Robert Aaron Long

On March 16, 2021, a shooting spree occurred at two spas and a massage parlor in the metropolitan area of Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Eight people were killed and a ninth was wounded. The suspect, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, was taken into custody later that day. Long pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Long told police he was motivated by a sexual addiction that was at odds with his Christianity, for which he had spent time in an evangelical treatment clinic, and that he had been targeting establishments where he had previously paid for sex. While six of the eight people killed were women of Asian descent, Long denied that race had played any role in the killings, which was questioned by numerous organizations such as the CAPAC, CAA and NAPAWF, U.S. politicians Marilyn Strickland and Bee Nguyen, as well as by the South Korean media and the victims' families.

Long was charged with 19 crimes in Fulton County and 23 crimes in Cherokee County. He pleaded guilty to the Cherokee County charges and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The shooting was one of the main incidents that gave rise to the Stop Asian Hate movement, against the backdrop of rising anti-Asian sentiment in the country.

Events

Before the shootings

On the morning of the day of the shooting, the suspect, Robert Aaron Long, was overheard by his roommate as he watched pornography in his room. Long said in court that he felt ashamed and went to purchase a firearm in order to commit suicide.

Shootings

Cherokee County shooting

At approximately 2 p.m., Long legally purchased a 9mm handgun and a box of 50 bullets at a firearms store in Holly Springs. He also purchased a bottle of bourbon at a liquor store which he drank while driving to Young's Asian Massage. Surveillance footage showed him arriving at Young's Asian Massage, a massage parlor near Acworth, and sitting for an hour in the parking lot. While in the parking lot, he loaded the gun. He then entered the building at about 3:38p.m. EDT and remained inside for a period of one hour and 12 minutes. When he was inside the building, Long paid for a service. The service ended around 4:45 p.m. and Long went to the restroom in the back of the building. Another customer who went to Young's that day said in an interview that everything was still normal inside when he arrived at around 4:40p.m.

When Long finished using the bathroom, he walked out, pulled out his 9mm handgun, and aimed it at Paul Andre Michels. Michels was in the back of the building using his cellphone while leaning over a counter. Long fatally shot him once in the head. Long began walking towards the front of the business in the main hallway. His next victim, Daoyou Feng, was in room 3. Feng poked her head out of the room and Long shot her once in the head. Long entered room 4 and shot Xiaojie Tan once in the head. Long then walked into room 2 and injured a man. Long entered room 6 and fatally shot customer Delaina Ashley Yaun González once in the torso while she was hiding in the corner of the room. Her husband was receiving a service in another room. Only six people in the building were left uninjured.

Long left Young's at 4:50p.m. Shots were fired at some point after. A customer who survived a gunshot wound said the gunman walked into Young's and began firing. The customer threw himself to the floor and begged the gunman not to shoot him. The gunman demanded him to look up at him, and when the customer complied, he was shot in the face.

The first 9-1-1 calls reporting the shooting to the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office were made at 4:54p.m. Police arrived within minutes of Long leaving. There, they found two people fatally shot and three others wounded in different rooms down a hallway; two of the wounded later died at a hospital. Police found a male customer, whose wife and fellow customer were fatally shot, sitting on a bed in another room, scared and confused, and detained him for four hours.

Piedmont Road shootings

At 5:47p.m.EDT, the APD responded to reports of a robbery at Gold Massage Spa on Piedmont Road in northeast Atlanta, about from the first shooting scene. There, they found three women dead from gunshot wounds. While Atlanta police were at Gold Spa, they received reports of another shooting across the street at Aromatherapy Spa, where they discovered another woman shot and killed. Three of the four victims had been shot in the head.

Two Gold Massage Spa employees who survived the shooting reported hearing ticking sounds while in a break room, which turned out to be gunfire. They hid in a lounge, using items to take cover, and were shot at but not injured. According to them, the gunman did not speak or make any other sounds during the shooting, and he locked both the front and back doors of the spa at some point. According to a report from national Korean newspaper ''The Chosun Ilbo'', a nearby Korean restaurant told how an unidentified Gold Massage Spa employee who escaped there from the store during the shooting stated that the shooter said, "I'm going to kill all Asians," although in a later Rolling Stone interview a taxi driver who had talked to a local business manager stated it was a police officer who had told the manager this. According to an eyewitness, the attacker shot the worker who opened the door of Aromatherapy Spa for him and fled without entering the interior. The prosecutor believed the suspect's gun malfunctioned after shooting the employee at Aromatherapy Spa which prevented additional deaths.

According to the APD, they noticed the similarities between the Piedmont Road and Cherokee County shootings and subsequently dispatched officers to patrol similar businesses in the area. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was called in to assist in the investigation.

Arrest

After the first shooting, Cherokee County police released surveillance footage to the public and were contacted by Long's parents, who recognized him. While they were being interviewed, the APD was responding to the second and third shootings in Atlanta. His parents informed deputies that Long's Hyundai Tucson was equipped with a tracking device. Using surveillance footage of his vehicle at both crime scenes along with the car's tracker, police were able to ascertain his location.

At around 8:30p.m., roughly 3.5 hours after the shootings, Long was spotted by police in Crisp County, about south of Atlanta. Georgia State Patrol officers followed him south on Interstate 75 until a location just south of Cordele, where they used a PIT maneuver to stop his vehicle and took him into custody. Long was on his way to Florida when he was apprehended.

Long was initially arrested in connection to the Cherokee County shooting; police later identified him as a suspect in the Piedmont Road shootings as well. Police found a 9mm handgun in his car.

Victims

The shooter killed seven women and one man. One man was wounded. Six died at the scene, one en route to a hospital, and one in treatment. Six victims, four at Piedmont Road and two at Cherokee County, were women of Asian descent. The others were a white woman and a white man, and the survivor is a Hispanic man from Guatemala. The South Korean Foreign Affairs Ministry reported that four of the dead were of Korean ethnicity, and one was a South Korean citizen.

Police released the names of the eight deceased victims on March 19. The victims at Young's Asian Massage were Delaina Ashley Yaun González, 33; Xiaojie Tan ( zh, first=s, s=谭晓洁, p=Tán Xiǎojié), 49; Daoyou Feng ( zh, first=s, s=冯道有, p=Féng Dàoyǒu), 44; and Paul Andre Michels, 54. The victims at the Gold Spa were Hyun Jung Grant (), 51; Suncha Kim (), 69; and Soon Chung Park (), 74. The victim at Aromatherapy Spa was Yong Ae Yue (), 63.

Perpetrator

The suspect was identified as 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, of Woodstock. He was born on April 6, 1999, in Woodstock, Georgia, and was raised in a conservative community. He graduated from Sequoyah High School in the spring of 2017. From fall 2017 to fall 2018, Long was enrolled at the Cumming campus of the University of North Georgia, but he did not earn a degree. Long was a hunter and was heavily involved in his Southern Baptist congregation. Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said Long did not have any prior interactions with law enforcement.

Long spent time in HopeQuest, an evangelical treatment facility located near Acworth and down the road from the first spa that he attacked. He was a patient at the treatment center for what he described as "sex addiction". He claimed to be "tortured" by his addiction to sex since he was "deeply religious", according to his halfway house roommate. His roommate also said that, several times during his stay at the halfway house, Long said that he had "relapsed" and gone to massage parlors to visit sex workers. His parents had kicked him out of their house the night before the shooting due to concerns about his sex addiction, and said he watched internet pornography several hours each day. A report to police said that he was "emotional" after being evicted from his parents' house.

Motive

According to the police, Long described his actions as being the result of a sex addiction that conflicted with his religious beliefs. Long had been a customer at two of the massage parlors, and saw them as sources of sexual temptation. Police records show that two of the massage parlors had been the site of 10 prostitution arrests, the latest of which took place in 2013. All three targeted spas appeared on an online guide to brothels. Long claims to have initially thought about killing himself but instead decided to target the businesses to "help" others dealing with sex addiction. According to the Cherokee County Sheriff's Department, Long wanted to "eliminate the temptation" by targeting spas.

He had been an active member of Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Georgia. The church took down its Facebook site, which included photos that included Long, after the shooting.

Ruth Graham, a national religion correspondent of ''The New York Times'', wrote that Long "seemed to have a fixation on sexual temptation, one that can lead to despair among people who believe they are failing to follow the ideal of refraining from sex and even lust outside heterosexual marriage."
According to Samuel Perry, a professor of sociology and author of three books on the modern evangelical church, the church's confusing sex rhetoric can lead to desperation over perceived sex addiction and a belief that one must take extreme measures to stop it.

The American Psychological Association does not have sex addiction as a diagnosis in the DSM-5. The World Health Organization includes "excessive sexual drive" as a diagnosis (code F52.7) in the latest version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), but as a compulsive behavior or impulse control disorder rather than an addiction. Psychologist David J. Ley and neuroscientist Nicole Prause noted significant differences between sex addiction and other types of addiction. Psychotherapist Robert Weiss, who diagnoses people with sexual addiction, expressed doubt in the diagnosis for Long because sex addicts are typically nonviolent.

Some noted the ethnicity of six of the victims, who were Asian women, amidst an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, or characterized the shooting as a hate crime. While some experts have claimed that race cannot be ruled out as a motive because of the fetishization of Asian women in the U.S., others have pointed out that the perpetrator was instead targeting sex workers at establishments he had frequented in the past, and Long later stated that his actions were not racially motivated. However, according to a report from national Korean newspaper ''The Chosun Ilbo'', a nearby Korean restaurant told how an unidentified Gold Massage Spa employee who escaped there from the store during the shooting stated that the shooter said, "I'm going to kill all Asians."

Legal proceedings

On March 17, Long was charged with eight counts of murder, split evenly between the shooting in Cherokee County and the shootings in Atlanta, and one count of aggravated assault in Cherokee County. He confessed to the killings while in custody. On May 11, Long received a 19-count indictment by a Fulton County grand jury on charges including murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, and domestic terrorism. During the press conference, district attorney Fani Willis shared her plans to seek death penalty and hate crime enhancements if he is convicted of murder. Later that day, he received a 23-count indictment on charges of malice murder, felony murder, attempt to commit murder, and aggravated assault from a grand jury in Cherokee County, Georgia.

On July 27, Long pleaded guilty to the Cherokee County charges and was sentenced to life without parole. Cherokee County District Attorney Shannon Wallace said that investigators had found no evidence of racial bias in the shootings. On August 30, state prosecutors announced Willis had filed court papers seeking the death penalty against Long for the Fulton County charges and designating the Piedmont Road shootings as a hate crime based on race and gender. On September 28, Long pleaded not guilty to the Fulton County charges.

Reactions

Government

On March 18, President Joe Biden ordered all U.S. flags at the White House, on other federal grounds, at military installations, on naval vessels, and at U.S. diplomatic missions to be flown at half-mast until sunset on March 22 to respect the victims of the shooting. He and Vice President Kamala Harris subsequently met with local Asian American community leaders on March 19 to discuss the shootings. After the meeting, he gave a speech condemning rising hate crimes against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic and declared his support for the proposed COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which he claimed would facilitate tackling anti-Asian hate crimes.

South Korean foreign minister Chung Eui-yong and national defense minister Suh Wook held a joint press conference in Seoul on March 19 with their U.S. counterparts Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and the South Korean foreign ministry released a statement the following day addressing the shooting and the United States government's anti-hate crime efforts.

On April 14, following the shootings and the overall rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, the U.S. Senate voted 92–6 to advance the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which would allow the U.S. Justice Department to review hate crimes related to COVID-19 and establish an online database. On April 22, the Senate voted 94–1 to pass the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act with bipartisan changes; Josh Hawley of Missouri was the only senator to vote in opposition. It then passed the U.S. House of Representatives by a 364–62 vote on May 18 and was signed into law by Biden on May 20.

Anti-Asian sentiment

Sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen characterized the event as "part of a nationwide pattern of Asian omenbeing disproportionately targeted in hate incidents", stating that the events took place in the context of an "intersection of racism and sexism" against Asian women, citing the Page Act of 1875, and the portrayal of Asian women as prostitutes in media such as the movie ''Full Metal Jacket'' and the stage play ''Miss Saigon'' as examples.

According to Stop Asian Hate, nearly 11,000 attacks against the Asian American community were reported just on the mere span from March 2020 to December 2021. The FBI has also discovered an upsurge in anti-Asian hate crimes since 2019.

Georgia House of Representatives member Sam Park

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