At least 10 people have been killed and 10 others injured in a mass shooting east of Los Angeles following a Lunar New Year celebration that attracted thousands, police said.
Police said the shooting, which took place late on Saturday, occurred at a ballroom dance club on Garvey Avenue in Monterey Park.
Captain Andrew Meyer of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said people were “pouring out of the location screaming” when officers arrived at the venue around 10:30 pm (06:30 GMT Sunday).
In a news conference hours after the attack, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said that five men and five women died at the scene. The injured were in conditions “ranging from stable to critical”.
Luna said the suspect was still at large and gave a preliminary description of the attacker as an “Asian male” between the ages of 30 and 50, but said investigators had so far received “different descriptions of one suspect” from survivors and witnesses.
“We don’t know if this is specifically a hate crime defined by law,” he added, “but who walks into a dance hall and guns down 20 people?”
Authorities said they were investigating another incident in the nearby city of Alhambra to see whether it was connected.
As a result of the shooting, the police said Lunar New Year festivities in Monterey Park for Sunday have been canceled.
A screenshot from a video shows emergency responders helping a person into an ambulance at the scene of the shooting in Monterey Park, California, the US [TNLA via Reuters]
Reporting from Monterey Park, journalist and videographer Sean Beckner-Carmitchel told Al Jazeera the details of the incident were still “fairly unclear”.
“We are waiting for the names [of those deceased] and the motive of the suspect,” he said. “A lot of the people who have gathered out here from the community are in shock.”
Monterey Park is a city of about 60,000 people with a large Asian population, located about 16km (10 miles) from downtown Los Angeles.
“Our hearts go out to those who lost loved ones tonight in our neighboring city, Monterey Park, where a mass shooting just occurred,” Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia said in a tweet.
Seung Won Choi, who owns the Clam House seafood barbecue restaurant across the street from where the shooting happened, told the Los Angles Times that three people rushed into his business and told him to lock the door.
The people also told Choi that there was a shooter with a machine gun who had multiple rounds of ammunition on him so he could reload.
Local resident Wong Wei told the newspaper that his friend had been at the dance club, and had been in the bathroom when the shooting erupted.
When she emerged, she saw a man carrying a long gun and firing indiscriminately, as well as the bodies of three people. The account could not immediately be verified.
Saturday was the start of the two-day festival, which is one of the largest Lunar New Year events in southern California.
The incident marks the fifth mass shooting in the United States this month and the deadliest since 21 people were killed in a school in Uvalde, Texas, according to the AP/USA Today database on mass killings in the US.
The latest violence comes two months after five people were killed at a Colorado Springs nightclub.
Mass shootings remain common in the US, which saw 647 shootings with four or more victims in 2022, according to the Gun Violence Archive website.
Investigators gather at the scene where a shooting took place in Monterey Park, California, the US [Jae C Hong/The Associated Press]
Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported last year that there had been 61 “active shooter” incidents in the US in 2021, up 52 percent from 2020 and the highest number on record.
The department defined an “active shooter” as someone engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a public space in a seemingly random fashion. About one in five “active shooter” incidents in 2021 were also mass killings.
Despite the high rate of gun violence, federal gun control has remained a political sticking point.
While the administration of President Joe Biden last year signed into law the most significant gun safety legislation in decades, gun control advocates said the gains in the legislation were relatively modest. They included strengthening background checks, funding laws to remove firearms from people considered to be a threat, and closing a loophole that allowed some people accused of domestic abuse to own guns.
Wider reforms, including higher age restrictions for gun purchases and a federal ban on assault weapons – the firearm of choice for many mass shooters – were not included in the package.
