north of Atlanta, killed four people and injured another, according to Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department.
The attacks led the New York Police Department’s counter-terrorism unit to declare the deployment of extra patrols in Asian neighborhoods as a measure, despite investigators refusing to provide a potential explanation for the crime.
According to Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department, the carnage in Georgia started about 5 p.m. local time when four people were killed and another was injured in a shooting at Young’s Asian Massage in Cherokee County, around 40 miles north of Atlanta.
Two women of Asian descent were among the dead, along with a white woman and a white man, Baker said, adding that the surviving victim was a Hispanic man.
In Atlanta, the state capital, police officers responding to a call of a “robbery in progress” shortly before 6 p.m. arrived at a beauty spa to find three women shot dead, Police Chief Rodney Bryant told reporters.
While investigating the initial shooting report the officers were called from a second spa across the street where a fourth woman was found dead of a gunshot wound, Bryant said. All four victims slain in Atlanta were of Asian descent.
Robert Aaron Long, 21, of Woodstock, Georgia, in Cherokee County, was taken into custody at about 8:30 p.m. in Crisp County, Georgia, about 150 miles (240 km) south of Atlanta.
Baker told Reuters on the phone that police were “very certain” that the shooter in all three shootings was the same person. According to a separate release by the Atlanta Police Department, surveillance footage from the crime scenes linked the perpetrator to all of the assaults.
Investigators were also seeking to “confirm with confidence” that the Atlanta and Cherokee County shootings were related.
After police in Cherokee County released a bulletin containing a description and license plates of the car used in the attacks, Long was spotted in southern Georgia, far from the crime scenes, Baker said.
