Suspect in custody after 8 killed in Atlanta shootings

General
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Robert Aaron Long, the suspected gunman in three attacks that killed eight people Tuesday, has confessed to the crime, police said in Atlanta.
Six women of Asian descent are among the dead, raising suspicions of a hate crime.
Long claims race did not play a role in his decision to target the massage parlors, police said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2BHLB7QjRk:5

Long, 21, “may have frequented some of these places in the past,” Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said,
after saying that the suspect indicated to investigators that he has a sexual addiction.

It’s unclear if the businesses had any ties to sex work.
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said the spas were “legally operating businesses that have not been on our radar,” and “we are not about to get into victim blaming, victim shaming here.”
The victims in Atlanta were Asian women, as were two of the victims in Acworth, officials said. The two other victims were white, and one man who was injured was stable.

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Long was arrested within hours of the attacks on the three spas, after police tracked his vehicle on the interstate in south Georgia.
As of Wednesday morning, none of the victims had been publicly identified.
Responding to questions of whether the shootings represent a hate crime, Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant said,
“We are still early in this investigation, so we cannot make that determination at this moment.”
“This was a tragic day, with many victims,” Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said.
At a late-morning news conference, she said the businesses targeted in Atlanta had not been on the radar of the city’s police as potential sites of crime or trouble.

“He does claim that it was not racially motivated,” Capt. Jay Baker of the sheriff’s office said, while cautioning that it’s still early in the investigation.
“He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and sees these locations … [as] a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.”

“These locations, he sees them as an outlet for him, something he shouldn’t be doing,” Baker said Wednesday, adding that Long indicated he had an “issue with porn” and was “attempting to take out that temptation.”
Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds added Long “may have frequented some of these places in the past” and “might have been lashing out.”
Officials said the suspect told investigators he was on his way to Florida, perhaps to target more spa-like businesses when he was captured.
The killings come amid a growing number of anti-Asian hate incidents. Research released through Stop AAPI Hate on Tuesday revealed that nearly 3,800 incidents were reported over the course of roughly a year during the pandemic and that a disproportionate number of attacks were directed at women.

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lol…wameanza script yao…

.the cops already wanamtetea…always a wonder how hawa vijana wazungu hushikwa bila ata buleti moja kufyatuliwa hata wakiuwa watu wangapi…

after wanapelekwa buger king…kisha wanatetewa na makarao coz hate and race crimes are treated more harsh…federal crimes as opposed to local court crimes…kabla ujue…kijana ni manslaughter coz alikuwa sex addict akarukwa na akili even though alikuwa mtoi mpoa maisha yake yote…afungwe miaka kadaa na jaji, prosecutor na jury wa kijiji yake arudi street…as opposed to kunyongwa by the feds

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Hate

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Will he be labeled a terrorista or a deranged individual who did not get hugs from his father ?

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[SIZE=7]Spa shooting suspect’s parents helped authorities catch him[/SIZE]

[SIZE=5]The suspect had been treated for sexual addiction…[/SIZE]

Sheriff Frank Reynolds of Cherokee County, where the Acworth shootings took place, told reporters Long “made indicators that he has some issues – potentially, sexual addiction – and may have frequented some of these places in the past.”
Reynolds said those issues could be the motivation behind the shooting.
A law enforcement source said the suspect was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours on end watching pornography online.
According to an incident report from the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, a 911 caller said the suspect could possibly be his son and “does have a tracker on his phone.”

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Another anonymous caller to 911 told dispatch the suspect was “kicked out of his parent’s house last night,” adding that he “was emotional,” the incident report says.
It is not clear whether the businesses affected were places of sex work. During a news conference on Tuesday, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms stated the businesses were “legally operating” and had not previously been on the Atlanta Police Department’s radar.
“We are not about to get into victim blaming, victim shaming, here. As far as we know in Atlanta, we have not had any 911 calls from that location. I believe one minor call on someone stealing some keys,” Bottoms said. “So we don’t know additional information about what his motives were, but we certainly will not begin to blame victims.”

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Long, 21, told police he battled a sexual addiction and frequented the three parlors where the victims, all but two Asian women, were shot and killed.

Tyler Bayless said he shared a housing unit with Long at Maverick Recovery, a rehab facility in Roswell, Georgia, between August 2019 and January or February 2020. He said that most residents were suffering from drug or alcohol addiction, but Long was being treated for sex addiction.
“It was something that absolutely would torture him,” Bayless said. He said Long was a “deeply religious person – he would often go on tangents about his interpretation of the Bible,” and was distraught about his addiction to sex.
Bayless said that on multiple occasions during his stay at the facility, Long told him that he had “relapsed” and “gone to massage parlors explicitly to engage in sex acts.”
After hearing Long was the suspect in the shootings, Bayless said he was shocked that his former roommate would do such a thing.
Mason Clements, who is listed as the registered agent at Maverick Recovery in business filings, said in a text message that “I am unable to comment on any client past, present or future due to confidentiality agreements.”
Another former roommate of Long’s also told CNN that Long had been in rehabilitation for sex addiction, and that in summer 2020 he had lived with Long at a transition house for people leaving rehab, though he declined to name the facility or divulge the state where it’s located. He said he had not spoken to Long “in a long time.”
He recognized Long from the surveillance footage disseminated by authorities, he said, and Cherokee County dispatch records indicate the ex-roommate called police Tuesday night.

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Mnajiona mko very smart sio?

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All Morning News headlines here agree with your point of view. They’re trying to protect their own by diverting attention from the main issue.

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A photo allegedly posted by Capt. Jay Baker, a public information officer at the Cherokee County, Georgia, Sheriff’s Office, shows shirts with a racist and anti-Asian message about Covid-19.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e_3GK052pk:3

“Covid 19 imported virus from Chy-na,” the racist shirt in the photo posted April 2, 2020, reads.
Although the account that posted it has been deleted, CNN was able to access the photos through a cached copy. The name on the Facebook account matches Jay Baker, and it claims that the individual is an employee of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s office.
The Daily Beast was first to report on the racist shirt photo. They also reported the account posted photos of Baker in uniform, with his name tag visible.
When contacted by CNN about the post, Baker told CNN, “No additional comment.”
“Love my shirt,” the photo caption of the shirt reads. It goes on to encourage others to buy their own shirts saying, “get yours while they last.” CNN reached out to the store selling the shirts, but did not immediately receive a response.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/18/us/racist-shirt-cherokee-county-sheriff-trnd/index.html

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Someone finally says what I have been thinking all along…

[SIZE=7]San Francisco school board member facing calls to resign over racist tweets: Many Asians use ‘white supremacist thinking’ to ‘get ahead’[/SIZE]
Andrew Mark Miller 15 hrs ago

A growing number of political leaders, parents, and alumni are calling for the resignation of a San Francisco school board member after a series of her tweets were discovered that have been deemed racist.

https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB1eNahX.img?h=488&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=720&y=523
© Provided by Washington Examiner
Board Vice President Alison Collins, elected in 2018, tweeted in 2016 that Asian Americans had used “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead’” and explained that she was attempting to “combat anti-black racism in the Asian community” and “at my daughters’ mostly Asian Am school,” according to the [I]San Francisco Chronicle[/I].
Collins also accused “many Asian American Ts, Ss, and Ps” (teachers, students, and parents) of promoting “the ‘model minority’ BS” and in one tweeted demanded to know “[w]here are the vocal Asians speaking up against Trump?”
“Don’t Asian Americans know they are on his list as well?” Collins said in another tweet.

“Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house n----- is still being a n-----. You’re still considered ‘the help.’" :smiley:

A local Black Student Union removed Collins as a panelist at a Women in Leadership event on Thursday, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed condemned the tweets but stopped short of calling for a resignation.
“I’m not going to comment on social media posts from five years ago,” Collins, a black woman, said in a statement. “I’ve been heartbroken seeing the escalating violence against my Asian-American brothers, sisters, and siblings."
“What has been even more upsetting is seeing the ways that the media often erase the true nature of the problem,” she added.
Collins posted a longer explanation on Facebook, saying her tweets were “taken out of context.
Earlier this year, Collins voted in support of a plan to rename over 40 local schools in order to combat racism. The plan, which would have scrapped George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and others, was later put on hold due to outrage from parents.

Tags: News, San Francisco, Racism, Asian Americans, Race and Diversity, Education, California

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[SIZE=7]How ‘sex addiction’ has historically been used to absolve white men[/SIZE]

“It is often used as an excuse to pathologize misogyny,” one psychology scholar told NBC Asian America of the term.

March 19, 2021, 7:42 PM CDT
By Kimmy Yam

While authorities said Atlanta-area spa shooting suspect Robert Aaron Long, 21, told investigators he was motivated by “sexual addiction” and claimed he had no racial motivation, health specialists say the explanation falls short.
Capt. Jay Baker, a spokesman for the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, said Long — who is accused of killing eight people, six of them Asian women — indicated that the spas were “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” However, experts say such rationale has been used before in attempts to exonerate white men. The explanation also discounts racial dynamics and can “cause harm” in the way the public understands these issues.

White men have traditionally been given a pass when they say it — and have the privilege of overlooking how race is a factor, experts say.

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“Historically, the term ‘sex addiction’ has been used by white males to absolve themselves from personal and legal responsibility for their behaviors,” Apryl Alexander, associate professor in the Graduate School of Professional Psychology at the University of Denver, told NBC Asian America. “It is often used as an excuse to pathologize misogyny.”

The defense of sex addiction itself, Alexander said, is a highly controversial one as those in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and sex research continue to debate whether to formally recognize it. Currently, the idea that sex addiction is a disorder is not supported by research, nor is it accepted as a clinical diagnosis, she said.

“A lot of individuals who are doing this kind of self-reports of sexual addiction are having normative sexual behaviors and urges, but they might be excessive. Or for a lot of people, it’s rooted in shame that ‘I’m having these attractions and emotional desires that are normal, but I don’t recognize them as normal,’” Alexander said.

Though the American Psychiatric Association added the concept of sexual addiction to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1987, it later retracted the term and has since rejected the addition of the idea to its later editions including the DSM–5, which is widely seen as the definitive resource on mental disorders, on the basis of a lack of supporting evidence.

Alexander said this sexual behavior doesn’t affect the brain in the same ways other addictions, including substance use and gambling behavior, do, either, calling the characterization of Long’s behavior “concerning.”

[B]The self-identification of sex addiction, she said, is often seen in individuals who are raised in conservative and religious environments, “where there’s a high level of moral disapproval of their natural kind of sexual urges and desires.” Many of these populations are overwhelmingly white.

In examining acts of gender-based violence, Alexander said such attacks often occur at the intersection of misogyny, racism, xenophobia and homophobia. She emphasized that contrary to what Long told police, such violence “doesn’t just occur in isolation.”[/B]

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Richelle Concepcion, president of the Asian American Psychological Association, said accepting the suspect’s rationale, in this case, erases several colliding dynamics of class, immigration status, and gender that impact the communities most at risk for physical and sexual violence.

“Quite frankly, it’s really difficult to attribute the atrocious behaviors to an addiction, especially when you look at the demographics of a majority of those who were murdered,” she said. “Race and gender do play a role in this.”

“It’s really unfair to take his word as there is intersectionality that exists pertaining to the lives taken, especially when one considers that the suspect claims to have gone to these businesses with the intention of eliminating the threat of temptation,” Concepcion added.

Still, sex addiction is a common defense invoked by white men in power.

After a number of allegations emerged last year from multiple women, including several who were underage at the time, accusing comedian Chris D’Elia of requesting sexual favors, he responded with a statement in June saying his relationships were “legal and consensual” and then a video this February saying, “Sex, it controlled my life.” He added, “I had a problem, and I do have a problem.” Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times reported he denied similar allegations in a new lawsuit.

Harvey Weinstein similarly claimed in a 2017 video that he wasn’t “doing OK” and “I’ve got to get help” after numerous accusations of sexual harassment and rape. In a statement provided to NBC News, his brother, Bob Weinstein, described him as “obviously a very sick man.”