LOS ANGELES — A gunman had fired his first deadly shots outside a dance hall when Monterey Park police got a call for help from a man trying to make sense of what happened to his partner sitting in the car next to him.
“Is your girlfriend awake?” the dispatcher asked.
“I’m not sure,” the caller said.
Audio from the 911 recordings released Thursday provides a sense of the confusion and chaos that unfolded Jan. 21 at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio on a night that had been full of celebration for the Lunar New Year.
Police said Huu Can Tran, 72, a onetime fixture at the ballroom who told people he was a dance instructor, killed 11 people and wounded nine with a submachine gun-style semiautomatic handgun. Of the six women and five men killed, one woman was in her 50s and the rest were in their 60s and 70s.
Tran fled from the shooting in a white van and about 20 minutes later entered a dance hall in nearby Alhambra, where a quick-thinking employee lunged for the weapon and disarmed him after a short struggle. He killed himself the next morning as police surrounded his van.
In the course of just over three minutes, Monterey Park police dispatchers fielded three 911 calls. One came from a man who had run from the club after seeing the gunman open fire near the dance hall entrance. He initially mistook the gunshots for firecrackers.
That man, who said he saw the gunman reloading the weapon as people ran for safety, urged a dispatcher to “send police here right away.”
“He might start shooting again,” the man said in a panicked voice.
The dispatcher asked several times if anyone was hurt. The man said he didn’t know.
“It happened too fast,” he said. “Everybody ran away.”
The man who phoned from the car reported that he and his girlfriend left the party early and someone tried to break a car window as they were leaving. He then said the window had been shot out and his girlfriend was unconscious.
He did not identify the woman, but Mymy Nhan, 65, was…
Read the full article here
