How a Lunar New Year celebration became a fight for survival
LOS ANGELES — The four smiling women pose before a festive backdrop, with its outsize clinking champagne glasses and clock about to strike midnight. They wear red, a symbol of good luck.
Shally wears flared black pants decorated with crystals. The 57-year-old has on a bob-cut wig “to make it special.” This is a Lunar New Year’s Eve party, after all.
An hour after that photo was taken, around 10:20 p.m., a 72-year-old man walked into Star Ballroom Dance Studio armed with a semi-automatic pistol. As he started spraying bullets, dancers confused the gunfire with fireworks.
But people began dropping to the floor. Screams rang out.
From her vantage point, hiding under a table, Ren could see a “very long” gun and the shooter in dark clothing.
The 57-year-old had a single thought: “My life will end here.”
When the gunfire stopped, 10 people had been killed. Another died in a hospital.
Two of the women in the photo had been shot. One died.
The attack shattered the dance community of Monterey Park, a storied hub of Southern California’s Chinese community.
Accounts from witnesses inside, many who asked not to be identified by their full names, paint a clearer picture of the evening’s horror, as dozens gathered to celebrate the most important holiday of the year.
———
Star Ballroom Dance Studio on Garvey Avenue in Monterey Park is well known to the middle-aged and senior population of the
