Half Moon Bay, California residents are breathing a sigh of relief after a suspect was
apprehended hours after killing seven Chinese immigrants, marking the state’s
third mass killing in eight days, including an attack at a dance hall that killed 11
during Lunar New Year celebrations.
Officers arrested a suspect in Monday’s shootings, 67-year-old Chunli Zhao, after
they found him in his car in the parking lot of a sheriff’s substation, San Mateo
County Sheriff Christina Corpus said.
Four people were found dead and a fifth injured from gunshot wounds at a farm, and
officers found three other people killed at another location several miles away, the
Sheriff’s Office said. Officials believe Zhao is a worker at one of the facilities and that
the victims were workers as well, Corpus said. Corpus said officials hadn’t determined
a motive for the shooting.
The new year has brought a shocking string of mass killings in the U.S. — six in less
than three weeks, accounting for 39 deaths. Three have occurred in California since
Jan. 16, according to a database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and
Northeastern University. The database tracks every mass killing — defined as four
dead not including the offender — committed in the U.S. since 2006.
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The killings occurred on the outskirts of Half Moon Bay, a city about 30 miles (48
kilometers) south of San Francisco.
Half Moon Bay Vice Mayor Joaquin Jimenez said the victims included Chinese and
Latino farmworkers. Some workers at one facility lived on the premises and children
may have witnessed the shooting, she said. Corpus it wasn’t immediately clear how
the two locations were connected.
The Sheriff’s Office first received reports of a shooting just before 2:30 p.m. and
found four people dead from gunshot wounds and a fifth person injured at the first
scene. Shortly thereafter, officers found three more people dead from gunshot
wounds at a second location nearby, Capt. Eamonn Allen said in a news release.
About two hours after first responding, a sheriff’s deputy noticed the suspect, Zhao,
in his car parked outside a sheriff’s substation in a strip mall and arrested him,
recognizing the car by its license plate.
A video of the arrest showed three officers approaching a parked car with drawn
weapons. Zhao got out of the car, and the officers pulled him to the ground, put him
in handcuffs, and led him away. A weapon was found in his vehicle, officials said. The
video was captured by Kati McHugh, a Half Moon Bay resident who witnessed the
arrest.
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