DALLAS, May 17 — Dallas police today said a suspect has been arrested in last week’s Koreatown hair salon shooting that wounded three women in an incident that echoed last year’s Atlanta-area shooting rampage that killed people of Asian descent.
The suspect, who was not identified, was being interviewed and processed, the Dallas Police Department said in a tweet early this morning.
Dallas Police Chief Edgardo Garcia will release more information on the arrest later today, the Tweet said.
The suspect entered a hair salon in the city’s Koreatown section on Wednesday, opened fire and wounded the owner of the Hair World salon, a stylist who worked there and a customer. All three were Korean women, according to reports by ABC affiliate WFAA. They were taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening wounds.
Police said they had no evidence that the shooting was a hate crime but stressed the investigation was in its early stages.
While authorities said they did not know the motive behind the incident, it recalled the shooting of eight people in Atlanta-area massage spas, six of whom were Asian or Asian-American women.
Those attacks heightened fears in Asian communities of violence inspired by anti-immigrant or anti-Asian sentiment, which has escalated in recent years, in part because of the perception that China was responsible for triggering the worldwide coronavirus pandemic.
Law enforcement circulated images from the scene that showed a person wearing black and carrying a large rifle while appearing to run out of a parking lot.
The Korean-American community in the Dallas area ranks among the largest in the United States, according to the Pew Research Centre, and Koreatown is the historic hub of the area’s Asian and Asian-American residents. — Reuters
