Members of US Congress on Sunday laid flowers at the three massage businesses in Georgia where a gunman killed eight people, six of them women of Asian descent, and demanded that prosecutors charge the suspect with a hate crime and the US Department of Justice take a leading role in the probe.
The congressional delegation was led by members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, which said that Asian Americans have faced increased hostility since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The lawmakers said they wanted to experience the shooter’s roughly 48km trip from Cherokee County, where police say he killed four people at Youngs Asian Massage, to Atlanta, where he is accused of shooting and killing four more people at two businesses across the street from each other.
Photo: AP
US Representative Andy Kim of New Jersey said he came to show solidarity with the local Asian-American community and try to understand how it felt after the March 16 attack.
“As I come here, what comes to mind is the idea that this could have been anywhere,” said Kim, who is Korean American. “And that’s what makes us so fearful right now. We’re fearful because what happens next, what other violence could there be.”
Kim later recalled crying the night of the shootings and struggling to explain them to his three and five-year-old boys.
US Representative Grace Meng of New York said she wanted to honor the lives of the victims, particularly the Asian women, whose “stories and lives are just as American as anyone else.”
“For too long in this country, we have made invisible so much of the history and contributions of Asian Americans, specifically Asian-American women in this country,” she said.
The lawmakers spoke outside Gold Spa, one of the shooting sites, where the ground was covered with bouquets and tree branches that spelled out “Love.” Signs read: “Asian Women Are Sacred” and “Stop Asian Hate.”
They also held a news conference in an Atlanta suburb and met with the families of two of the victims, Xiaojie Tan and Young A. Yue, and local leaders of the Asian-American community.
Robert Aaron Long, the 21-year-old white man facing murder charges in the attacks, has told police he had a “sex addiction.”
Authorities have said that he apparently lashed out at what he saw as sources of temptation.
Long told police the shootings were not racially motivated, but those statements have spurred widespread skepticism given the locations and that six of the eight victims were of Asian descent.
“It is clear that this was a deliberate journey,” said US Representative Judy Chu, who chairs the Asian Pacific American Caucus.
“It is clear that you would not choose those three places unless you were targeting Asian women,” she added.
She said that comments from local investigators were “improper” and wrongly cast doubt on whether the shootings were a hate crime, adding that the US Department of Justice should use its resources to “call these murders a hate crime.”
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