What to know about the shootings in Half Moon Bay. (2023)

Pinned

What to know about the shootings in Half Moon Bay.

Here is the latest:

• A suspect, Zhao Chunli, 67, of Half Moon Bay, was found in his car in the parking lot of a sheriff’s office substation in Half Moon Bay, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office said.

• Sheriff Christina Corpus said at a news conference on Monday night that the suspect had been taken into custody “without incident,” and that a semi-automatic handgun had been found in his vehicle. The authorities said that he was “fully cooperating,” and that they believe he acted alone.

• Sheriff Corpus said that the suspect was believed to be a worker at an agricultural nursery, one of the two shooting sites.

• Farmworkers and several children were present when the shootings took place, the sheriff said, adding that it was “unspeakable” that the children witnessed the violence.

• “There is no current outstanding threat to the community,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement, which also said that no motive was known.

• A family reunification center was set up at the IDES Hall, run by a historic religious society, in Half Moon Bay.

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

Half Moon Bay is a small seaside town in flux.

Thanks to the railroad, it grew and became a hot spot during Prohibition, when the region’s famous fog helped runners bring in illegal liquor in the 1920s. A few years later, the town was used by the U.S. Army as a radar site to monitor enemy aircraft approaching the California coast.

It was incorporated as a city in California only in 1959, and today about 12,000 people fit neatly into its 6.25 square miles. The legacy of agriculture and fishing remain. The region’s rich soil and temperate climate lend themselves to the cultivation of decorative flowers and vegetables.

Half Moon Bay is best known for a pumpkin festival that can draw hundreds of thousands of people.

Tourism is a main source of income, with the Ritz-Carlton hotel the biggest employer. Surfing at Half Moon Bay’s four-mile-long stretch of beaches is one of the biggest draws.

At the same time, the city is in flux. As in much of California, real estate prices have soared in the past decade, making some of the city unaffordable to those who have lived there for generations. Meanwhile, the pandemic hit the city hard, as tourism money dried up.

All of them had been victims of the shooting or had been displaced from their homes because of the investigation, said Captain Eamonn Allen of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office.

California grapples with a mounting toll of gun violence.

Officials at the San Mateo County Sheriff’s office said the suspect, Zhao Chunli, was an employee at one of the locations and called the shooting an incident of “workplace violence.”

In Southern California, investigators continued their search for a motive in the massacre on Saturday night at a ballroom dancing venue in Monterey Park, a Los Angeles suburb, where 11 people were killed and nine more were wounded. The suspected gunman — Huu Can Tran, 72, a former volunteer dance instructor who the authorities said may have been driven by personal grievances — killed himself on Sunday.

The cases, which bracketed celebration of the Lunar New Year, claimed the lives largely of immigrant victims: Asian Americans in their 50s, 60s and 70s at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio, and Asian and Latino agricultural workers around Half Moon Bay. The suspects were immigrant Asian men in their 60s and 70s — a rare age bracket for assailants in mass shootings.

Those tragedies were only two in a series of shootings this month in a state that, overall, has some of the nation’s lowest mortality rates from gun violence, as well as some of its toughest gun laws.

Eight days ago, in an attack that the authorities compared to a drug cartel-style execution, six people were shot dead in rural Tulare County in Central California, including a 16-year-old girl and her 10-month-old baby. On Monday night, one person was killed and seven people were wounded in a gun battle in Oakland.

In San Mateo County, where details about the Half Moon Bay shooting were still emerging, Assemblyman Marc Berman said the coastal city, which he represents in the legislature, usually feels far from San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

“Half Moon Bay is as close to small-town America as we get in the Bay Area,” he said, adding, “When you get here, you feel like you’re a million miles away from all those problems. Yesterday, all those problems came crashing down.”

Officials said on Tuesday that the suspect in that case worked with some of the victims, and had legally purchased the semiautomatic handgun he used in the shooting. They released few other details.

Half Moon Bay is mostly known for surfing and for an annual pumpkin festival. “Cases like this — we’ve never had one in this county,” said Steve Wagstaffe, the San Mateo District Attorney, “of this many deaths at one scene or one time.”

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

The suspects’ ages stand out among mass shooters.

Mass shooters tend to “target locations that are representative of the grievances that they have,” says James Densley, the co-founder of the Violence Project and a professor of the School of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice at Metro State University in Minnesota. He added that mass shooters in school settings are often students. The Uvalde and Sandy Hook shootings were carried out by former students of the respective schools.

Monterey Park is a predominantly Asian and Asian American community. Several of the victims in Saturday’s shootings were in their 50s and 60s. The victims of Monday’s shooting have not yet been identified.

While the average age of a mass shooter is in the early 30s, there are clusters who carry out shooting sprees while in their 20s and 40s, a reflection of how these attackers may be in “transitional times” in which “you feel like you don’t fit in, and violence follows,” said Professor Densley. He called the gunman in Monterey Park an “outlier” in terms of his age.

The overwhelming majority of mass shooters in the Violence Project report were men. This likely reflects the social pressure on males to “be stronger, tougher and have the final word, with that final word sometimes being violence,” said Vickie Jensen, a professor in the Department of Criminology and Justice Studies at California State University, Northridge.

Social media has been cited as a factor in recent shootings by young men, including the attacks in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, reflecting “a problem that intersects with the distribution and the reinforcement of the rigid and hegemonic idea of toxic masculinity,” Professor Jensen said. This was not an issue several decades ago.

There have been a few mass shootings in the United States in which the shooter was over 60 years old.

In one of the largest, the 2017 shooting in Las Vegas that left 58 dead, the shooter, Stephen Paddock, was 64. A former postal worker and tax auditor, Mr. Paddock’s mental and physical health had been deteriorating in the months leading up to the shooting.

The list of U.S. mass shootings continues to grow.

A suspect is in custody and is cooperating with investigators, according to the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office

There is no consensus on what constitutes a mass shooting, complicating the efforts of government, nonprofits and news organizations to document the scope of the problem. The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group, defines a mass shooting as involving at least four people killed or injured.

By that measure, there have been at least 38 mass shootings so far in 2023, according to the group. It counted 648 mass shootings last year, 21 of which involved five or more fatalities.

Here is a partial list of recent mass shootings in the United States:

Jan. 21: Monterey Park, Calif.

At least 11 people were killed in Monterey Park, a small community east of Los Angeles, when a gunman opened fire at a ballroom frequented by Chinese American dancers. It was the deadliest mass shooting in the United States since the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, last May, when 19 children and two teachers were killed.

Jan. 16: Goshen, Calif.

Gunmen killed six people, including a 16-year-old and her 10-month-old child, in a shooting that the police said was probably gang-related.

Nov. 22: Chesapeake, Va.

A Walmart employee opened fire in a break room as the store was preparing to close for the night, killing six people, the authorities said. The gunman was found dead, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to the police.

Nov. 20: Colorado Springs

Five people were killed and 17 wounded by gunfire in a shooting at an L.G.B.T.Q. nightclub. The gunman was hurt and taken to a hospital.

Nov. 13: Charlottesville, Va.

Three University of Virginia students, all members of the football team, were killed and two were wounded when a gunman, a former player, opened fire in a garage after a field trip to see a play in Washington.

Oct. 13: Raleigh, N.C.

A gunman, described by the authorities only as a “white male juvenile,” killed five people, including an off-duty police officer, and wounded two others. The attacks drew a large response from law enforcement agencies to the residential area near the Neuse River Greenway, a popular bike trail for Raleigh residents.

Sept. 7: Memphis, Tenn.

Memphis was effectively closed down during an hourslong manhunt for a 19-year-old gunman who killed four people while streaming some of the violence on Facebook Live. The violence involved several shootings and carjackings over the course of the day.

July 4: Highland Park, Ill.

Seven people were killed and dozens more wounded when a gunman opened fire from the roof of a building in Highland Park, a suburb north of Chicago, during a Fourth of July parade. A 21-year-old was taken into custody several hours later.