Three shootings and 21 deaths in four days. A man killed three people before committing suicide on Tuesday in the US state of Washington, police said. Two shootings had saddened California, killing 11 and 7 within 48 hours of each other, particularly hitting the Asian community from which most of the victims came.
This new killing happened around 3:30 a.m. Tuesday around and inside a convenience store at a gas station in Yakima, a city of 97,000 people two hours from Seattle. According to the police, the 21-year-old suspect, Jarid Haddock, had no particular reason to attack his victims. “There was no apparent conflict between the individuals. The man just walked in and started shooting, Yakima Police Chief Matthew Murray said earlier Tuesday.
“I Killed These People”
He then shot two people outside the store before stealing a car and fleeing. A manhunt ensued, with authorities warning that the suspect was “armed and dangerous.” Then police received a call from a woman who said the wanted person had borrowed her phone.
He “called his mother and made several incriminating statements like ‘I killed these people,'” before saying he was going to kill himself, Matthew Murray told reporters. Officers dispatched to the scene arrived just in time to hear gunshots. They tried to revive him, to no avail.
The Left Behind Asian Community in California
On Monday, seven farm workers were gunned down on two farms in Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco. An eighth person was seriously injured by a 60-year-old named Chunli Zhao. A former employee of one of the two farms, he was arrested by authorities with a semi-automatic handgun in his vehicle.
And on Saturday night, in Monterey Park near Los Angeles, the celebration of the Chinese New Year turned into carnage when a septuagenarian of Asian descent, Huu Can Tran, killed eleven people, mostly seniors, in a dance hall popular with an Asian clientele. He then attempted to attack another ballroom before committing suicide in his van, surrounded by police. Investigators were still busy Tuesday trying to determine the motives for those two attacks.
39 shootings in January
There have already been 39 mass shootings in January, according to statistics compiled by The Gun Violence archive, which defines them as gun attacks that result in at least 4 dead or injured, not including the shooter. Since 2020, for reasons that are still poorly understood, there has been a clear increase of almost 600 shootings per year, while between 2013 and 2019 the United States was between 250 and 400.
The FBI uses a much more restrictive definition of “active shooter” which, with the involvement of law enforcement, excludes most gang violence and many settlements. The FBI identified 61 in 2021, a 50% increase over 2020 (40), which already represented a 33% increase compared to 2017, 2018 and 2019 (about thirty).
