How the Lunar New Year massacre unfolded: A night of ballroom dancing ends in horror
MONTEREY PARK, Calif. — The burst of pops sounded, at first, like the firecrackers expected to cap a day of celebration.
It was late Saturday night in Monterey Park, and the city’s Lunar New Year festival had ended an hour earlier. People were still strolling through downtown when the noise echoed from a ballroom dance studio tucked into a strip mall.
Three people sprinted across Garvey Avenue and into the Clam House, a seafood restaurant, where they begged owner Seung Won Choi to barricade the door. They said they just escaped from a class at Star Ballroom Dance Studio, where a gunman had opened fire.
Their faces were pale with terror — “hot white,” Choi recalled.
The mass shooting — one of the worst in the modern history of L.A. Los Angeles County — left 10 people dead and at least 10 more wounded in a storied hub of Southern California’s Chinese community during a weekend of celebration, now truncated by terror and grief. Monterey Park canceled
