On March 16, 2021, a shooting spree occurred at two spas and a massage parlor in the metropolitan area of Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Eight people were killed and a ninth was wounded. The shooter, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, was taken into custody later that day.
Long told police he was motivated by a sexual addiction that was at odds with his Christianity, for which he had spent time in an evangelical treatment clinic, and that he had been targeting establishments where he had previously paid for sex. While six of the eight people killed were women of Asian descent, Long denied that race had played any role in the killings, which was questioned by numerous organizations such as the CAPAC, CAA and NAPAWF, U.S. politicians Marilyn Strickland and Bee Nguyen, as well as by the South Korean media and the victims' families.
Long was charged with 19 crimes in Fulton County and 23 crimes in Cherokee County. He pleaded guilty to the Cherokee County charges and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The shooting was one of the main incidents that gave rise to the Stop Asian Hate movement, against the backdrop of rising anti-Asian sentiment in the country. While the Cherokee County District Attorney stated that they found no evidence of racism as a motive for the murders, Fulton County prosecutors have stated that both race and gender played a part and are seeking the death penalty for Long.
It was the worst mass shooting in Georgia since the Atlanta day trading firm shootings.
Events
Before the shootings
On the morning of the day of the shooting, Long's roommate overheard Long watching pornography. Long said in court that he felt ashamed and went to purchase a firearm in order to commit suicide.
Shootings
Cherokee County shooting
Around 2 p.m., Long legally purchased a 9mm handgun and a box of 50 bullets at a firearms store in Holly Springs. He also purchased a bottle of bourbon at a liquor store, which he drank while driving to Young's Asian Massage ("Young's"), a massage parlor near Acworth. Surveillance footage showed him arriving at Young's and sitting for an hour in the parking lot. While in the parking lot, he loaded the gun. He then entered the building around 3:38 p.m. EDT (19:38 UTC) and remained inside for a period of one hour and 12 minutes. When he was inside the building, Long paid for a service. The service ended around 4:45 p.m. and Long went to the restroom in the back of the building. Another customer who went to Young's that day said in an interview that everything was still normal inside when that customer arrived around 4:40 p.m.
When Long finished using the bathroom, he walked out, pulled out his 9mm handgun, and aimed it at Paul Andre Michels. Michels was in the back of the building using his cellphone while leaning over a counter. Long fatally shot him once in the head. Long began walking towards the front of the business in the main hallway. His next victim, Daoyou Feng, was in room 3. Feng poked her head out of the room and Long shot her once in the head. Long entered room 4 and shot Xiaojie Tan once in the head. Long then walked into room 2 and injured a man. Long entered room 6 and fatally shot customer Delaina Ashley Yaun González once in the torso while she was hiding in the corner of the room. Her husband was receiving a service in another room. Only six people in the building were left uninjured.
Long left Young's at 4:50 p.m. Shots were fired at some point after. A customer who survived a gunshot wound said the gunman walked into Young's and began firing. The customer threw himself to the floor and begged the gunman not to shoot him. The gunman demanded him to look up at him, and when the customer complied, he was shot in the face.
The first 9-1-1 calls reporting the shooting to the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office were made at 4:54 p.m. Police arrived at Young's within minutes of Long's departure. They found two people fatally shot and three others wounded in different rooms down a hallway; two of the wounded later died at a hospital. Police found a male customer, whose wife and fellow customer were fatally shot, sitting on a bed in another room, scared and confused, and detained him for four hours.
Piedmont Road shootings
At 5:47 p.m. EDT, the Atlanta Police Department ("APD") responded to reports of a robbery at Gold Massage Spa ("Gold Spa") on Piedmont Road in northeast Atlanta, about 30 miles (48 km) from the first shooting scene. There, they found three women dead from gunshot wounds. While Atlanta police were at Gold Spa, they received reports of another shooting across the street at Aromatherapy Spa, where they discovered another woman shot and killed. Three of the four victims had been shot in the head.
Two Gold Spa employees who survived the shooting reported hearing ticking sounds while in a break room, which turned out to be gunfire. They hid in a lounge and took cover under items stored there, and were shot at but not injured. According to them, the gunman did not speak or make any other sounds during the shooting, and he locked both the front and back doors of the spa at some point. According to a report from South Korean newspaper The Chosun Ilbo, a nearby Korean restaurant told how an unidentified Gold Spa employee who escaped from the store during the shooting stated that the shooter said, "I'm going to kill all Asians", although in a later Rolling Stone interview, a taxi driver who had talked to a local business manager stated it was a police officer who had told the manager this. According to an eyewitness, the attacker shot the worker who opened the door of Aromatherapy Spa for him and fled without entering. The prosecutor believed the suspect's gun malfunctioned after shooting the employee at Aromatherapy Spa.
According to the APD, they noticed the similarities between the Piedmont Road and Cherokee County shootings and subsequently dispatched officers to patrol similar businesses in the area. The Federal Bureau of Investigation assisted in the investigation.
Arrest
After the first shooting, Cherokee County police released surveillance footage to the public and were contacted by Long's parents, who recognized him. While they were being interviewed, the APD was responding to the second and third shootings in Atlanta. His parents informed deputies that Long's Hyundai Tucson was equipped with a tracking device. Using surveillance footage of his vehicle at both crime scenes along with the car's tracker, police were able to ascertain his location.
Around 8:30 p.m., roughly 3.5 hours after the shootings, Long was spotted by police in Crisp County, about 150 miles (240 km) south of Atlanta. Georgia State Patrol officers followed him south on Interstate 75 to a location just south of Cordele, where they used a PIT maneuver to stop his vehicle and took him into custody. Long was on his way to Florida when he was apprehended.
Long was initially arrested in connection to the Cherokee County shooting; police later identified him as a suspect in the Piedmont Road shootings as well. Police found a 9mm handgun in his car.
Victims
The shooter killed seven women and one man. One man was wounded. Six died at the scene, one en route to a hospital, and one in treatment. Six victims, four at Piedmont Road and two at Cherokee County, were women of Asian descent. The others were a white woman and a white man, and the survivor is a Hispanic man from Guatemala. The South Korean Foreign Affairs Ministry reported that four of the dead were of Korean ethnicity, and one was a South Korean citizen.
Police released the names of the eight deceased victims on March 19. The victims at Young's Asian Massage were Delaina Ashley Yaun González, 33; Xiaojie Tan (Chinese: 谭晓洁; pinyin: Tán Xiǎojié), 49; Daoyou Feng (Chinese: 冯道有; pinyin: Féng Dàoyǒu), 44; and Paul Andre Michels, 54. The victims at the Gold Spa were Hyun Jung Grant (née Kim; Korean: 김현정; Hanja: 金賢廷), 51; Suncha Kim (김선자; 金宣子), 69; and Soon Chung Park (박순청; 朴純請), 74. The victim at Aromatherapy Spa was Yong Ae Yue (유영애; 柳英愛), 63.
Perpetrator
The suspect was identified as 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, of Woodstock, Georgia. He was born in Woodstock on April 6, 1999, and raised in a conservative community. He graduated from Sequoyah High School in spring 2017. From fall 2017 to fall 2018, Long was enrolled at the Cumming campus of the University of North Georgia, but he did not earn a degree. Long was a hunter and heavily involved in his Southern Baptist congregation. Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said Long did not have any prior interactions with law enforcement.
Long spent time in HopeQuest, an evangelical treatment facility located near Acworth and down the road from the first spa that he attacked. He was a patient at the treatment center for what he described as "sex addiction". He claimed to be "tortured" by his addiction to sex since he was "deeply religious", according to his halfway house roommate. His roommate also said that, several times during his stay at the halfway house, Long said that he had "relapsed" and gone to massage parlors to visit sex workers. Long's parents had kicked him out of their house the night before the shooting due to concerns about his sex addiction, and said he watched internet pornography several hours each day. A report to police said that Long was "emotional" after being evicted from his parents' house.
Motive
According to the police, Long described his actions as the result of a sex addiction that conflicted with his religious beliefs. Long had been a customer at two of the massage parlors, and saw them as sources of sexual temptation. Police records show that two of the massage parlors had been the site of 10 prostitution arrests, the latest of which took place in 2013. All three targeted spas appeared on an online guide to brothels. Long claims to have initially thought about killing himself but instead decided to target the businesses to "help" others dealing with sex addiction. According to the Cherokee County Sheriff's Department, Long wanted to "eliminate the temptation" by targeting spas.
He had been an active member of Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Georgia. The church took down its Facebook site, which included photos that included Long, after the shooting.
Ruth Graham, a national religion correspondent for The New York Times, wrote that Long "seemed to have a fixation on sexual temptation, one that can lead to despair among people who believe they are failing to follow the ideal of refraining from sex and even lust outside heterosexual marriage."
According to Samuel Perry, a professor of sociology and author of three books on the modern evangelical church, the church's confusing sex rhetoric can lead to desperation over perceived sex addiction and a belief that one must take extreme measures to stop it.
The American Psychological Association does not have sex addiction as a diagnosis in the DSM-5. The World Health Organization includes "excessive sexual drive" as a diagnosis (code F52.7) in the latest version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), but as a compulsive behavior or impulse control disorder rather than an addiction. Psychologist David J. Ley and neuroscientist Nicole Prause noted significant differences between sex addiction and other types of addiction. Psychotherapist Robert Weiss, who diagnoses people with sexual addiction, expressed doubt in the diagnosis for Long because sex addicts are typically nonviolent.
Some noted the ethnicity of six of the victims, who were Asian women, amidst an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, or characterized the shooting as a hate crime. While some experts have claimed that race cannot be ruled out as a motive because of the fetishization of Asian women in the U.S., others have pointed out that the perpetrator was instead targeting sex workers at establishments he had frequented in the past, and Long later stated that his actions were not racially motivated.
Legal proceedings
On March 17, Long was charged with eight counts of murder, split evenly between the shooting in Cherokee County and the shootings in Atlanta, and one count of aggravated assault in Cherokee County. He confessed to the killings while in custody. On May 11, Long received a 19-count indictment by a Fulton County grand jury on charges including murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, and domestic terrorism. During the press conference, district attorney Fani Willis shared her plans to seek death penalty and hate crime enhancements if Long was convicted of murder. Later that day, Long was the subject of a 23-count indictment on charges of malice murder, felony murder, attempt to commit murder, and aggravated assault from a grand jury in Cherokee County.
On July 27, Long pleaded guilty to the Cherokee County charges and was sentenced to life without parole. Cherokee County District Attorney Shannon Wallace said that investigators had found no evidence of racial bias in the shootings. On August 30, state prosecutors announced Willis had filed court papers seeking the death penalty against Long for the Fulton County charges and designating the Piedmont Road shootings as a hate crime based on race and gender. On September 28, Long pleaded not guilty to the Fulton County charges.