Police investigate suspect’s motive in Atlanta-area killings

A white gunman accused of killing eight people, most of them of Asian descent, at three Atlanta-area massage parlors claimed to have a “sex addiction” and apparently lashed out at what he saw as sources of temptation, officials said Wednesday.

The bloodshed immediately raised fears of another hate crime against Asian Americans. But Robert Aaron Long, 21, told police the attack was not racially motivated, and police said it appeared it may not have been. Six of the victims were identified as Asian and seven were women.

The attack was the sixth mass killing this year in the U.S., and the deadliest since the August 2019 Dayton killing that took the lives of nine people, according to a database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.