Suspect frequented spas where he killed, police say, but motive still under investigation

Days after they were gunned down at the Atlanta-area massage spas where they worked, the names of four victims of Korean descent remained unknown and details about an ethnic Chinese victim were scarce, leaving their lives and their stigmatized industry wreathed in mystery.

All told, eight people died in the shootings Tuesday at three spas in Atlanta and neighboring Cherokee County. But while the four who died in Cherokee County have been identified, Atlanta authorities said Thursday they were still unable to release the names of the four women, all Korean, killed at Gold Spa and Aromatherapy Spa in the city’s Piedmont Heights neighborhood.

All four victims were older, with two in their 70s, one in her 60s and another in her 50s, according to members of the local Korean American community and workers at nearby businesses. Three worked at Gold Spa and the fourth at the Aromatherapy Spa across the street.

President Biden has refocused his trip to Georgia on Friday so he can meet with Asian American leaders about violence against their community. He has ordered flags flown at half-staff after the shooting that killed six Atlanta-area women of Asian descent. His administration is backing a bill that allows the Justice Department to review coronavirus-related hate crimes.

And White House officials have spent two days working the phones, reaching out to leaders and advocates in the Asian American and Pacific Islander community and reaffirming their commitment to fighting anti-Asian hatred.

“What I’m conveying to them is, we want you to be a part of the solution,” White House senior adviser Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.) said in an interview. “You all have been in the community running these programs. We want your expertise, we want your input into how we get past this. But it’s also been an intensive two days of making sure that we’re listening.”

It’s inevitable that reporters will have to rely heavily on law enforcement sources in the first hours after a horrific crime. Amid chaos and wild speculation, the police may be the only ones with any hard information at that point.

But sometimes their information is flawed. And sometimes the way they tell it reflects a damaging bias.

And so it was on Wednesday when Jay Baker, a captain with the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, described the motivations of the man accused of killing eight people, six of them Asian women, at spas in the Atlanta area.

Thursday would have been Xiaojie Tan’s 50th birthday.

Instead, Tan, of Kennesaw, Ga., was remembered by her friends who left flowers at her business, Young’s Asian Massage, the scene of a shooting that killed her and three others at the Cherokee County spa.

Tan, or Emily as she was known by friends, was dedicated to her job and her daughter, a recent graduate from the University of Georgia, said friend and customer Greg Hynson, 54.

Hynson said they met six years ago and became friends. Tan, whose family is from China, sometimes hosted Lunar New Year and Fourth of July parties with food and fireworks at her spa, Hynson said.

“She was a very good friend, a kind, sweet person,” Hynson said.

Hynson said Tan’s business was unfairly stigmatized by some who associated her store with sex work.

“She was absolutely professional,” he said. “She cared about her job, she cared about her customers, she cared about her friends and family.”

After he heard about the shooting, Hynson rushed to the scene, shocked to see police cars.

“I can’t wrap my mind around it,” he said. “The kindest, sweetest people, gone. For what?”

Delaina Yaun had Tuesday afternoon off, so she and her husband decided to treat themselves. They booked couples massages at Young’s Asian Massage, a storefront spa in Cherokee County, and went in for a relaxing rub.

They were in separate rooms when the gunman entered the business and started shooting, according to DeLayne Davis, a relative.

Yaun was killed. Her husband escaped.

“They were just taking an afternoon together,” Davis said. “It was the first time they’d ever been to that place.”

The past year had been momentous for Yaun, 33. Over the summer, she gave birth to her second child, a daughter. Shortly after, she and her husband, Mario Gonzalez, were wed in a small ceremony in Ringgold, Ga.

“Her dreams were finally coming true. Things were falling into place with her,” said Lisa Marie, Yaun’s longtime friend. “It was good to see her happiness.”

Friends and relatives said Yaun put her family above all else. When a divorce upended her sister’s family a couple years ago, Yaun took in two of her sister’s preteen children to live in her home.

She was close with her mother, who lived with her as well. Marie remembered getting misty-eyed seeing the two of them dance to Boyz II Men at her wedding.

“They were inseparable,” she said.

Yaun was also a doting mother to her 13-year-old boy, cheering him on at his track meets, and she liked to organize trips to Six Flags with her children, friends’ kids, and her nieces and nephews.

“She threw all the best parties for the kids. Nobody would get left out,” Davis said. “She opened her home to everybody.”

When she wasn’t with family, Yaun worked hard, covering the third shift at a local Waffle House to support her family. She’d been a server at the restaurant chain since 2013 and was recently cross-trained as a grill operator, Waffle House said in a statement.

Her Facebook page was sprinkled with pictures of her wedding and her children, along with loving messages from her husband.

“It’s you who occupies all of my heart,” he wrote in one of their last exchanges.

“Thank you, my love,” she replied. “You and me."

Tuesday’s deadly mass shooting in the Atlanta area that left eight people dead, including six Asian women, was the “peak of everything that we have feared actually coming to fruition,” said Bianca Jyotishi, a Georgia organizer for the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, an advocacy group that focuses on racial and gender justice.

“Our safe spaces just really have been violated.”

The Atlanta attack on three Asian spas rattled Asians and Asian Americans across the country, many of whom had already been fearful of increased attacks on their community.

By the time he was captured, Robert Aaron Long was the subject of nationwide horror about the murder of eight people — six of them Asian women. Many Americans were already on edge before Tuesday’s news; the country remained in the throes of social upheaval resulting from police killings of Black Americans and attacks on Asian Americans that surged after President Donald Trump took to calling the coronavirus the “China virus” or “kung flu.”

Tuesday’s attacks instantly unleashed a gut-wrenching collective anxiety — was this another outburst of racial hatred?

Long’s journey from membership in a religious social club at his suburban high school to a murderous rampage, ostensibly driven by his addiction to sex, remains fuzzy. What is already clear is that this latest in a seemingly never-ending series of mass shootings hit the country where it hurt most — in its anguished struggles over race, sex and the allure of gun violence.

The sheriff’s captain who said Long was having a “bad day” when he allegedly fatally shot eight people on Tuesday will no longer be a spokesman on the case, a sheriff’s official said Thursday.

At a news conference the day after the Atlanta-area shootings, Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Jay Baker described the 21-year-old suspect as “pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did.”

The comments triggered a backlash and resignation calls that only intensified as people found past social media posts by Baker promoting a shirt that called covid-19 an “IMPORTED VIRUS FROM CHY-NA.”

Andrea DeCourcey, an executive assistant for the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, said Thursday that Baker will no longer provide public updates on the shootings but that she did not know why or how the decision was made. Neither Sheriff Frank Reynolds nor Baker immediately responded to requests for comment from The Washington Post.

Earlier in the afternoon, the sheriff’s office released a letter in which Reynolds acknowledged that Baker’s comments had “become the subject of much debate and anger.”

“In as much as his words were taken or construed as insensitive or inappropriate, they were not intended to disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy, or express empathy or respect for the suspect,” Reynolds wrote.

Baker had a “difficult task before him” in the wake of the shootings, Reynolds added, praising the captain’s work and saying he had “personal ties to the Asian community.”

WSB-TV reporter Nicole Carr reported that Reynolds said that Baker’s future with the sheriff’s office is under evaluation and that the office is consulting with the district attorney about potentially handing over its part of the case to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The GBI and prosecutors did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Post.

Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.