The gunman who shot and killed eight people at massage parlors in the Atlanta area told police that he had a “sexual addiction” and had frequented massage parlors in the past before carrying out the shootings to eliminate his “temptation,” authorities said Wednesday.
The police said the gunman claimed that he had not targeted the victims, six of whom were of Asian descent, because of their race, but they cautioned that it was too early in the investigation to be sure that there wasn’t a racial motivation.
Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office added that the gunman saw the spas as “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” All but one of the victims were women.
Authorities said the gunman had told them he was driving to Florida when he was caught after the shootings Tuesday evening, and Baker said he may have been trying to commit similar violence at a business connected to the “porn industry” there. He was stopped after his parents alerted the police that they believed their son might be the suspect, and police were able to track his phone.
“He made indicators that he has some issues, potentially sexual addiction, and may have frequented some of these places in the past,” said Sheriff Frank Reynolds of Cherokee County.
“We believe he frequented these places in the past and may have been lashing out,” Reynolds said.
The police arrested Robert Aaron Long, 21, of Woodstock, Georgia, who is white, about 150 miles south of Atlanta in Crisp County after a manhunt, authorities said. They had earlier released a surveillance image of a suspect near a Hyundai Tucson outside one of the massage parlors. Baker said that Long had admitted to the shootings and that he appeared to be acting alone.
Rodney Bryant, the acting chief of the Atlanta Police Department, said it was not yet clear whether the shooting spree would be classified as a hate crime.
“We are still early in this investigation, so we cannot make that determination at this moment,” Bryant said. “We are just not there as of yet.”
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta said that regardless of the determination about motive, the tragedy was clear.
“Whatever the motivation was for this guy, we know that the majority of the victims were Asian,” Bottoms said. “We also know that this is an issue that is happening across the country. It is unacceptable, it is hateful and it has to stop.”
A Justice Department official said Wednesday that Attorney General Merrick Garland was briefed on the shooting, and the department would likely have more to say on the matter later that day.
Four people died in the first shooting, at Young’s Asian Massage near Acworth, a northwest suburb of Atlanta, Baker said. That shooting, in which a Hispanic man was injured, was reported around 5 p.m.
At 5:47 p.m., Atlanta police said, officers responded to a robbery at Gold Spa in the northeast part of the city, where they found the bodies of three women with gunshot wounds. While the officers were at the scene, police said, they received a report of shots fired at the Aromatherapy Spa across the street, where they found the body of another woman.