The information I saw was that there was a husband and wife couple at one of the spas for a massage. The woman, who was ethnic Asian, was killed. Her husband managed to get out of the building without being shot.
I think the final sentence points at a reason for the first sentence. Understanding the murderer’s motivation can help us build a society that doesn’t feed into that motivation.
Our society has had a year of especially racist language attacking Asian people. And we have a long history of sexually fetishizing Asian women. And we have centuries of teaching that sex workers are wicked and tempt honest Christian men into damnable acts. This murderer committed his murders at the intersection of these social dynamics.
Building a society where we can live together in peace means pushing back against the racism, and against the misogyny, and against the demonization of sex workers. It means holding accountable those who promote these vicious beliefs. They’re not responsible for the mass murder, but they are responsible for creating an environment in which a mass murderer finds direction and purpose for his murderous impulses.
This article makes it pretty clear that these businesses have reputations as sex work locations:
Whether or not the murder victims were sex workers, the murderer’s perception that they were is part of why they died. In the conversations about how to respond to these murders, protecting those identified (correctly or otherwise) as sex workers must stay in the forefront.
I think this is definitely a factor. From what I’ve read so far - and I’ve not kept up with every detail - it doesn’t seem like he was particularly motivated by race, as much as he was by a really warped sexuality or sexual mental framework, very likely the product of religious indoctrination and shaming at the household level.
But that doesn’t mean that race isn’t a factor. As you correctly note, Westerners, including Americans, have fetishized and hyper-sexualized Asian women while simultaneously hypo-sexualizing Asian men. Clearly, this guy made some sort of association between Asian women and deviant sex, and he ended up demonizing these poor women.
Yes. He killed a bunch of innocent human beings because he believed they were sex workers, and that his horniness was somehow their fault. It’s not terribly important whether they actually WERE sex workers. He’s a miserable excuse for a human being.
It also matters if he was a former customer, which they are investagating. If so it adds a personal twist along with racism and misogynist angles to crimes. Did he target them because he knew some of them?
He totally is. But he’s not a “lone wolf,” as far as I can tell: part of what shaped this miserable excuse for a human being is his political party’s demonizing of Asian people, and his church’s demonizing of sex. Both of them need to reflect on how they’re helping to build a corrupt, evil culture for young white men to grow up in.
The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office has released the names of the four victims killed at Gold Spa and Aromatherapy Spa: Soon Chung Park, 74; Suncha Kim, 69; Yong Ae Yue, 63; Hyun Jung Grant, 51.
Park, Grant and Yue each died of a gunshot wound to the head, according to the examiner’s report. Kim died of gunshot wounds to the chest.
Investigators said this week they were waiting to identify the four victims because they had been unable to notify all their family members.
Shortly after the shootings, police identified the four other victims killed: Xiaojie Tan, 49: Delaina Yaun, 33; Daoyou Feng, 44; and Paul Andre Michels, 54.
Middle aged and elderly Asian women. I mean, God Bless you if you are still managing to do sex work at 70, but it isn’t known for being a career you keep into your 50s.
This is more like he just shot the front office people and never got to the actual massage women. I wonder if this was on purpose?
Yes, this is so on the head. For certain religious men that “luring” is a real thing in their minds. Totally fucked up.
Yeah, that was one of my thoughts about this as well: a hyper-religious nutter who commits mass murder, and he probably believes that he is the victim, that he was lured there by an irresistible temptation.
Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence.
I’m willing to go out on a limb on this one. It sounds like everyone he shot was either in the front office/customer waiting room or shot around the doorways. Call me an ageist, but I don’t think happy ending massages, if that’s what these places were, would be staffed with a bunch of over 50 year old women. Although people have had weirder fetishes. If it turns out I’m wrong just tag me and I’ll come back to apologize.
I guess what I’m getting at is, speculation aside, what’s the actual evidence that there were ever any “happy ending massages” at these locations? The police think maybe there were? Doesn’t seem entirely conclusive to me. People seem too ready to assume “Well of course there was sex work going on! The murderer and the police who sympathize with him say there was!”
WaPo had an article suggesting that these specific spas had recommendations on a website that’s like the Yelp of pay-for-handjobs. It’s not conclusive, but there’s some Occam’s Razor going on here: murderer is sexually compulsive, is kicked out of his conservative Christian family for sexually compulsive behaviors, has gone to a rehab center for treatment for the (likely fictional) condition of sex addiction, is part of a church that has counseled him against it, sits for an hour in his car outside of a business that (according to police and to scuzzy websites) sells sexual activity, goes in, stays inside for more than an hour, then comes out and there are people he murdered inside.
I mean, we could just use “the razor” to cut out the sex workers and conclude he shot the massage parlors up because they didn’t live up to his racist stereotypes, and he was pissed after paying for an extra deluxe hour-long massage, and then when they didn’t know WTF he was talking about with “the happy ending” he went and got his gun because that’s how insecure losers respond when ashamed/embarrassed.
Atlanta massage parlor shootings - white perp, “apparently” Asian victims
Nothing to add, except that I may start referring to my Japanese wife as “apparently Asian"…
uh, okay.
@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness already covered this in his post upthread. You’ll also notice I said “if there was” not "there was, so I don’t see what your objection was about.
^ This is disturbingly plausible to me…
Going by the various police reports and stings that go on around here the sex workers that are arrested are usually middle aged and up. The perception that they are always young girls that are being trafficked is not usually true in my experience. I don’t know if any of the victims are sex workers. Nothing about their age would make me assume they are not.