Back-to-back horrific shootings in California have shocked the nation.

Back-to-back horrific shootings in California have shocked the nation. Two days after 11 people were shot and murdered in a dance studio in the Los Angeles region, seven more were slain in a rural area outside of San Francisco, making this period in California’s history one of the worst periods of mass shootings in the state in decades.

Both suspects were males of retirement age, much older than the typical perpetrator of lethal mass shootings in the United States. Authorities said they had not determined a motive for either spree, which seemed especially puzzling.

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Governor Gavin Newsom found out about the murders in northern California on Monday when visiting with the victims of the Saturday night shooting in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Monterey Park.

This tragedy follows the last one so well,” Newsom tweeted.

On the surface, it looked like there was no connection between the two shootings that occurred so close together.

Around 30 miles south of San Francisco, near the seaside hamlet of Half Moon Bay, a shooter opened fire on two groups of field laborers, killing seven and wounding one, before fleeing.

The alleged gunman, known as Chunli Zhao, 67, was taken into custody a short time later after he was found sitting in his vehicle, parked outside a sheriff’s department, where investigators said they thought he had come to turn himself in.

At a press conference in the evening, San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus revealed that a semi-automatic weapon had been discovered in the suspect’s vehicle.

Corpus said the suspect, who was “totally cooperating” with investigators following his detention, had worked at one of the two prime locations. Agriculture “nurseries,” where some workers also had homes, was how she referred to the locations. According to local media, a mushroom farm was reportedly located at one of the sites.

One person was killed, and seven others were injured in a “shooting between numerous individuals” in Oakland on Monday night, according to police, and the facts strongly imply that this was a case of gang warfare. The police did not provide many specifics, but they did say that the survivors had made their way to local hospitals.

The Star Ballroom Dance Studio shooting in Monterey Park, east of downtown Los Angeles, left 11 people dead. News of the Half Moon Bay massacre broke as authorities entered their second full day of investigating the incident. There were nine more casualties.

Police claimed the culprit, 72-year-old Huu Can Tran, went to a neighboring town and stormed another dance club, but the owner challenged him and managed to take the weapon away.

Tran, a regular at the Star Ballroom, a dancing club frequented primarily by people of a certain age, suddenly vanished one night.

Authorities say he killed himself in his getaway vehicle, a cargo van, in Torrance, a suburb of Los Angeles, almost 12 hours after the shooting spree began.

Killer track record

Because the incident on Saturday occurred during a Chinese Lunar New Year event in Monterey Park, a center of the Asian-American community in Southern California, initial speculation focused on race. The event’s second day was scrapped.

According to Hilda Solis, a Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors member, this was the deadliest mass shooting in the county’s history.

The 1984 San Diego McDonald’s massacre, in which 21 people were killed, is the single incident in California with the highest number of fatalities from a gunshot.

In 2015, a married couple identified by authorities as extremists influenced by foreign terror groups killed 14 people in San Bernardino, east of L.A. County. Hours later, they were gunned down by law enforcement.

One of the suspects in the most recent shootings was in his late 60s, and the other was in his early 70s, making their ages a striking feature of the case.

Only one of the 185 mass shootings recorded between 1966 and 2022 in the database kept by the nonprofit Violence Project was committed by someone 70 or older; a retired miner in Kentucky killed five people that year.

On Monday, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna informed reporters that investigators had recovered 42 spent shell casings and a large-capacity ammunition magazine from the shooting scene at the Monterey Park Ballroom.

According to him, a check of the suspect’s mobile home in a gated senior community in Hemet, 80 miles east of Los Angeles, uncovered a rifle, electronics, and objects “that led us to believe the suspect was producing homemade” gun silencers. Authorities also recovered a weapon from the suspect’s vehicle and hundreds of bullets from the residence.

Chief Scott Wiese of the Monterey Park Police Department said that authorities were looking into rumors that envy or relationship problems may have been to blame for the violence.

Adam Hood, who rented a house from Tran in the Los Angeles region, told Reuters that Tran was a regular at the Star Ballroom, where he enjoyed ballroom dancing despite his frustrations with the gossiping patrons.

“He had a negative impression of the studio staff and was unhappy with them. He’d had enough, “I quote Hood.