What to Know About the Atlanta Massage Parlor Shootings

At least eight people were killed and another person was injured when a man opened fire Tuesday evening in three separate Atlanta-area massage businesses, in a northwestern suburb and in the northeastern part of the city. A suspect was arrested about 150 miles south of Atlanta within hours of the shootings.

Six of the victims were of Asian descent. The shootings put Asian communities across the United States on alert and prompted law enforcement officials to increase patrols.

The gunman told the police that he had a “sexual addiction,” and the authorities said that he might have targeted spas he had visited in the past. But investigators in Atlanta said Wednesday that they had not ruled out racial bias as a motivating factor.

Here is what we know about the shootings.

Around 5 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday, the first shooting was reported at Young’s Asian Massage near Acworth, a suburb northwest of Atlanta, said Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office. Four people died and a fifth person, a Hispanic man, was injured.

At 5:47 p.m., Atlanta police responded to a report of a robbery at Gold Spa in the northeastern part of the city. Authorities found the bodies of three women with gunshot wounds. While they were at the scene, officers received a report of shots fired at the Aromatherapy Spa across the street, where they found the body of another woman.

Around 6:30 p.m., the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office released surveillance images of the suspect, wearing a black and red shirt and driving a black SUV outside one of the massage parlors. Authorities urged people to call if they recognized the man or the vehicle.

About 90 minutes later, the sheriff’s office in Crisp County, Georgia, about 150 miles south of Atlanta, received information that the suspect was traveling south on Interstate 75. Georgia State Patrol and Crisp County deputies spotted a black 2007 Hyundai Tucson around mile marker 101, authorities said. A state trooper performed a maneuver, causing the SUV to spin out of control. The driver was arrested without incident.

The suspect, who is white, was identified as Robert Aaron Long, 21, of Woodstock, Georgia. His family helped to identify him after images from surveillance cameras at nearby businesses were posted on social media, law enforcement authorities said.

A 9 mm gun was found in his vehicle, authorities said.

Matt Kilgo, a lawyer for Big Woods Goods, a gun shop and shooting range in Canton, Georgia, said Long bought a gun legally from the shop Tuesday, before the shooting. Kilgo said that the store had not broken any laws and that it was cooperating with the authorities.

Long is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday, officials said. He was charged with a total of eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault, and was being held without bond, according to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office and the Atlanta Police Department.

The authorities said they did not believe that there was a racial motive for the shootings but had not ruled it out. Baker said that Long told law enforcement officials that he had a “sexual addiction” and that he saw the spas as a temptation “that he wanted to eliminate.”

Baker said that Long had told the police he was driving to Florida when he was caught, and that he said he may have been trying to commit similar violence at a business connected to the “porn industry” there.

Six of the people killed were women of Asian descent, and two were white, according to law enforcement officials. All but one were women. A Hispanic man was injured in the shooting at Young’s Asian Massage near Acworth. His condition was not released, but authorities said it was stable.

The authorities identified the victims of the shooting at Young’s Asian Massage as Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33, of Acworth; Paul Andre Michels, 54, of Atlanta; Xiaojie Tan, 49, of Kennesaw, Georgia; and Daoyou Feng, 44.

Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, of Acworth was injured.

On Wednesday, an official from the South Korean consulate in Atlanta, citing the Foreign Ministry in Seoul, confirmed that four of the eight people who were killed were ethnic Koreans. But the nationalities of the four women were not immediately known, the official said.

Georgia’s Asian American population has grown in recent decades. About 7.6% of residents in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, are of Asian descent, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

No matter what Long’s motive was, the Atlanta mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, said the city wanted to provide resources and protection to Asians in the aftermath of the shootings.

Police departments in at least two American cities — New York and Seattle — on Tuesday moved to increase patrols amid a rise in hate crimes targeting Asians.

Stop AAPI Hate, an organization that was formed to fight anti-Asian discrimination during the coronavirus pandemic, said on Twitter on Tuesday that there was a “great deal of fear and pain in the Asian American community” and that the shootings were an “unspeakable tragedy.”

Nearly 3,800 hate incidents targeting Asian Americans have been reported in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., since last March, the organization said in a new report earlier in the day.

The FBI is assisting the local authorities in the investigation.