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Atlanta Massage Parlors Targeted in Shootings Were Legal Businesses: Mayor
Posted
March 17, 2021
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1:11Now PlayingAtlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said Wednesday the spas targeted in yesterday's shootings "are legally operating businesses” that have not been “on the radar” of the Atlanta Police Department.
"We are not about to get into victim blaming, victim shaming here," she said.
The man accused of killing eight people at massage parlors in the Atlanta area told police his act was not racially motivated, and that he potentially had a “sex addiction,” officials said Wednesday.
Still, officials said they were investigating whether the deaths were hate crimes amid concerns over a wave of attacks on Asian Americans. Six of the victims were Asian and seven were women.
Officials did not say that Robert Aaron Long, 21, ever went to the parlors where the shootings occurred. They also said he was planning to go to Florida in a plot to attack “some type of porn industry.”
“He made indicators that he has some issues, potentially sexual addiction, and may have frequented some of these places in the past,” said Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds.
He said it was too early to tell if it was racially motivated. “But the indicators right now are it may not be. It may be targets of opportunity. Again, we believe that he frequented these places in the past and maybe have been lashing out.”
Many suspects who commit mass shootings have a history of violence against women. Still, the attack haunted members of the Asian American community who saw the shootings as an attack on them, given a recent wave of assaults that coincided with the spread of the coronavirus across the United States. The virus was first identified in China, and then-President Donald Trump and others have used racially charged terms like “Chinese virus” to describe it.
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