At least seven people have died after the mass shooting occurred in Half Moon Bay, California, a small town south of San Francisco.
The shooting occurred around 2:20 p.m. at two separate locationsthe police said.
Four victims were found at a mushroom farm on Highway 92, while two other people died at another agricultural facility between one and three miles away. A third victim at this second location was rushed to hospital in critical condition and later died.
A fourth person was shot and hospitalized with “life-threatening injuries,” police said.
The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office said that a suspected 67-year-old Half Moon Bay resident named Zhao Chunli, turned himself in to authorities around 4:40 p.m.
He was taken into custody without incident in the parking lot of a sheriff’s substation, the very spot where local reporters and community members milled about, waiting for a police news conference to begin.
Kati McHugh, a 38-year-old community health advocate, told The Daily Beast in a phone interview that she had just returned to her car to retrieve her bag when a sheriff’s deputy approached her and told her to get away from the vehicle. .
As officers approached the car next to hers, a brown Lexus SUV, McHugh looked up to see a man sitting calmly in the driver’s seat. She obeyed the officer’s order, ducked behind a tree and pulled out her phone to record the subsequent arrest.
“It was a super, super clean, super quiet arrest for, you know, what we tend to see with police,” McHugh said. “I was impressed with his handling of the situation because of how intense it was.”
Local news outlets were able to film the arrest as it occurred, with some reporters crouching just a few feet away.
KGO-TV footage shows a man in a white baseball cap being dragged to the ground by officers, then handcuffed, picked up and led away.
“There is no ongoing threat to the community at this time,” the sheriff’s office wrote in a tweet minutes later.
At the press conference later Monday night, Sheriff Christina Corpus said a “semi-automatic pistol” had been found in the brown van, Zhao’s vehicle.
Corpus said Zhao was fully cooperating with authorities. The motive for the shooting has not yet been established, he added, but said he was “believed to be a worker” at one of the businesses targeted.
Zhao was characterized as a “disgruntled worker” by David Pine, chairman of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors.
“This is a devastating tragedy for this community and the families affected by this unspeakable act of violence,” said Corpus, who was sworn in as county sheriff just weeks ago.
She said she had not yet spoken to any of the victims’ relatives, and police were hoping the coroner’s office would make positive identifications.
An investigation into the shooting was ongoing Monday night, with the FBI assisting the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, the federal agency said on Twitter. A family reunification center was set up at IDES Hall in Half Moon Bay off Main Street.
McHugh said he never expected a mass shooting to take place in Half Moon Bay, a small town of about 12,000 people, most of them farm workers, artists and travelers from Silicon Valley.
Even the substation parking lot was “generally a much sweeter scene on a Saturday morning than tonight,” he said, and community members used the site as a weekend farmers’ market year-round. .
The country’s latest deadly mass shooting took place less than two days after 11 people were killed at a ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park, some 380 miles away, amid community Lunar New Year celebrations.
The suspect in the Saturday night shooting died of a self-inflicted gunshot after a confrontation with a SWAT team.
Speaking at the Monday night news conference, Pine, the chairman of the board of supervisors, condemned the recent spate of gun violence in particularly fierce terms.
“Gun violence in this country is at completely unacceptable levels,” he said. “He has really come home tonight. Our hearts are broken… But in the end, there are simply too many guns in this country. And there has to be a change. this is not an acceptable way for a modern society to live, to conduct its business.”
State and local elected officials quickly joined in mourning the shooting in the hours that followed the attack.
“At the hospital meeting with the victims of a mass shooting when I was pulled aside to inform me of another shooting,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom had tweeted Monday afternoon. “This time in Half Moon Bay. Tragedy upon tragedy.”
“Two hours ago I joined my colleagues on the steps of the Capitol for a vigil for the victims of the Monterey Park shooting,” Marc Berman, a Democrat serving in the California State Assembly, tweeted.
“Before we’ve had a chance to mourn them, there’s another mass shooting, this time in Half Moon Bay. In my district.” President Joe Biden had been briefed on the shooting by Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, his national security adviser, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.
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