Three shootings and 21 dead in four days. A man killed three people in Washington state Tuesday before committing suicide, police said. California was mourned by two shootings that killed 11 and 7 people within 48 hours, and which particularly affected the Asian community, where most of the victims came from.
This new murder took place around 3:30 a.m. Tuesday at and inside a grocery store at a gas station in Yakima, a city of 97,000 people a two-hour drive from Seattle. 21-year-old suspect Jarid Haddock had no particular reason to attack his victims, according to police. “There was no apparent conflict between the people. The man just walked in and started shooting,” Yakima Police Chief Matthew Murray said 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 the suspect was “armed and dangerous.” Then the police received a call from a woman stating that the person they were looking for 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 gunfire. They tried unsuccessfully to revive him.
The surviving Asian community in California
On Monday, seven farm workers were shot dead at two farms in Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco. An eighth person was seriously injured by a man in his 60s named Chunli Zhao. A former employee of one of the two farms, he was arrested by authorities with a semi-automatic pistol in his vehicle.
And on Saturday night, Chinese New Year celebrations in Monterey Park, near Los Angeles, turned into carnage when a seventy-something Asian man, Huu Can Tran, killed 11 people, mostly elderly, from an Asian clientele at a popular dance hall. He then attempted to attack a second ballroom before committing suicide in his van surrounded by police. Investigators were still trying to determine the motives behind the two attacks as of Tuesday.
39 shootings in January
There have already been 39 mass shootings in January, according to statistics from The Gun Violence archive, which defines them as gun attacks with at least 4 dead or injured, not counting the gunman. Since 2020, for reasons that are still poorly understood, there has been a significant increase, with nearly 600 shootings per year, while the United States was between 250 and 400 between 2013 and 2019.
Access to this content has been blocked to respect your choice of consent
I SUPPOSE
More information on the Cookie Management Policy page.
The FBI uses a much more restrictive definition of “active shooting” which, when including law enforcement, excludes most gang violence and many billings. The FBI identified 61 in 2021, a 50% increase compared to 2020 (40), which is already a 33% increase compared to 2017, 2018 and 2019 (about thirty).