Seven people were killed in two related shootings on Monday at agricultural businesses in a Northern California community, marking the state’s third mass killing in eight days, including an attack at a dance hall that killed 11 during Lunar New Year celebrations.
Officers arrested a suspect in Monday’s shootings, 67-year-old Chunli Zhao, after they found him in his car in the parking lot of a sheriff’s substation, San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus said.
Four people were found dead and a fifth injured from gunshot wounds at a farm, and officers found three other people killed at another location several kilometers away, the Sheriff’s Office said.
Photo: AFP
Officials believe Zhao is a worker at one of the facilities and that the victims were workers as well, Corpus said, adding that officials had not determined a motive for the shooting.
The new year has brought a shocking string of mass killings in the US — six in less than three weeks, accounting for 39 deaths. Three have occurred in California since Monday, according to a database compiled by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.
The database tracks every mass killing — defined as four dead, not including the offender — committed in the US since 2006.
The killings occurred on the outskirts of Half Moon Bay, a city about 48km south of San Francisco.
Half Moon Bay Vice Mayor Joaquin Jimenez said the victims included Chinese and Latino farmworkers.
Some workers at one facility lived on the premises and children might have witnessed the shooting, she said.
Corpus said it was not immediately clear how the two locations were connected.
The Sheriff’s Office first received reports of a shooting just before 2:30pm, and found four people dead from gunshot wounds and a fifth person injured at the first scene.
Shortly thereafter, officers found three more people dead from gunshot wounds at a second location nearby, Captain Eamonn Allen said in a news release.
About two hours after first responding, a sheriff’s deputy noticed the suspect, Zhao, in his car parked outside a sheriff’s substation in a strip mall and arrested him, recognizing the car by its license plate.
A video of the arrest showed three officers approaching a parked car with drawn weapons. Zhao got out of the car, and the officers pulled him to the ground, put him in handcuffs and led him away.
A weapon was found in his vehicle, officials said.
The video was captured by Kati McHugh, a Half Moon Bay resident who witnessed the arrest.
The sheriff’s department said it believes Zhao acted alone.
“We’re still trying to understand exactly what happened and why, but it’s just incredibly, incredibly tragic,” said California state Senator Josh Becker, who represents the area and called it “a very close-knit” agricultural community.
Aerial television images showed police officers collecting evidence from a farm with dozens of greenhouses.
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