Stopping a Mass Murderer

"Something came over me. I realized I needed to get the weapon away from him. I needed to take this weapon, disarm him or else somebody would have died."

"When I got the courage, I lunged at him with both my hands,l grabbed the weapon and we had a struggle."

Brandon Tsay, 26, Alhambra Dance Studio, Monterey Park, California 

 

"They came across a scene none of them have prepared for." 

"There were injured people inside and dead people inside. My young officers did their job."

"[What his officers found was a] scene of carnage [the first officers on scene responding were some of the youngest on the squad, only just finished their training a few months earlier]."

Police Chief Scott Wiese  

"[An alert should have gone out right away, and a half hour between the two incidents was more than enough time to do so]."

"What took so long? [Five hours before alerting the public.] Maybe they were still doing their investigation. Maybe they didn’t have a good handle on what they had."

"But if they didn’t know, they should have erred on the side of caution and put this out."

 Brian Higgins, adjunct professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, former SWAT team commander and police chief in Bergen County, New Jersey

Photos of the suspect were issued by police during the manhunt  Reuters

Thirty minutes after an elderly gunman had sprayed automatic riflefire inside the Star Ballroom Dance Club where a Lunar New Year's gathering was celebrating, leaving ten celebrants dead and another ten wounded, some seriously, he entered another  club where he obviously meant to repeat the carnage, before he was challenged by a young man whose grandparents had founded the ballroom. 

Once the gun was in Brandon Tsay's hands he aimed it at the elderly intruder shouting "Get the hell out of here, I'll shoot, get away, go!". As soon as the killer, Hu Can Tran, 72, left and returned to his van, the police were called. A frantic search for the gunmen proceeded. An alert went out identifying the shooter, after a lapse of five hours, with photographs posted. It took twelve hours before a SWAT team cautiously surrounded a white parked van. 

 

As they approached the parked vehicle, 30 miles from the shooting scene, they heard a shot. It was the suspect, turning his handgun on himself to be found slumped dead, over the wheel of the vehicle. The manhunt was over. The dance studios were very popular in this majority Asian community. Saturday nights saw people converge on the ballrooms whose clients thought of it as a comforting social circle.

The 72-year-old had in fact been a dance instructor at the Star Ballroom Dance Club where he taught "almost very night" until the early 2010s. It was where he met his wife. They divorced in 2005. Police believe that he entered the first ballroom searching for his ex-wife. The affair had been by invitation and he had not been invited. It appears that he was known to be a man with a short temper and he was fairly unpopular. On his part, he believed that 'evil people' were out to get him.

Not all the dead in the shooting have been identified. It is not known whether the man's ex-wife was among the dead."This hate is because of wife and husband. I believe because of that there was the killing of innocent people", said Chester Chong, a community leader in Monterey Park, a city of about 60,000 people to the east edge of Los Angeles. The population is comprised of majority Asian immigrants from China or first-generation Asian Americans.

The death toll rose to eleven on Monday when another victim died in hospital.Most of the dead and injured were in their 50s and 60s. They were in very fact, a social community. This will be accounted the 33rd mass shooting in the United States in the past 23 days.

The second venue where Brandon Tsay tackled the gunman  Getty Images