Monterey Park shooting death toll rises to 11, including dance hall manager

The death toll in a mass shooting at a ballroom dance studio has risen to 11 people, after health officials said that one of the people wounded in the shooting had died.

Authorities have still not confirmed a motive for the shooting, which also left at least nine other people injured, but law enforcement sources told local news outlets they believed the shooter had frequented the two dance studios he had targeted, making it possible that the shootings were motivated by some kind of personal dispute, including intimate partner violence.

Investigators currently believe that the shooter intentionally targeted some victims, while others were killed at random, a law enforcement official told the New York Times. Authorities said that, minutes after opening fire at a studio in Monterey Park, the shooter appeared at a second dance studio in a nearby town.

The 72-year-old gunman, an Asian man named as Huu Can Tran, was found dead in a van in Torrance, California, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound hours after he was disarmed by a worker at a second dance hall in Alhambra, close to Monterey Park.

The tenant told Reuters that Tran complained that people at the Star Ballroom studio were talking behind his back.

Public and business records showed that the 72-year-old had run a trucking company with an address in Monterey Park, and that he had lived in the Los Angeles area since at least the 1990s. His ex-wife told CNN that he had emigrated to the US from China.

The ballroom dance studios that were targeted, one in Monterey Park and a second in nearly Alhambra, were praised as vibrant social centers, whose patrons included many middle-aged and elderly couples who loved to dance.

Authorities did not disclose an age for the 11th fatality, which was announced by the LA county department of health services.

At 72, Tran was the second-oldest mass killer in the U.S. over the last nearly 20 years, According to a database compiled by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University. In 2011, a 73-year-old murdered five people in Yuma County Arizona before killing himself.

The Violence Project, which tracks a subset of public mass-casualty shootings in the United States, identified another shooter in his 70s, a retired miner who killed five people in a store in Kentucky in 1981, in an incident motivated by a personal dispute.

Ramon Antonio Vargas, Reuters, and the Associated Press contributed reporting

This article has been amended to clarify that Tran visited the Hemet police department twice in January 2023, not once more than 10 years ago. He was making allegations about incidents that occurred 10 to 20 years ago, Hemet police said.