“I just want to hold her tight,” Webb told CNN of her mother. “Give her a hug … hold her hand, give her a long hug.”
Tan’s ex-husband, Michael Webb, says he just wants justice.
“I think what makes a difference to us … is that justice is done,” he said. ‘This was a massacre. We have a legal system and he will have to be held accountable. And our family will be involved in that process as much as possible. ‘
“We just want justice to be done and we hope it will.”
“The recognition that this was a crime based on hatred of a particular community matters and I think it’s important for prosecutors and police to consider that when making those charges,” said Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. , Saturday against CNN.
Meetings across the country
Hundreds of protesters gathered at a rally in Atlanta on Saturday. A Florida resident who drove eight hours to attend told CNN that the violence was “coming home.”
“I see my mother, I see my acquaintances, my colleagues,” said Timothy Phan. “This is an Asian issue, but more than that, this is a human issue.”
“One of the biggest problems in fighting hate crimes is that too many of the incidents go unrecorded,” said California Assembly member Al Muratsuchi, who introduced bill to create a statewide hate crime hotline. . “We want to make it as easy and safe as possible for people to report these hate crime incidents.”
“The women who died, they looked exactly like me, they look like my mother, they look like my aunts,” Yuh-Line Niou, a member of the State Assembly of New York said Saturday at a meeting in Manhattan. “They look like us.”
These are the victims of violence
The victims include 49-year-old Tan of Kennesaw; Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33, from Acworth; Paul Andre Michels, 54, from Atlanta; and Daoyou Feng, 44, who were fatally shot at Young’s Asian Massage. Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, of Acworth, was also shot at Young’s Asian Massage, but survived.
Within an hour of the initial shooting, four Asian women were killed in Atlanta – three at the Gold Massage Spa and one at the Aroma Therapy Spa across the street, authorities said. They were: Soon Chung Park, 74; Hyun Jung Grant, 51; Suncha Kim, 69; and Yong Ae Yue, 63, according to the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office.
According to Kwangsuk Lee, South Korea’s deputy consulate general in Atlanta, one of the four victims in Atlanta was a South Korean citizen and a permanent resident of the US. The other three would be Americans of Korean ethnicity, Lee told CNN on Friday.
Charlie Yoon Kim, president of the Korean American Association of Greater Atlanta, told CNN that he received calls from two families of victims who shared their financial problems after the sudden tragedy and “asked us if we could help them.”
“They were concerned about rents and energy costs and other practical costs, including the funeral process,” Kim said.
The association now plans to raise money to support the families of the victims, Kim added.
“All Asian groups and associations are willing to participate in raising support for the people affected by this incident, so I hope we can find some practical help for them,” Kim told CNN.
Sadness and deprivation have been left behind
“To be honest, I don’t have time to grieve for long,” her son, Randy Park, wrote on the page. “I will have to find out the living situation for my brother and me in the coming months, possibly a year. From now on I have been advised to leave my current home at the end of March to save money and a new place to live.”
“My grandmother was an angel, it is excruciating to have her taken away in such a horrible way. As an immigrant my grandmother just wanted to grow old with my grandfather and her children and grandchildren the life she never lived,” says the page.
“We are still in shock at the violent murder of our mother, but our grief makes us plan to remember her, bring our family together and solve her financial problems,” he wrote.
Hernandez-Ortiz was shot in the forehead and the bullet traveled to his lungs and into his stomach, his wife, Flora Gonzalez Gomez wrote on the page, adding that he is now in the hospital intensive care unit.
Suspect charged with murder
The suspect, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, was arrested Tuesday evening at a traffic stop 150 miles south of Atlanta.
He told police he believed he had a sex addiction and that he saw the spas as “a temptation … that he wanted to eliminate,” said Jay Baker, Cherokee County Sheriff’s captain.
He claimed the attacks were not racially motivated, Baker added. But Atlanta police say it is too early to know the suspect’s motive.
Cherokee County District Attorney Shannon Wallace said the investigation is ongoing and appropriate charges will be filed.
Long is being held with no chance of bail in Cherokee County, where he faces four malicious murders, one with attempted murder, one with aggravated assault, and five with the use of a firearm in committing a crime.
According to Atlanta police, he has been charged with four murders in connection with the two shootings at the Atlanta spas.
CNN’s Paul Vercammen, Jason Hanna, Madeline Holcombe and Yoonjung Seo contributed to this report.