The man charged with killing eight people at three Atlanta-area massage parlors Tuesday evening had been a customer of at least two of the spas, police said.
Deputy Chief Charles Hampton of the Atlanta Police Department said in a news conference Thursday that the suspect had patronized both of the massage businesses that were attacked in the city, where police say he shot and killed four women of Asian descent.
Authorities have said he drove to those businesses after fatally shooting four people at a spa in the suburbs, including two women of Asian descent. The police there said they did not know whether the suspect was a customer at that location.
As the killings brought a wave of outrage and attention to violence against Asian Americans, Atlanta Police officials emphasized that they were continuing to investigate all possible motives for the killings.
“Nothing is off the table for our investigation,” Hampton said when asked whether the police had ruled out classifying the attack as a hate crime.
Atlanta Police officials also sought to distance themselves from the investigation in Cherokee County, where the first four victims were killed. A sheriff’s deputy there who discussed the assailant’s self-described addiction to sex, as well as his claim that he was not motivated by race, later came under fire for saying the suspect had carried out the killings after “a really bad day.”
“While the cases are linked by the same perpetrator,” said Sgt. John Chafee, a spokesperson for the Atlanta Police Department, “our investigations are independent of one another, and there are different dynamics to each.”
The suspect, Robert Aaron Long, has been charged with eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault and is being held at the Cherokee County jail. His lawyer said Long had waived an arraignment that had been scheduled for Thursday.
Long, who is white, said he had targeted the spas because he wanted to remove a “temptation,” authorities have said. A former roommate of his at a halfway house said Long had tried to stop acting on his sexual desires as recently as 2020 but had continued going to massage parlors for sex.
The four victims at the suburban spa, two of whom were white, have been identified, but Hampton said he could not yet release the names of the women killed at the two spas in the city because the police have not been able to reach the “proper next of kin.” He said the police were working with the South Korean consulate to do so.
The police have identified the victims of the attack on Young’s Asian Massage in Cherokee County as Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33; Paul Andre Michels, 54; Xiaojie Tan, 49; and Daoyou Feng, 44.
Long was arrested about 150 miles south of Atlanta after his parents saw a surveillance image and called police to say that they believed their son was the wanted man. The police said Long told them he had been on his way to Florida when he was caught, where he planned to commit similar violence against a business tied to the pornography industry.
Hours before the shootings, he bought a gun from Big Woods Goods, a gun shop in suburban Atlanta, according to a lawyer for the store.